CX is the impact and income asset every business needs, but doesn’t know the search terms to find it. Learn just enough to decide if this is the competitive advantage you’ve been looking for!
In this short article you’ll learn the basics of what CX is, how it relates to other departments like sales and marketing, and how it takes some of the workload off of the people running your ethical business (while saving you money!)
Reading time: 5 minutes
Here’s what we’re discussing in this post:
- definition of CX
- examples of CX
- where CX begins and ends
- how an ethical CX makes your business easier to manage and grow
- where to start improving your CX
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If you’ve every tried to get a better return on ad spend, boost engagement in your customer communities, increase retention rates, repeat sales, reviews, or referrals, then CX was the solution you were looking for.
And it’s totally not your fault if you lacked the lingo to ask Google (or Ecosia!) for the answers! Your business already has a post-sale experience, no matter what you’ve been calling it.
Today we’re going to give you the right amount of information to figure out if you need to learn more about this wonderful world of happy customers who do the marketing for you and mention you in the rooms you aren’t in… Or if all this belongs on your “someday” list.
What is CX?
CX is a catch-all phrase for how well your brand bonds with the people who buy from you.
Does it chase your customers away, into the arms of your competition? Or does it turn first-time buyers into raving fans who buy everything you sell and refer everyone they know?
The C in CX is for “customer,” a catch-all word for customers, clients, members, students, subscribers, and anyone that buys from you.
If you sell anything, you have “customers” (even if you call them by a different name.)
The X is for experience and it should be exactly that ~ an experience. Worthy of their hard earned money and trust.
It includes every touchpoint your customer has with your brand after the sale. Whether that’s in-person, online, or a mix of both.
When done right, the experience warms them up even more and has them falling in love with buying from you so they can’t wait to do it again (and again!)
But, sadly, most brands have a very lackluster, forgettable experience (which makes business growth slower and more expensive) or a BAD experience (that leads to refund requests, chargebacks, and bad reviews.)
CX Examples
Some of the things included in a customer experience, depending on the type of business:
- order confirmation/thank you pages
- the friendly banter with the cashier at checkout
- a handwritten note or extra goodies included in the bag/package
- the welcome email that reminds them what they bought and how to access it
- whatever is used to train the buyer how to use the thing they bought
- the delivery of the item (online or offline)
- everything used to warm them up to buy the next thing
- email nurture sequences to stay top of mind between purchases
- loyalty programs
- requests for referrals, reviews, feedback
- how hard their purchase is to open and start using (packaging or logins)
These are just a few of the things included in any CX. And as you can see, most brands already have these things in place, but often the business invests less time and effort into them than the sales and marketing assets.
Either because the business owner is exhausted by the time they’ve created the offer, sales, and marketing pieces, and makes a note to go back and improve the CX later… Or because a lot of business owners assume their customers are self-motivated to figure things out once they’ve paid for something.
Being exhausted after preparing to launch a new offer is perfectly understandable! And there’s nothing wrong with launching lean and proving the offer is profitable before spending more time on the post-sale experience.
But leaving your customer experience lean forever is a mistake. And expecting customers to pick up the slack just because they want to get their money’s worth is an even bigger mistake.
People pay for things because they can’t do something on their own. They’re paying you to help them stay motivated, inspired, and make progress in a new direction.
A lackluster CX will turn a hot lead cold and your marketing will have to do the heavy lifting to warm them up again.
And a disappointed lead is harder to sell to than a cold lead!
Where does CX begin and end? Where does it cross over into other marketing and sales departments?
Some companies (and the industry as a whole) might say that CX starts the minute a potential lead discovers your business exists. Under this definition, CX has its hands in everyone’s cookie jars ~ social media marketing, web design, sales team, and more.
In practice, we find this gets messy, especially when we’re hired by a business owner who already has amazing people focusing on those elements.
Amazing experts who don’t need a CX specialist coming in and messing with their craft.
And frankly, I think applying CX to everything isn’t helpful for the business owner or stakeholders either. It makes it hard to track results and easy to blame CX for every problem.
Especially when UX (user experience) already does such a wonderful job of handling the experience of any user who comes in contact with your business before and after the sale.
So, while other experts will blur the lines between CX and UX… or say that CX is every touchpoint your customer ever has with your brand…
We prefer to think of CX as everything that happens after they step across the threshold from lead to paying customer.
I like to call it the “world beyond your paywall.”
It starts the moment they click a link to commit to this purchase and continues until the last interaction they ever have with your business. (The “lifetime” of a customer, aka the “c” and “L” in cLTV or customer LifeTime Value.)
If they step into a world they enjoy being part of, they’ll want to be in it as much as possible. They’ll want to bring their friends into it. They’ll want to help you succeed so they can keep enjoying the experience.
CX contributes to and collaborates with other departments when it provides 5-star reviews to share on sales pages and social media, happy customers commenting on ads about their results, guides the upsell messages to provide a smoother transition to the next purchase, boosts profit margins, and reduces lead gen expenses.
Which makes it easier for teams to play nice with each other. 🫱🏼🫲🏾
How A Delightful CX Makes It Easier (And More Ethical) To Run Your Business
It really depends on the business and the thing being sold, of course.
But even a small improvement to your CX can have huge results for your biz growth.
1. CX impacts your income
For example, a 5% increase in repeat sales can create as much as 95% more income!
You could do a LOT with 95% more income. Especially if you didn’t need to spend more on lead generation to create that increase.
You could donate more, hire more, invest more, pay your team more, or simply take more home to fund your big dreams!
But an optimized CX goes beyond just KPI’s.
2. CX impacts your time, money, and effort
Having an optimized customer experience usually means less customer support requests, more community engagement, more positive reviews, more referrals, more organic traffic, and more customers getting results from the things they buy from you.
A delightful customer experience turns casual buyers into superfans who rave about you on social media, refer you to everyone they know, and buy everything you sell. They keep the conversation going in your communities, help others, and champion your brand.
Brand champions comment on your ads about the results they got from using your offers, tag you in posts when people are looking for recommendations, and link to your offers every chance they get.
Any one of these things can make it feel easier to stay focused on the things you love to do instead of feeling like you have to work twice as hard on sales and marketing.
These things can also reduce the work your customer support team does, which saves you money and reduces everyone’s stress levels.
3. CX impacts how you feel about the work you do
My favorite side effect of a delightful CX is seeing customers RAVE about how much your offers have made a difference in their lives!
Seeing them get results from those things and seeing how your work made their lives better.
Knowing that your work matters, that people deeply appreciate the work you do, and that it changes lives.
You literally can’t buy that. But you can optimize for it!
4. CX impacts the future of your business
An ethical CX also future-proofs parts of your business.
Every year the FTC rules and international/online business laws get stricter with how companies treat people, data, opt-ins, free trials, email communication, and more.
An ethical CX prioritizes the customer in the first place, so a lot of the updated requirements are already part of your process before it becomes law.
Which means you don’t have to drop everything to rewrite welcome emails based on the new “automatic renewal law” because you’re already sending out the required info as part of being a company who cares about its customers.
You don’t have to edit checkout pages to add a checkbox because it’s already been there for years.
Your emails already land in the inbox and your unsubscribe rate is low because you don’t add people to your list without permission. So when the email privacy laws get stricter, your emails ethically sail past the inbox filters.
Good CX is good for business. It’s more ethical, engaging, profitable, and legal, keeping you ahead of the competition.
5. CX makes it easier, cheaper, more fun to manage your business
Hopefully you’re starting to see how a delightful CX boosts your income, reminds you how awesome you are and how much your work matters, saves you and your support team time & money, and saves you the headache of redoing things every time a new law is passed.
It makes sales and marketing easier because you have a steady stream of positive reviews, social media shoutouts, referrals, raving fans, and repeat buyers.
You can hire more, pay more, reward more, and take more time off.
You have more money to donate, more time for hobbies, and more pride in the work you do. Your customers champion your brand and help your business grow to new heights.
Your business probably won’t feel like it runs itself, but it will feel like a huge weight has been lifted and converted into fuel for your next adventure.
Where To Start When You’re Ready To Look At Your CX Again
Done-with-you and Done-for-you Solutions
If you want to get specific about how your Customer Experience can make it easier to run your business, let’s look at it together and create a list of simple, but meaningful, tweaks that anyone on your team can make to optimize it.
Book a 1:1 CX Starter Kit with us, get answers fast, test the results, and see for yourself if this is an area worth further exploration (or if that’s all you needed for your next level of business growth!)
If you’d like us to build a custom solution for your offer, the CX Starter Kit is included in our done-for-you solutions, so you might as well start there and get a taste of what it’s like to work with us.
DIY Solutions:
If you want to explore this further on your own, start with this article that clearly describes 3 types of CX and how they affect your impact, income, and influence: The #1 Customer Experience To Grow Your Ethical Business
If you prefer to listen, rather than read, we also have a series of ~5 minute long podcast episodes that discuss CX for ethical business owners on the go. I recommend starting with these 2 episodes in this order:
The #1 Most Important Moment In Every Sales Funnel For Retention Rates And Referrals
3 Thank You Page Optimizations That Boost Retention And Referrals