Business owners across the globe are acquainted with the term’s customer experience and customer satisfaction. Both terms are widely used by most of the industries to evaluate their performances and see how well they are faring amongst their customer bases.

For anyone with a faint idea of what both these terms are, they are often used interchangeably, which is not right. While their ideas might sound similar, they both differ prominently from each other. In this article, we will explore their differences and importance which makes them such a powerful tool for all types of businesses. Let us dive in.

What is Customer Satisfaction?

In simple terms, customer satisfaction is the happiness index of your customers once they are done conducting business with you.

Customer satisfaction is a metric that helps businesses determine how well they are servicing their customers, whether it be their customer journey, transaction, interaction with your staff, servicing, or something else. This metric is calculated using customer satisfaction survey software, through which businesses can conduct surveys for their customers to gain their feedback and evaluate how satisfied they were after they were done with their transaction with your business.

What is Customer Experience?

While customer experience sounds the same as customer satisfaction, both are very different from each other. Simply put, customer experience is more focused on the impression that is left by your business as a brand on the customer which comprises their entire journey with your business.

There are many elements that come under the umbrella of customer experience. These elements include the interaction of the customer with your business, their finding of your business, how easily they were able to access your services, their customer journey while engaging with your business, how well they were taken care of by the employees, how were they treated after their transaction was done, and most importantly, how encouraged they are to return to your business.

Customer experience is a much more comprehensive metric to evaluate, and businesses use a customer experience software to capture this metric properly. Since there are so many different elements involved under customer experience, it is helpful for businesses to use a customer experience software with advanced analytics and profound features to evaluate it.

Core Components of Customer Experience & Customer Satisfaction

Evaluating both customer experience and customer satisfaction depends on certain defined components, which play a major role in determining the value of each. Here are the core components for both metrics:

Customer Experience

1. Product: How well-targeted and suited the features of your product are for the customer.

2. Communication: How your business’s brand image has been formulated in the mind of the customer via advertising, branding, marketing, and even ongoing interactions.

3. Channels of Communication: How easily accessible your business is with various forms of communication channels, such as platforms, websites, phone, face-to-face, etc.

4. Processes: How conveniently a customer can navigate their journey with your business, with easy-to-follow processes and seamless servicing execution from your staff.

5. Pricing: Is your customer servicing justifying the price paid by the customer for the products.

Customer Satisfaction

1. Quality of Products: Is your product meeting all the requirements that the customer be seeking out of it? How well-built and designed is it? Is it long-lasting and comes with a warranty? All these elements are considered in this component.

2. Customer Service: How well the customer was serviced in terms of guidance from the employees, options presented, interactions, and the experience at the transaction counter come under this component.

3. Feedback: Is your business asking for customer feedback? This is an important component of customer satisfaction as it helps in getting raw reaction from the customers and their perception of your brand, which helps in calculating this metric.

Relevance of Customer Experience and Customer Satisfaction

While both metrics are considered equally important for businesses, customer experience edges over customer satisfaction as a more holistic metric to determine customer perceptions.

Customer experience offers businesses not only with the oversight of how well they were treated when they were on premises, but also with their experience outside the premises. For instance, the marketing for your business that is reaching to them via messages or emails, the offers you are sending them, newsletters, feedback surveys, etc., provide more comprehensive insights than just customer feedback surveys used for evaluating customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is heavily reliant on how well the customer experience is.

Having insights directly from the customers about the various segments of your business can help you in developing newer and more effective strategies to elevate your customer servicing, thus offering a better customer experience.

Conclusion

Now you are aware about the major differences between customer experience and customer satisfaction. All that is remaining to be done is employ a customer experience software to properly evaluate each metric to elevate your business to new heights backed with happy customers!

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