The importance of Customer Experience for the printing industry

Customer experience (CX) covers every touchpoint a customer or prospect has with your company – digital, verbal, physical, and visual. Crucially, it centers around the perception a customer has of a business; a brand could think it comes across in a certain way but to the customer it could look completely different, and it’s the way the customer perceives the brand that’s important.

The rising importance of Customer Experience

The emphasis on customer experience has grown over the past few years, but why is this?

As social media and real-time interaction have developed, people are very quick to make a judgment about the businesses they connect with, and many make this judgment through online reviews before they’ve even interacted with the brand.

By 2020, Walker predicts that customer experience will overtake price and product to become the new key brand differentiator. Currently, 86% of customers say they would pay more money for a product/service where they will get a better customer experience.

That’s why customer experience is key in the printing industry – in a tough competitive market, CX will help a company outperform their competitors.

A number of reports emphasize the importance of customer experience, including one from Accelent which found that building up a great customer experience is nearly twice as important to a business as increasing sales.

Other surveys have shown the importance of customer service too, EConsultancy’s Digital Marketing Trends report found that enhancing customer experience came at top of the ‘most exciting trends’ for 2016 with 22% and its importance is very visible in the market today.

Online customer service is improving rapidly and half of UK adults say it has improved over the past 5 years. But the digital world has changed things and people are more likely to research a brand before they get in touch with them – more than 1 in 3 (36%) UK retail customers have said that if a brand offers a customer an inconsistent experience, across mobile, online and in-store, it would put them off buying. A further third of people said receiving offers that weren’t relevant to them really put them off.

Getting it wrong

Before the age of customer experience, businesses believed that they would gain and retain customers by offering them the best product at the best price. But this is no longer true - in today’s digital age success is gauged on the customer experience and how customers perceive the brand.

Social media and other technologies are making it easier for businesses to offer the more personal brand experience that modern customers want. But it can also create problems for companies that haven’t quite got it right. If a business doesn’t offer the experience that the customer expects, then it is very easy for that customer to leave negative reviews on social media, and these have the potential to spread very quickly. According to Esteban Kolsky, if customers are not satisfied, 13% of them will tell 15 or more people that they are unhappy. On the other hand, 72% of customers will share a positive experience with 6 or more people.

Back in 2015, The Director’s Centre found that 80% of companies think that they give above-average customer service, but in contrast, only 11% of customers think that they receive above-average customer service.

Effects of poor customer experience

If a brand doesn’t earn a customer’s trust and loyalty, it could end up either:

• going to a competitor – 7 in 10 B2B customers say they’ll leave after one bad experience with a business. Although the number who want to leave is likely to be higher due to contract restrictions.
  
  
• share negative feedback – those who can’t get out of their contracts are likely to do more damage to the business because they are more likely to leave negative reviews – 95% of them will share their bad experience with others.

The benefits of getting it right

It has been found that it can cost up to five times as much to attract a new customer as it does to retain an existing one, so there is more value is enhancing the customer experience, in order to retain existing customers, rather than spending money to market to new ones.

Genesys found that there are many reasons for increasing emphasis on customer experience and making sure customers are happy.

1. The most obvious reason is to improve customer retention.
2. The second is to improve customer satisfaction, which will more than likely result in increased customer retention. And thirdly,
3. The third is to increase cross-selling and up-selling – after all, if a customer is happy, they are more likely to want to stay loyal to that business and buy more products/services from them.

A key thing to remember when thinking about customer experience is word of mouth. Keeping the current customer base happy is likely to increase the number of new customers gained. If a business has satisfied customers, they are likely to refer their friends or trusted associates to use that business too.

Implementing a CX project

Every business will have a different approach to making sure they give the best CX, but from our experience, the key areas that all companies need to work on are:

• Maintaining cross-channel consistency
• Ability to respond to customer preferences
• Making things easy

There is also a framework that businesses can adopt if they want to make the most of their efforts in CX.

1. Produce a customer experience vision
2. Get to know the customer
3. Employees need to create an emotional connection with customers
4. Gather customer feedback constantly
5. Develop the teams using feedback from the customers
6. Gather regular employee feedback
7. Measure the ROI

Once a consistently positive experience is delivered, the business should then ask the customer to share their experiences and become ambassadors for their brand – influencing others to consider using the brand themselves. 

Sources

• PrintWeek - Is it true that print customers can't get no satisfaction?
• British Print - Trust Pilot explain how customer experience can sell your printing services  
• McKinsey - Linking customer exoerience to value
• Reputation Builder - Angry customers more likely to post bad reviews than happy customers are to post a good one
• Helpscout - 75 customer service facts, quotes and statistics
• WhatTheyThink - Is Customer Experience really more important than sales