what is customer experience case study

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7 Successful Customer Experience Case Studies

Customer experience, or CX, is essential for your brand’s longevity, profitability, and customer loyalty, so it’s worth considering this factor in your marketing strategy. It’s no stretch to say that delivering high-quality customer experiences is critical if you want your brand to remain competitive in the modern business environment.

But it’s one thing to try to incorporate solid CX strategies and methodologies into your workflow. It’s another thing to see them in action as a success story. Today, let’s break down seven successful customer experience case studies. By the end, you’ll be well-equipped and ready to implement the techniques and methods that these successful companies used to bolster and reinvigorate their CX philosophies .

1. Macmillan Research

Macmillan Research, a scientific research institution, discovered in 2012 that various individuals affected by cancer needed extra support with practical tasks like cleaning, shopping, and so on. Approximately one in four people diagnosed with new cancer in the UK lacked support from close family or friends (or roughly 70,000 people each year) at the time of this project.

To solve this, Macmillan devised a Team Up service. The goal was to create an accessible, intuitive online marketplace that would help those affected by cancer get the practical support they needed.

To accomplish their goal, Macmillan worked hard to ensure that Team Up was easy-to-use and accessible across many different devices. It also needed to recruit new volunteers plus appeal to a younger demographic of workers.

Thus, Macmillan faced two primary challenges:

• Getting enough early adopters to test the earliest iterations of the service
• Acquiring the new technologies needed to make the whole project work

Macmillan focused on customer experience by hiring a dedicated community manager. This community manager then worked with various local groups in order to sign people up for the prelaunch of the product.

Furthermore, Macmillan integrated data into its CX testing by running biweekly user testing sessions. These guaranteed that members of the community provided their feedback to the project early on, where it could still be incorporated easily.

Thanks to these CX practices, Macmillan was successful in its overall goal. The Team Up service exceeded its initial expectations and registration KPIs by approximately 40%. Most practical tasks for cancer patients had a turnaround time of fewer than three days overall.

The car sales company CARFAX always looks for new ways to leverage its extensive vehicle database and use its customer knowledge to make new, intuitive digital tools and solutions.

Among the most recent improvements that CARFAX has made to its product is CARFAX for Police, which is a mobile and web application that helps to streamline accident report filing. Customers can now use CARFAX to file accident reports with local police precincts, making the entire process much more streamlined and easier.

To develop this app, CARFAX needed to focus on customer experience. CARFAX did some research to learn about the challenges police officers face while on the job and the difficulties they experience when filing accident reports. Fortunately, the technology to incorporate a solution like this was already present.

CARFAX and its clients conducted extensive user research, including interviews, measuring application user patterns, and so on, with a handful of police officers. They also leveraged skilled developers and mobile app programmers to make navigable, easy-to-use systems that successfully led to a great app.

By the end, CARFAX’s focus on CX resulted in an app that enables law enforcement officers to reduce accident report times by about 50%, as well as capture more data in law enforcement systems.

PBS previously wanted to transition from a more traditional media company into a leading digital media giant. To do that, PBS recognized that it needed to discover new marketing channels and formats through which to deliver educational, informative content to audiences across all age groups. More broadly, PBS wanted to connect and unify its overall network of approximately 200 member stations.

The CX-focused improvements were multifaceted from the get-go. PBS constructed a new technical infrastructure to serve content on multiple channels. This made PBS content more accessible to its users, thereby improving their customer experiences.

Furthermore, PBS developed iPad applications and APIs to ensure that content could be seamlessly delivered on any channel. This required the construction of custom content management systems, too — a high initial expense, but one that ended up being very worthwhile in the long run.

PBS also pivoted into a digital-first culture across the board. This allowed its members to focus on delivering exemplary customer experiences to online users, not just individuals watching television programs.

Trex was a home improvement company that specialized in providing sustainable deck materials. It wanted to improve its customers' experiences by creating a deck design app through which customers could create photorealistic mockups or simulations of what their decks might look like after constructing them.

The deck app would solve a huge pain point by helping customers who had only themselves to rely on when designing and building a deck of their very own. In creating a photorealistic application, Trex could eliminate a lot of the time and costs required in outsourcing the design process.

Therefore, Trex focused on creating an intuitive, navigable app with a good UX experience. This involved performing very deep, comprehensive user testing, as well as designing and building an initial solution and providing it to testers before incorporating their feedback.

In the end, the final app was very user-friendly. Customers were able to upload an image of their deck spaces or backyards, input certain deck dimensions, and even share their preferences. The app then recommends various eco-friendly deck materials and products so they can design and build the deck of their dreams in no time.

5. Thomas Cook

Thomas Cook, a travel agency and operator, wanted to improve its direct relationships with its target audience members and expand its customer base to those who weren’t currently its customers. Thomas Cook also wanted to know more about online customer journeys, as well as better understand customer purchase lifecycles.

With so many disparate goals, Thomas Cook needed to focus on customer experience and data-gathering above all else. To do this, it launched a targeted lead-generation campaign in addition to a travel survey.

The point of both of these methods was to capture key data and information about customers' future buying intentions, as well as specific customer requirements (which could, in theory, affect whether a given customer might buy something).

Furthermore, Thomas Cook utilized a nurturing program to deliver individualized, highly resonating messages and bolster user engagement. After completing the survey, consumers were presented with several different headline offers or redirected to the primary Thomas Cook website.

Thomas Cook didn't stop there. It also displayed various retargeting tags in the marketing campaign, helping the brand deliver more personalized display banner advertisements to respondents. All in all, this marketing effort allowed Thomas Cook to gain much more information than before.

It also acquired over 15,000 leads, saw email engagement rates boosted by over 30%, and saw email open rates at over twice the UK national benchmark average. All in all, it was a very successful CX data-gathering campaign.

6. RS Components

RS Components previously needed a better user experience. Specifically, the CX here was not conducive to quick or efficient processing.

This was a big problem for RS Components, as its marketing campaign was doing well, delivering over 10 million visits to various associated websites per month. Unfortunately, 70 million of those prospective customers left the site right at the search stage over the year.

To bolster conversion, RS Components look to improve its online customer experiences. With 60 websites in the group, this was a monumental task.

To accomplish it, RS Components:

• Collected customer feedback from online surveys, in addition to performing customer lab testing in the real world
• Prioritized things like speed and ease of identifying products. RS Components aimed to make it easier for customers to find and purchase the products they wanted
• Practiced search term correction
• Made significant improvements to search result categorization and presentation
• Emphasized and optimized its websites for mobile searchers

All in all, these efforts were highly successful. RS Components didn’t focus so much on changing its customer experience in terms of customer support or marketing. However, it did make a change in its CX in terms of searchability, website navigation, and product purchasing. This highlights how customer experience can incorporate and encompass many different elements of an online enterprise.

7. Vodafone UK

Vodafone UK wanted to develop an interactive, graphical representation of network performance. This was to be a first for the overall UK telecoms market. Unfortunately, Vodafone UK faced a significant challenge: making this rather technical and complex subject more accessible and simpler to understand for customers.

The primary objective was to create a tool to route queries into a call center using a self-service portal. Then, Vodafone UK aimed to develop a system to help communicate any planned outages to customers that would be affected. By the end of development, the tool needed to be very easy to maintain and be able to update itself in real-time 24/7.

To accomplish this, Vodafone UK focused somewhat on CX or customer experience management. Specifically, it:

• Created a cross-channel working group that included different business areas and people in industries like network operations, public relations, technology, security, and more.
• Carried out various usability studies with the public. This helped to validate its initial graphic design plan and user experience before implementing and improving upon it.

With this CX-focused approach, Vodafone UK successfully constructed a system where telecom information could be updated moment by moment by field engineers. The system was also linked to an email notification center, which enabled affected customers to immediately be notified of outages or changes in their coverage.

These days, users can still register their email addresses with the Vodafone UK telecoms system. This automatically sends an email if an issue is reported or if the network operations center has to impose an outage for technical or maintenance reasons.

The Impact of Customer Research on Customer Satisfaction

Many of these studies show how social media, digital transformation, and customer-centric optimization strategies can have a major impact. Using touchpoint analysis or leveraging contact centers can have an incredible impact on the bottom line.

Customer relationships — for both current and potential customers — only grow if you focus on world-class CX like these companies. Provide your customers with good day-to-day service in the online shopping world. Leverage automation where it makes sense, but don’t forget about the impact of a personal, human touch.

Chat With Awesome CX Today

As you can see, good customer experiences are absolutely vital for your brand. As you look to improve your CX overall, review your customer satisfaction metrics. Decide what pain point you can solve and anticipate the kind of improvements that loyal and new customers will most likely appreciate.

If the ideal way to make sure that your CX improvements are actually improvements and not just changes to your website or customer journeys for the sake of it.

Fortunately, if your CX philosophy needs a bit of work, there are partners you can turn to for help. Awesome CX is well-equipped and ready to assist with all of your CX needs.

In fact, we’ve assisted over 90 brands with their customer experience services , ranging from backend or office support to customer experience center aid and more. No matter what your industry happens to be, Awesome CX can help in more ways than one.

Send us a message today to learn more.

Customer Experience | Tech Target

What Is Customer Experience? | Forbes

What is Customer Experience? | IBM

Customer experience

Understand what customer experience is and how it’s changing.

• What Is Customer Experience?
• Why Is Great Customer Experience Important?
• How Is Customer Experience Changing?
• Who is Responsible for Customer Experience?
• How Can Companies Improve Customer Experience?

Introduction to customer experience

Customer experience is the heart of the relationship between a business and its customers. Typically, when people talk about customer experience (CX) they mean traditional sales and marketing touch points along the customer journey—for example, attentive store clerks in attractive stores, or simple and beautiful apps and websites. In the past, when executed well, CX investments have yielded good results: better customer retention and acquisition, increased sales and stronger loyalty.

But the world has changed. It’s more than just the COVID-19 pandemic: A non-stop barrage of external life forces—economic, social, political and beyond—is affecting people’s everyday decisions in unavoidable ways. In fact, according to Accenture research , 72% of consumers say that external factors, such as inflation, social movements and climate change, are impacting their lives more than in the past. Amid so much upheaval, people are revaluating what’s important to them: 61% of consumers say their priorities keep changing as a result of everything going on in the world. As a result, the way they interact with brands is evolving, and so too is the idea of customer experience.

Here, we will explain what customer experience is, how it’s changing and how a new customer experience strategy can benefit your business.

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What is customer experience?

Customer experience is many things, but it can broadly be described as the perception a customer or a company has of a brand. It is embedded into every interaction, and each interaction is an opportunity to build a stronger bond between the company and the customer—or has the potential to weaken that bond.

Good customer experience involves building a relationship by understanding what people want, need and value. It goes beyond the act of using the product or service itself: The full experience includes pre-purchase connections with the brand (via marketing or awareness), the process of researching and making the purchase (either in-store or online) and post-purchase interactions (regarding service, repairs, additions and more). The goal is to create smooth and efficient connections between the brand and the customer.

It’s vital that brands remember that every interaction people and other businesses have with them elicits some sort of emotion. Whether good, bad, happy or sad, the feelings brought on by those interactions are then associated with the brand. This can result in your customer asking some all-important questions: To buy or not to buy? To love or not to love? To return or not return?

It’s also critical to acknowledge that people’s needs, desires and emotions change moment to moment based on external forces. An oversimplified understanding of people’s emotional responses is not enough—brands need to see their customers beyond walking wallets and respond to the complexities in their lives.

Why is great customer experience important?

Positive customer experience is a way of standing out from competitors. As more brands compete for public attention and more options are readily available, CX provides a way to put your product and brand at the forefront.

Imagine you’re a business looking to place beverage vending machines in your offices. Your overall customer experience isn’t just how much you like using the machine, it’s the full start-to-never-fully-finished process of engaging with the brand, making the purchase and continuing interactions for service and support or future upgrades. When making the purchase, the beverage retailer can offer you a one-size-fits-all experience, such as showing you pictures of various products. But a better approach would be to use augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) to create a bespoke, personalized and customized experience so that you can see exactly how each type of machine would look in your office space. Because of this great customer experience, you and your business colleagues are happy, and your business will use the same retailer next time you want a vending machine.

Brands that want to increase customer acquisition, customer loyalty, customer engagement and drive growth need to think about delivering more exceptional experiences and connecting with customers in more dynamic ways.

With so much at stake, brands need to ask: is great CX enough to elicit positive emotions and meet customers’ changing needs?

How is customer experience changing?

Twenty years ago, the answer to “what is great customer experience?” would have been a straightforward explanation about optimizing touch points, mapping out customer journeys and designing and producing covetable products that customers want.

But today, how we interact with brands and what we need from them has transformed exponentially. At a time when people are navigating constant change amid external economic, social, environmental and political forces, their behavior is increasingly inconsistent. Consumers are more comfortable with paradoxical choices as their decisions become trade-offs between what they want, what they need and what options are available.

Adapting customer experience to these changes isn’t easy. Oversimplifying segmentation and underestimating the impact of external life forces has created a disconnect :

A life-centric approach to customer experience creates connections that hold fast amid constant change and disruption.

of consumers wish companies would respond faster to meet their changing needs, while

of executives think their customers are changing faster than their business can keep up.

Though businesses have evolved past the product-centric approach that focuses on performance to accept the importance of customer experience, seeing CX as something static can be their undoing. Instead, companies need a life-centric approach .

Life-centric businesses accept that people are multifaceted, complex and doing their best to adapt to unpredictable life circumstances—and use that insight to meet customers’ evolving needs. By taking a life-centric approach to customer experience, companies can better reach them at a variety of pivotal moments and create connections that hold fast amid constant change and disruption.

Who is responsible for customer experience strategies?

Historically, CX was limited to the Chief Marketing Officer’s (CMO) or the Chief Operating Officer’s (COO) purview with different functions in the business operating in siloes focusing on their own priorities.

Let’s take a quick look at how traditional CX thinking has informed how leaders and functions within an organization think about their customer experience strategies:

• CEO: prioritize maximizing profitability
• Marketing and brand: focus on making people want things
• Sales: focus on the product the company wants to sell
• Product development: create products based on market research that are easy to use
• Talent: use traditional metrics based on employee performance within a function (onboarding, annual reviews, etc.)
• Tech and IT: focus on enabling business processes at greater scale
• Operations: focused on providing efficiency for the company that often limits growth
• Supply chain: focus on moving products and goods to consumers

As you can see above, each department and function has its own priorities, targets and metrics. With blinders to the rest of the company, each department is executing a specific customer experience strategy template without seeing the bigger picture. Instead of operating in isolation, companies need to organize all of their internal operations in new ways to evaluate and serve changing consumer needs.

To remain relevant and compete in today’s ever-changing world, customer experience strategies need to be top of mind for every stakeholder in your business. From management to marketing to sales to service, everyone across front- and back-office functions needs to be invested in delivering a life-centric customer experience.

By taking the company’s existing assets (such as talent, data and technology) and rewiring them for more coordinated action, internal operations become simplified in pursuit of a common goal. Internal alignment lets companies pursue an external strategy that maximizes customer experience.

This is a pivotal moment for the C-suite. Leaders who push beyond traditional CX strategies and redefine their organizations, not just by which products or services they sell and offer, but with a life-centric approach to understanding and meeting customer needs, will emerge stronger and ignite growth in their organizations.

Internal alignment lets companies pursue an external strategy that maximizes customer experience.

How can companies improve customer experience?

From banking onboarding journeys for new customers to how clothing should be presented online, many of the fundamentals of customer experience have become commonplace. As a result, it is increasingly difficult for brands to differentiate themselves via CX alone.

Businesses have traditionally focused on optimizing customer touch points around product and service. In the past this has been a successful approach to increase sales and loyalty. Now, it’s no longer enough. The way forward is to take a holistic, dynamic view of who customers are and what motivates their behaviors—and to treat them as more than just buyers.

Today, brands must enhance customers’ lives through new technology-led experiences that go beyond short-lived transactions. Consider the impact of omni-channel services that connect brick-and-mortar shopping with customers’ digital data for greater personalization. Companies also need to have the enterprise-wide imagination, vision and empathy for the customer that will drive them to find creative ways to engage and serve people who crave simplification and agency.

By evaluating what brings value to customers and reconsidering how a brand promise fits with customer needs, companies can refocus their efforts to drive growth and relevance.

To grow a life-centric CX strategy, brands need to think of customers as more than just buyers.

The future of customer experience is life-centric

Brands are looking for ways to harness the changes the world is experiencing to emerge stronger and more prepared for the road ahead. To do so, they need to hone in on the complex life forces and paradoxical behaviors driving consumers today. Through data, technology and a holistic, human-centered approach, they can respond to people’s diverse, often paradoxical and ever-changing needs.

To achieve this, an evolution is needed: It’s time for companies to become life-centric .

Explore more about what it means to be life-centric and find out how to create a life-centric strategy that works for your business.

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Frequently asked questions

Customer experience (CX) is broadly described as the perception a customer or a B2B company has of a brand. It is embedded into every interaction a customer has with a brand. While some focus only on CX as traditional sales and marketing touch points along the customer journey (for example, attentive store clerks in attractive stores and simple and beautiful apps and websites), it’s actually much more complex.

What makes a great customer experience?

As customers face growing pressure from external social and economic forces, CX has moved from fulfilling wants and needs in the moment to seeing creating experiences that adapt to their changing circumstances and paradoxical behaviors. For brands, this means taking a life-centric approach that sees customers in their full lives and interacts with them as complex, inconsistent and evolving individuals.

As customer experience basics become commonplace, brands need to do more to differentiate themselves. The way forward is to take a holistic, dynamic view of who customers are and what motivates their behaviors—and to treat them as more than just buyers. Companies need to enhance customers’ lives through technology-led experiences that forge long-term connections, and foster the enterprise-wide imagination, vision and empathy that will help them pivot to meet changing needs.​

What is the future of customer experience?

Though businesses have evolved past the product-centric approach that focuses on performance to accept the importance of customer experience, seeing CX as something static can be their undoing. Instead, companies need a life-centric approach. Life-centric businesses accept that people are multifaceted, complex, and doing their best to adapt to unpredictable life circumstances—and use that insight to meet customers’ evolving needs. By taking a life-centric approach to customer experience, companies can better reach them at a variety of pivotal moments and create connections that hold fast amid constant change and disruption.

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What is customer experience and why you should improve it

What customer experience (CX) is, why it's important for your business, and how you can improve it for your customers.

Last updated

Reading time, use customer feedback to improve cx.

Get started for free: collect feedback from your customers so you can fix and improve their experience on your website.

Great CX requires a customer-centric mindset...and a lot of careful work. This guide is your introduction to the basics: why CX is important, how to improve it through customer feedback and surveys , plus tips from 100+ CX experts and a report with plenty of CX trends and stats —so you have everything you need to start delivering an exceptional experience for your customers.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience, also known as CX, is your customers’ holistic perception of their experience with your business or brand.  

CX is the result of every interaction a customer has with your business, from navigating the website to talking to customer service and receiving the product/service they bought from you. Everything you do, whether it’s providing responsive real-time support or maintaining seamless omnichannel messaging, impacts your customers’ perception and their decision to keep coming back or not—so a great customer experience is your key to success.

Why is CX important for your business?

Delivering a great customer experience is important for any business. The better experience customers have, the more loyal customers and positive reviews you'll receive, while simultaneously reducing the friction of customer complaints and returns. Moreover, providing a great customer experience gives you a competitive advantage over businesses that maybe aren’t doing so hot with their own CX.

The benefits of delivering a great CX include:

Increased customer loyalty

Enhanced customer satisfaction

Improved customer engagement

Better word-of-mouth marketing, positive reviews, and recommendations

All business models can benefit from improving customer experience: subscription businesses can increase customer retention and reduce customer churn rates ; ecommerce marketplaces can facilitate purchase decisions, increase repeat customers, and reduce returns; and service industries can elevate customer interactions, gain recommendations, and reduce complaints.

In fact, we challenge you to think up a type of business that doesn't benefit from providing a positive customer experience. 

We believe that putting customers first is always good for business (and we also have the data to prove it in the ' CX stats and trends ' chapter). 

What is the difference between customer experience and customer service?

In short, customer service is just one part of the whole customer experience.

As we mentioned, customer experience is a customer’s overall perception of your company, based on their interactions with it. Comparatively, customer service refers to specific touchpoints within the experience where a customer requests and receives assistance or help—for example, calling an operator to request a refund, getting support from a chatbot, or interacting via email with a service provider.

In other words: CX is broader than customer service. It includes every touchpoint a customer ever has with your company, from the moment they first hear about you in a blog post they found on Google, all the way through to the time they call your support team to ask for help with inside your product (and hopefully get a prompt response).

What is a good customer experience?

There’s no universal checklist to follow to guarantee good customer experience: your business is unique and so are your customers. However, we've found a number of common principles by polling 2,000 CX professionals across many industries. You can read the full results of our survey here , but we've included some of the key takeaways below.

In short, good customer experience can be achieved when you:

Make listening to customers a top priority across the business

Use customer feedback to develop an in-depth understanding of your customers

Implement a system to help you regularly collect, analyze, and act on feedback

Reduce friction and solve your customers' specific problems and unique challenges

It's not rocket science: a good customer experience comes from asking your customers questions , listening to their responses, and acting on their feedback.

6 things that cause bad customer experiences

Bad customer experience comes in many shapes and sizes, but we noticed a number of commonly-reported issues in our customer experience stats .

Bad customer experience is primarily caused by:

Long wait times

Employees who don’t understand customer needs

Unresolved issues/questions

Too much automation/not enough of a human touch

Service that doesn’t provide a personalized experience

Rude/angry employees

If you need any more ideas, just think about the last time you were frustrated as a customer—it's quite likely that one (or more) of the above was the cause. 

Ultimately, though, what counts as a poor customer experience in your business will be unique—and you'll only learn about it by opening the door to customer feedback, then working to minimize the impact of factors that cause a bad experience. Collecting customer feedback is an essential jumping-off point in developing your overall customer experience strategy. 

→ Check out the chapter with all the CX stats and trends or learn more about improving your CX strategy

Why you should use customer feedback as part of your CX strategy

You may know some theory behind what makes good and bad CX, but for it to make an impact on your business, you need to have a reliable method of collecting insight from your customers so you can take action and make impactful changes.

Customer feedback is information you collect from your customers about their experience with your product, service, website, or business as a whole. You can use this feedback to improve customer experience by removing or reducing areas of friction, cultivating positive touchpoints, and creating pleasant in-store or digital experiences.

You're probably already collecting customer feedback without realizing it: when a customer sends an email, calls your customer support team, or leaves a review on social media, that's feedback. The problem is, if that feedback and other valuable customer data is not measured and analyzed, you're missing out on the opportunity to use it to improve customer experience and leverage its growth potential.

→ Read more about the CX surveys you can run to collect feedback from your customers

Grab a FREE Hotjar trial and start collecting feedback from your customers, so you can fix and improve their experience of your website.

How to measure and analyze customer experience

From what we've described so far, customer experience might sound like a subjective concept that's difficult to measure. That's why you need to rely on a number of different customer experience metrics that can be used individually or together to get an indication of CX in your business (you can also get more detailed feedback on customers’ expectations by engaging them in interviews—and Hotjar can help you connect with customers without lifting a finger).

By having a measurable indicator of CX, you can track how it improves (or worsens) over time and use customer analytics to evaluate the success or failure of changes you make that might be affecting your customers. Here are four top metrics used by CX professionals and customer relationship management (CRM) teams to track customer experience over time, at different points in the customer journey :

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Net promoter score® (nps), customer satisfaction score (csat), time to resolution (ttr).

Customer Effort Score measures the experience with a product or service in terms of how ‘difficult’ or ‘easy’ it is for your customers to complete an action.

CES surveys are usually sent out after an interaction with customer service, with questions such as "How easy was it to get your issue resolved today?" and a rating scale going from "1: very difficult" to "7: very easy". They also work well after customers reach important milestones in their journey, particularly the customer activation moments when a customer actively engages with your product or service (for example, after they sign up for a free product trial or successfully conclude a transaction).

💡Pro tip: use our CES survey template to discover how hard or easy to use your site or product is.

Net Promoter Score ® is a customer loyalty score derived from asking customers a simple closed-ended question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?” 

You can choose to adapt the question slightly to better suit your business and use a follow-up NPS question to get more insight, but the point of NPS is to get a simple numerical score on a scale from 0 to 100 that represents customer experience or brand loyalty .

We use NPS as a primary CX metric at Hotjar—you can give our built-in NPS software a test drive yourself.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

💡Pro tip: use our NPS survey template to gauge your customers’ loyalty.

CSAT surveys measure customers’ satisfaction with the product or service they receive from you. They can be expressed with a 5- or 7-point scale (with1: very unsatisfied and 7: very satisfied), or through binary yes/no questions.

Unlike the Net Promoter Score®, which asks customers to consider their overall feeling towards the brand (and thus, their likelihood of recommending it or not), CSAT focuses the customer’s attention on specific touchpoints they were satisfied or dissatisfied with. Taken in context with CES and NPS, customer satisfaction is a meaningful indicator of whether your customers are cultivating a pleasant emotional connection with your business, or what product teams like to call customer delight .

💡Pro tip: use our CSAT survey template to measure how satisfied your users are with your site, product, or service.

TTR is the average length of time it takes customer service teams to resolve an issue or ticket after it’s been opened by a customer. It can be measured in days or business hours, and is calculated by adding up all times to resolution and dividing the result by the number of cases solved.

In our CX stats and trends , we found that the leading cause of customer frustration is a long wait/response time. For that, TTR is a crucial metric to track and improve: the shorter your TTR, the higher the chances your customers won’t experience frustration when they reach out for help.

💡Pro tip: use our TTR survey template to evaluate the effectiveness and perception of your support.

And keep in mind that for a better customer experience, you can display Hotjar surveys as a popup, a full screen takeover, after a button click, or send them by email.

A great customer experience example using NPS

Here’s a practical example of what tracking a CX metric and acting on the insight can do for customer experience.

One of our customers, jewelry ecommerce Taylor & Hart, specializes in bespoke engagement rings—not the kind of product people usually think about buying online, and also not the kind of product customers typically buy more than one of.

The company’s goal was to turn reluctant visitors into one-time buyers, and one-time buyers into lifelong promoters who would recommend the same service to their family and friends. After choosing Net Promoter Score® as their primary CX metric, Taylor & Hart identified two essential customer touchpoints  and set up NPS surveys at each milestone:

The moment a customer places an order

The moment the customer receives their order

The resulting NPS numbers were kept visible on metrics dashboards in the office, and everyone's focus was on improving the scores. It wasn't an easy feat, but the team used each piece of negative feedback to fix parts of their business, from manufacturing to shipping methods, to give customers the best experience they could (if you're curious about the logistics, you can read a full write-up of this NPS case study ).

With a focus on providing a better customer experience, Taylor & Hart grew their NPS score to over 80 (the highest in their industry); annual revenue followed suit and doubled to €4.5M. 

→ Find more inspiration in these tips from 100+ CX experts on what else you need to deliver a great customer experience

7 more ways to understand and improve customer experience with Hotjar

1. identify high-drop off pages.

Use Funnels to identify unusually high churn rates in your most important flows, and watch recordings of users who didn’t make it to the next step. Uncover the pain points in their user journey and improve their customer experience.

2. Discover how users engage with your page

Heatmaps help you understand how users click, scroll, and move on a page. With Engagement zones , see which areas of your page users most interact with. If you notice some rage clicks on a non-clickable element, improve user experience by making it clickable, or revisit your page’s design.

3. Watch session replays of frustrated users

Filter session recordings by Frustration score to dive into sessions where users rage clicked, u-turned, or generally had a bad time on your site. Or use the ‘error’ filter to review sessions in which users encountered a JavaScript error.

4. Gather in-the-moment feedback

Floating or embedded widgets let you collect feedback from users as they experience your site. Discover how they feel when running into blockers or interacting with something they love on your site, then review their feedback to spot pain points and ‘aha moments’.

5. Interview users for nuanced feedback

When written feedback from users leaves you wanting more, give Engage a spin to get to the bottom of why users love their experience with your business, or are instead struggling to interact with it. Gather insights on how they would improve their experience so you can better meet their needs by implementing user-led changes.

6. Test changes made to improve CX

Speaking of changes, of course you’ll want to know what CX updates to make, and how each one performs, based on all the user feedback you collect. Hotjar integrations make it easy to act on that feedback: conduct effortless A/B testing with Optimizely or Omniconvert , then filter your session recordings and user feedback by experiment to understand how users interact with different versions of your site.

7. Share findings with your team

Last but not least, spread the word: you’ll be sitting alone on a mountain of information unless you clue in your team. Share live CX insights and use them to collaborate on initiatives by integrating Hotjar directly with Slack or Microsoft Teams .

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• The 25 Most Important Customer Experience Questions Answered

This is a great customer experience summary from Christopher Koch at SAP.

Yes, we’ve done the work so you don’t have to. Our eyes still glowing red from the pain of poring over the arcane verbosity of dozens of academic research papers (though a few interesting books helped ease the inflammation; some are noted below), we’ve compiled a list of what we think are the most important questions to ask about the customer experience and, based on our research, come up with the clearest, simplest, and most complete answers to those questions. Please let us know if you agree.

Q. What is customer experience and why does it matter?

Many experts like to say that customer experience is any interaction that customers have with a company. But some interactions matter more than others. The ones that matter the most have a measurable impact on the answers to these two questions: What do your customers think about you? What do your customers do based on their perception of you?

Q. Why these two questions?

Because customer loyalty is the closest thing to a holy grail in customer experience and these two questions represent the two components of customer loyalty: “attitudinal loyalty,” which means having a favourable mental impression of a company, and “behavioural loyalty,” which means that they don’t just like you, they buy from you – and keep buying from you. Research shows that attitudinal loyalty plays the biggest role in customer loyalty. If customers have a positive emotional outlook towards the customer experience, especially when measured against a competitor, they are more likely to buy from you and become loyal (repeat purchases). Research shows that customers’ evaluations of their experiences mirror the emotions they display during the interactions they have with companies as well as the feelings they experience after the encounter. If those emotions are negative, you can kiss sales and loyalty goodbye.

Q. Isn’t customer experience just another name for customer service?

No. Customer service is just one slice of the customer experience. Customers only contact customer service when they have a problem. As authors Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine put it in their excellent book Outside In, “Equating customer service with customer experience is like saying that a safety net is a trapeze act … If the performer has to use the net then something is wrong with the show.”

Q. So what should be my goals for improving customer experience?

You want them to like you, really like you. A positive attitude toward your company and its products or services has direct ties to customer loyalty and satisfaction. So any efforts that you make to improve customer experience should be considered in terms of how they make customers more satisfied and more loyal. If they are more satisfied with the experience you offer leading up to the sale than competitors, they are more likely to buy from you. If they feel more loyal, they are more likely to buy from you repeatedly.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that satisfaction does not necessarily lead to loyalty. For example, a customer could be satisfied with her experience with you but if a competitor offers something comparable or better she may buy from them next time. Customer experience efforts should drive towards making you customers’ preferred choice. (This distinction between satisfaction and preference is what has helped Frederick Reichheld make millions with his Net Promoter Score methodology.)

Q. But what if my company only sells to a customer once or infrequently? Why should I care about experience and loyalty?

Because even a single positive experience can be expressed in other ways besides repeat purchases. For example, happy customers can give you positive recommendations on websites or in social media or by recommending you to others via word of mouth.

Q. How do I know whether my customer experience needs improvement?

You can’t necessarily trust your customers to tell you. Few will take the time to complain or fill out a survey (especially online); they’ll simply go to a competitor, or worse, social media to complain. Better to ask these questions:

• Is our market share slipping?
• Is it costing more to acquire new customers?
• Are we losing existing customers more rapidly (churn)?
• Are we getting fewer recommendations and favourable reviews online and in social media?
• How much pain would our customers have to go through to switch to a competitor (switching costs)

Getting the answers to these questions will not only help determine the current quality of the customer experience but will also form the basis of a business case to do something about it.

Q. How much do my actual products and services factor into customer experience?

Less and less, unfortunately. You know the drill: product cycles are getting shorter and automation and globalisation have made it much easier for competitors to crank out “good enough” substitutes.

But even for highly complex products and for services, the quality of the customer experience often matters more. Research has found that in some cases, customers would rather buy an inferior (though good enough) product that comes with a superior relationship than a better product that does not.

Q. What are the most important components of the customer experience?

It’s not so much the individual components themselves, such as a Web site or a call centre (though those are certainly important); it’s more about whether the individual touch points contribute to creating a positive impression in customers’ minds. Here are the building blocks for creating that impression:

Trust. This is the foundation of a positive customer experience. If customers don’t feel that they can trust the interaction points (say a Web site) or the company behind them, they will be less likely to purchase.

Research says that trust consists of two main components:

• Confidence. Customers must believe that the company has the ability to provide a quality product or service
• Benevolence. Customers must believe that the company is willing to consider customers’ self-interest above their own
• Low effort and sacrifice. Customers want their interactions with companies to be free from delays and extra effort

Another issue is the tradeoff between what customers want and what companies are actually capable of providing. In their book The Experience Economy, authors B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore call this “customer sacrifice.” If the gap between what the customer wants and what the company offers is too great – for example, a cable TV customer has to subscribe to 10 extra channels she doesn’t want to get the one she does want – the experience generates negative emotions.

Positive emotion. Emotion shows up again and again in the research as being the most important factor in the customer relationship. Positive emotions are necessary to build satisfaction and long-term loyalty while negative emotions can destroy in a few moments relationships that companies have invested years in building.

Personalisation. Though this is a relatively new and controversial area, research shows that personalising the customer experience in the right ways creates positive emotion and leads to more satisfaction and loyalty.

Q. How good does my customer experience need to be?

In any relationship with a company, customers expect – or at least hope – that their interactions will require as little effort as possible to get what they want. This means that companies have to make the experience smooth, reliable, and efficient. If, for example, customers are shuttled among three different departments (all asking for their customer numbers) before they can accomplish a typical transaction, then the experience generates a negative emotion (frustration is the one that researchers agree is most common) and leads to reduced sales and loyalty.

However, some researchers believe that customers’ perceived effort isn’t just about what they have to do, it’s also tied into how they feel. In their book The Effortless Experience, authors Mathew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick Delisi found that only 35% of customers’ perceived effort had to do with exertion; 65% had to do with their emotional reactions during and after the encounter. So easy must go hand in hand with enjoyable.

Q. How do I determine how much I can or should spend to improve customer experience?

If, through competitive analysis and surveys of customers, it’s clear that your customer experience lags behind your competitors then improving customer experience should be considered part of the cost of doing business. Customers can research you and your competitors much more easily now through the web and social media. The holes in your experience will be revealed, causing negative emotion and an exodus to competitors.

Of course, a grocery chain doesn’t have the same profit margins as a luxury hotel chain. However, even companies with limited budgets can try experimenting with small pilots to see how changes in the customer experience impact sales, satisfaction, and loyalty. The percentages of extra revenue, improved loyalty, and increased profits gained from the pilots can help determine the budget for customer experience improvements.

Q. Where should I begin to improve the customer experience?

Removing the bumps in the road that cause customers to expend extra effort is the best place to start. Research by the Corporate Executive Board outlined in the book The Effortless Experience found that moving customers from rating the experience “below expectations” to “meets expectations” gave companies as much economic value as customers who said their expectations were exceeded. So just fixing the existing potholes in the experience will go a long way.

To do this, companies need to look outside by surveying customers about their experiences. Companies also need to look inside by surveying employees (and partners and external providers), about the frustrations they encounter in trying to accomplish their roles in the customer experience.

Q. What role should employees play?

Employee emotions are as important as customer emotions in the customer experience. Employees and managers who feel unable to do their jobs as they perceive they should be done – and feel powerless to change the situation – become unhappy and less able and willing to put out the effort it takes to keep customers happy. Rather than speak up about problems, they simply focus on doing what they are told, what research company Forrester calls a “culture of compliance.”

Yet let’s not be too hard on employees and managers here. An individual employee or manager may not be able to tell where the bumps in the road are. Employees may be happy and feeling confident about their contributions while being completely unaware that they are in fact causing problems further down the line because they are isolated from the rest of the experience process and can’t see the negative impacts.

Q. So how do I identify where the problems are in the customer experience?

Most companies begin by mapping out the customer experience both in terms of how customers interact with the company and the internal processes designed to make the experience flow smoothly. You also have to capture all the processes that happen outside your company, with partners and outsourcers. Having a holistic view can reveal where failures are occurring and form the basis of the case for change.

To create the map, you need your most knowledgeable process participants; ideally, those who have unbroken visibility out to what customers experience, as well as to the internal processes and experiences of employees and managers. Where the line of sight is broken, bring in people who can fill in the gaps. This is best done as a group exercise using the proverbial whiteboard and sticky notes, so that everyone has the opportunity to comment and contribute to determining where the problems are and debunking myths about where people might have thought the problems were, but weren’t.

Of course, this all presumes that the different areas involved in the customer experience in your company are even speaking to one another, much less willing to collaborate on fixing problems. Old habits, old grudges – and old silos – die hard. There should be a high-level executive leading the customer experience change effort, one who is a charismatic convincer (and decider), and who has a direct mandate from the CEO to get everyone to play nice with each other.

Q. What is the role of digital in improving the customer experience?

Digital channels and processes play the most important roles in pursuing the goals of speed and convenience and reducing customer effort. Of course, fixing existing problems with the digital experience (not just for customers but also for employees) is easier said than done because it is expensive and time-consuming. Many of the systems that customer service representatives use in call centres, for example, are as old as a greying dad – even a few grandfathers.

Why we are still on hold

And this is the rub. It’s one thing to identify potholes in the customer experience, it’s quite another to fix them. The reason that customers must be put on hold and transferred to different departments and asked for their identification information again and again is usually that the systems that serve these departments were developed in the mainframe era when the concept of integration – and more importantly, the technology to accomplish it – simply did not exist.

Customisation has created a nightmare

To make matters worse, companies have layered customisation on top of customisation over the years to make these systems more able to talk to one another and to company networks, databases, and the internet. They’ve made huge investments just to attain the level of mediocrity we all endure today.

New technologies will help – eventually

The good news is that technology has finally caught up with the customer experience problem. Cloud technologies make application integration easier and in-memory databases have the power to hold massive amounts of information from multiple systems together in real time; that would have seemed like science fiction to mainframe developers of the sixties and seventies.

However, we are still in the early wave of the transformation. Companies remain cautious about discarding old systems that work well in favour of new technologies that are less proven. And though companies have a lot of freedom to make changes in their website experiences, the best Web site is only as good as the data behind it. Customer experience executives would do well to make the CIO their best friend right now.

In the meantime, companies do what they have always done. They pave the potholes in the customer experience with people. People fill the experience potholes – and pay the price.

Companies use people to try to ameliorate the long hold times and the call transfers that stem from having to navigate among different archaic systems and process workarounds. It’s an extremely difficult job and it’s why call centre turnover rates are so high.

Q. What is “emotional labour?”

Most people who work directly with customers these days have been trained to suffer. Researchers have even developed a term for it: “emotional labour.” Studies have shown that employees expend a lot of mental energy in the customer experience, such as having to express happiness when they don’t feel it and having to suppress anger and other inappropriate behaviours when customers treat them abusively.

The toll of this emotional labor can become so high that employees can suffer from researchers call “emotional exhaustion,” which expresses itself in burnout, feelings of low accomplishment, and a kind of emotional numbness in which employees are no longer able to summon the positive attitude and empathy that are so necessary to a successful customer experience.

Q. So does that mean I should be looking for a certain type of person to fill roles in the customer experience?

For those who interact directly with customers, yes. Research says that extroverts do better in customer experience roles because they are more naturally inclined to want to interact with others. But these extroverts should also have the ability to do three things: Regulate inner emotions Tolerate ambiguity Enjoy helping others In combination, these factors give employees extra endurance when it comes to dealing with people and more ability to suppress inappropriate behaviour (even when customers deserve it).

Q. How should I train employees to act during the customer experience?

Even the best employees can burn out if they are forced to adopt what researchers call “surface acting,” in which employees have to put on the proverbial smile and feign emotions that they aren’t feeling during an encounter with customers. Part of the stress is that customers can sometimes detect the falseness of employees’ emotions, which research says causes customers to react negatively.

Instead, companies should focus on training employees to offer two things:

1. Treat customers with empathy. This means hearing customers out and treating them with dignity and respect at every point in the interaction and acting to defuse emotional tension – without having to put on false emotions such as a painted on smile.

2. Offer customers justice. Employees need to get on the same wavelength as the customer to determine what would constitute a just outcome for the experience in the customer’s mind and then weigh that against the limits the company has set on the experience and come to a mutually agreed upon resolution.

In part, this depends on the degree to which employees are allowed to exercise their own independence and judgment. But it also depends on the preset outcomes that the company builds around the experience. For example, are customer service representatives given the freedom to send a replacement product for one that is one month – or one year – past warranty? Companies need to constantly revisit these outcomes to maintain a good balance between giving employees the power to give customers experiences that lead to positive emotions while not breaking the bank.

Q. To what extent should I try to replace the human customer experience with a digital one?

There’s clear evidence that digital contributes a lot to make the experience easy and fast, especially in transactional types of relationships such as buying a book on Amazon, which customers like. Digital is also great for information-intensive experiences, such as complex products and services that require customers to do a lot of research before buying. And of course, digital experiences are much cheaper for companies, though most surveys show that companies do a poor job of managing them — especially when it comes to coordinating across digital and human channels.  Indeed, a good customer experience can rarely be completely online or offline. Increasingly, it’s the coordination of the two that matters most.

Digital may be great for easy, but we still need humans for when things become hard – such as when that product that was so easy to order online breaks offline. Research shows that customers place a high value on the quality of the relationship they have with companies. In that regard, there is no replacement for human-to-human interaction – at least not until virtual reality hits the mainstream (which could be sooner than you think). Until then, careful placement of a pleasurable human interaction into the customer experience when competitors are trying to pave everything over with digital can have a major impact.

An example is ING, the Dutch bank that entered the U.S. market in the nineties with an online experience only – no branches. But in 2001, the company decided to create a human experience, not with a traditional bank branch but with a café in New York City. Instead of serving up deposit slips, employees serve coffee, treats (sales of which help defray the costs of running the offices), and financial planning advice. The original café was a big hit and ING (whose U.S. online business was purchased by Capital One for $9 billion in 2012) began building cafes in major metro areas around the country. Capital One has continued the expansion plan while other banks have been shutting down branches or imitating the approach.

Q. What if I don’t have the resources for a “delight-the-customer” approach to customer experience?

Companies that invest in delighting the customer without first making sure they are at least meeting the expectations of the vast majority of customers are probably wasting their money. Getting a free gift card for a restaurant is meaningless if the food and service aren’t so hot to begin with.  Plus, giving stuff away or sending your employees out on time-consuming missions to bring smiles to customers’ faces is expensive – 10-20% more, according to executives surveyed by authors Mathew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick Delisi in The Effortless Experience.

The first priorities should be to drive down customer effort and sacrifice.

However, delighting the customer does not necessarily need to be focused on going above and beyond the call of duty. There are less expensive ways to do it (see the “customer experience as theatre” examples below).

Q. Okay, let’s say customers say the experience is easy and fast. Is that really enough to build loyalty over the long term?

Given the current sorry state of the customer experience in most industries, yes. But let’s assume for a moment that you are the world’s master of easy, fast, reliable, and convenient. What happens when a competitor catches up? What’s next?

Some researchers argue that there are two other ways to differentiate your customer experience that are harder for competitors to match:

Customer experience as theatre Personalisation

Q. What is customer experience as theatre?

Author B. Joseph Pine II says that Best Buy’s Geek Squad has taken the classic military motif of the uniform a step farther by adding a dose of humour and humility. The Geek Squad purposely dresses its employees in an outfit that still gets nerds hung from their underwear in gym lockers around the world: white button-down shirts, thin, clip-on black ties, black pants, and white socks.

Each employee also gets a titanium badge designed to look just like a policeman’s badge. The geek squad drives Volkswagen Beetles painted black and white to look like extremely awkward and ineffective police cars. It is the nerd as the anti-hero hero, here to save the day for you and your computer.

Theatre need not cost much.

Through this minimalist and, Pine is careful to point out, inexpensive, bit of theatre, the Geek Squad, which Best Buy bought when it was a tiny startup, has grown exponentially and become a household brand name. Is it because of the name and the uniforms, or is it simply because the Squad offers better service and is tied to Best Buy, which has long been a household brand? Impossible to tell, but once again, the clip-ons haven’t hurt.

Pine, who is the co-author, with James H. Gilmore, of The Experience Economy, believes that any company, with enough creativity and a good employee screening and training program, can create the same kind of differentiated experience. “Whenever employees are in front of your customers, those employees are acting,” says Pine. “They need to act in a way that engages the audience. And it does not require any expenditure. It requires that you direct your workers to act, that you give them roles to play and you help them characterise those goals on the business stage.”

Though he acknowledges that he has nothing beyond anecdotal evidence to back up his theory, Pine argues that performance is a way to stand apart in a crowded field and create customer preference rather than mere satisfaction.

Q. What about personalisation? Can that create a differentiated customer experience?

Personalisation is controversial but holds promise because it can be another form of easy. Though we usually think of customisation as adding more, it can also mean simplifying the experience by removing everything except what the customer truly wants. This is particularly true on the web, where websites and e-commerce portals overstuffed with offers and information can trip that magic switch of frustration that kills sales and loyalty.

Sweeping away the noise and personalising a Web site to a customer’s tastes – we will look back on Amazon’s recommendation engine as the stone-age prototype for this sort of thing – can reduce customer effort and sacrifice. Research has shown that offering relevant information and simplifying the experience results in more customer trust and satisfaction and more sales.

More importantly, as databases become ever-more fast and powerful, we can add a powerful new aspect to the digital customer experience: learning. At the core of recommendation engines like Amazon’s and Netflix is machine learning – the ability to memorise your actions and preferences and use algorithms to serve up personalised offers.

However, personalisation treads on the same dangerous turf as efforts to “delight” the customer. It can be complex and expensive. And if it only leads to satisfaction rather than a positive preference for the brand, that money may be wasted. Indeed, one research study found that for customers that were already satisfied with their experience, personalisation had limited benefits. Only in instances where the customer had a high degree of trust in the company but low levels of satisfaction did personalisation make a significant difference. Therefore, it’s best to start with a pilot project to see if personalisation will make a difference before investing too much.

Q. Personalisation also raises issues of privacy, right?

In order to make recommendations and personalise web pages, companies need to gather information. And as we’ve all learned, various companies and governments have stepped all over people’s privacy in order to gather data about them.

Businesses need to build a customer experience model that helps individuals understand the data that companies want to collect about them, the methods the companies will use to make behavioural predictions, and the trustworthiness they can expect from those predictions.

Here are five ways to use Big Data to be cool, not creepy.

Articulate “What’s in it for me?” Research has found that the majority of consumers in the United States and the United Kingdom are willing to have trusted retailers use some of their personal data in order to present personalised and targeted products, services, recommendations, and offers. But the value has to be crystal clear, no matter who’s tracking the data. For example, insurance provider Progressive and Tesla Motors have convinced car owners to have devices installed in their vehicles that track where and how they drive. In exchange, customers potentially get lower car insurance rates (an average 10% to 15% reduction on premiums) or improved service, such as supercharger stations near their most frequent routes.

Be transparent about the data relationship. Slapping a dense data use policy written in legalese on the corporate Web site does little to enlighten customers. Instead, companies should think about the customer data transaction – what information the customer is giving them, how they’re using it, and what the result will be – and try to describe it as simply as possible.

Let customers learn about each other. In 2011, Procter & Gamble created a “Mean Stinks” campaign for Secret deodorant that encouraged girl-to-girl anti-bullying posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The pages let participants send apologies to those they had bullied; view videos; and share tips, tools, and challenges with their peers. Besides helping girls, it drove a 16% market share increase in the Secret deodorant line.

Experiment and build trust. Building a Big Data strategy that improves customer experience takes time and continual tweaking. Google’s Autocomplete isn’t always on point. Amazon’s suggestions sometimes go astray. But as customers build up a history of experience with a brand, they see that data is used for their benefit more often than not. They develop a trust in the exchange of data for value. They see where it came from. And they forgive the missteps.

Make the distinction between little data and Big Data. “I steer companies to really focus on leveraging the data that customers give them in the normal process of doing business first and think about the third-party stuff later,” says Elea McDonnell Feit, assistant professor of Marketing at Drexel University. “At least 80% of the value you can generate from customer data comes from using the information customers reveal about themselves directly to you.”

Q. Do some customers deserve more personalisation than others?

Given that personalisation can be complex and expensive, it could pay to segment customers into those most likely to respond to personalisation.  Some companies have created composite personas of customers to do more broad-brush personalisation that doesn’t cost as much as one-to-one efforts. For example, you could create a set of categories across the customer base based on past purchase history and other data and create separate customer experiences for each category.

Q. How do I determine the ROI of customer experience improvements?

Unfortunately for customers (and in the long run, companies, too), there’s really only one measure that matters: switching costs. If there are no viable alternatives in the market, or if switching to a competitor would cost more than the product or service itself or involve so much customer effort that it doesn’t seem worth it, customer experience becomes less important to revenues. Research shows that customers who perceive high switching costs are more likely to stick with a company that provides a less-than-stellar (but acceptable – again anger and conflict trump all other factors) experience, thereby reducing the potential returns from investing in improving that experience.

But even companies with high switching costs or lack of competition neglect customer experience at their peril. Cable companies, for example, are feeling the pain today as disruptive pay-per-view entertainment options such as Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime lure away cable customers who have long wished for an alternative but have had no other choices – until now.

Loyalty over time matters.

But let’s assume that you are in a competitive industry. The most important impact that a good customer experience has is in customer loyalty. Because it costs more to acquire new customers than to maintain relationships with existing customers, most experts point to loyalty as the decisive metric. More specifically, they cite lifetime customer value – usually computed as the revenue from each customer over the length of the relationship.

Author Frederick F. Reichheld puts a finer point on the metric in his book The Loyalty Effect, saying that companies should measure the lifetime profit per customer minus the cost of acquiring them in the first place. The problem here is that few companies even measure revenue per customer over time, much less take it to Reichheld’s ideal level. And not all researchers agree with Reichheld that profits matter more than revenues.

Three other metrics to consider

In their book Outside In, authors Manning and Bodine modelled three areas where companies can benefit from improved customer experience that is slightly easier to measure: 1. More incremental purchases from existing customers 2. Higher retained revenue as a result of reduced churn 3. New sales driven by word of mouth They found that in the hotel and wireless industries, small improvements in customer loyalty led to major gains – in the billions – in revenue because competition in those industries is so intense and switching costs are so low. However, even in less volatile industries where switching costs are higher, such as health insurance, Manning and Bodine saw opportunities to gain revenue in the tens of millions by improving the customer experience.

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Neil ran his first SAP transformation programme in his early twenties. He spent the next 21 years working both client side and for various consultancies running numerous SAP programmes. After successfully completing over 15 full lifecycles he took a senior leadership/board position and his work moved onto creating the same success for others.

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5 great customer experience case studies.

Home » 5 Great Customer Experience Case Studies

Exceptional CX Strategies in action are vital for organizations aiming to thrive in the competitive market. By focusing on customer needs, these strategies transform standard interactions into memorable experiences that foster loyalty. In this section, we explore five outstanding case studies that showcase innovative approaches to enhancing customer experience.

Each case demonstrates the importance of understanding customer insights and adapting services accordingly. These exceptional CX strategies not only drive satisfaction but also contribute to sustainable business growth. Through analysis of these real-world applications, we aim to inspire a fresh perspective on elevating customer experience to new heights.

Exceptional CX Strategies: Companies Leading the Way

Exceptional CX strategies often emerge from companies that prioritize customer-centricity. These organizations recognize that understanding customer needs and preferences is essential for offering unmatched service. They continually analyze feedback and insights to tailor experiences that resonate deeply with their audience. By fostering a culture of empathy, these companies empower their teams to think critically about customer interactions, leading to improved outcomes.

Moreover, their commitment to exceptional customer experiences does not end at mere satisfaction. These leaders actively engage customers in meaningful ways, ensuring they feel valued and understood. Innovative touchpoints, personalized communications, and seamless service integration help create lasting relationships. These strategies not only drive loyalty but also inspire advocates who share their positive experiences, further enhancing brand reputation and visibility. Through these exceptional CX strategies, companies are setting benchmarks in customer service excellence that others aspire to achieve.

Case Study 1: How Company A Transformed Customer Engagement

In the pursuit of exceptional customer experience (CX) strategies, a leading organization revolutionized its approach to customer engagement. Recognizing the growing competition and the importance of customer feedback, they prioritized understanding the voice of their customers. By analyzing customer sentiment, the organization gained actionable insights into preferences and pain points. This not only enabled them to tailor their offerings but also created a more personalized interaction with customers.

The transformation began with mapping the customer journey, allowing the organization to identify key touchpoints for improvement. This strategic move had a dual benefit: it bolstered customer satisfaction while also increasing market share. Enhanced engagement strategies, including personalized communication and targeted promotions, ensured that customers felt valued and understood. This case study highlights the significance of exceptional CX strategies, illustrating how a company can thrive by truly listening to its customers and adapting to their needs.

Case Study 2: The Impact of Personalization at Company B

At one organization, a robust personalization strategy significantly improved customer experiences. By using data analytics, they crafted tailored interactions that resonated with individual customer preferences, which fostered stronger connections and increased customer loyalty.

The implementation of personalized recommendations based on past behaviors was a game-changer. This approach not only enriched the shopping experience but also boosted conversion rates. Additionally, effective communication channels, such as targeted emails and customized offers, ensured customers felt valued.

Furthermore, by continuously analyzing customer feedback, they adapted their strategies to better meet evolving needs. This responsiveness illustrated the importance of exceptional customer experience strategies, ultimately establishing a competitive edge in their market sector. Engaging their audience through personalized experiences was integral to their overall success, demonstrating how critical tailored interactions are to achieving superior customer satisfaction.

Implementing Exceptional CX Strategies: Insights from Leaders

Implementing exceptional CX strategies requires a deep understanding of customer needs and behaviors. Leaders in customer experience consistently rely on data-driven insights to refine their practices. By utilizing customizable insights, organizations can pinpoint specific pain points and desires directly related to their target audience. This tailored approach allows companies to focus on areas that truly matter to their customers.

Effective CX strategies emphasize the importance of context in understanding customer feedback. Moreover, presenting evidence for insights ensures teams recognize the origin of their data, fostering a culture of trust and accountability. This blend of analysis and transparency not only guides decision-making but also enhances overall customer satisfaction. Leaders demonstrate that the journey towards exceptional CX hinges on active engagement, adaptability, and a relentless pursuit of excellence. Ultimately, successful implementation of these strategies can transform a standard experience into one that’s memorable and meaningful.

Case Study 3: Company Cs Omni-Channel Success Story

To achieve exceptional customer experience, one company successfully integrated its online and offline strategies. This omni-channel approach ensured that customers enjoyed a seamless experience, regardless of the channel they chose. The company focused on understanding customer preferences through deep insights, which allowed them to tailor their services effectively. This attention to customer needs fostered loyalty and increased engagement.

Furthermore, by utilizing data analytics, the company gained valuable insights into purchasing behavior. This enabled them to personalize marketing efforts and improve product recommendations. As a result, customers felt understood and appreciated. These exceptional CX strategies led to higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction scores, proving that an omni-channel strategy can significantly enhance the overall customer experience.

Case Study 4: Streamlined Customer Support at Company D

In one organization's journey towards exceptional CX strategies, they focused on enhancing their customer support process. By incorporating a sophisticated yet user-friendly support system, they allowed customers to easily access help through various channels. This multi-channel approach significantly reduced customer wait times, resulting in faster resolution of queries and complaints.

To further streamline the support experience, the company implemented a ticketing system that prioritized urgent issues. They trained their teams to swiftly address pain points identified through user feedback. As a result, customers felt their concerns were valued, leading to increased loyalty and satisfaction. By continuously monitoring support metrics, the organization ensured that their strategies evolved based on real-time data, laying the groundwork for a consistently positive customer experience. This journey serves as a compelling example of how focused strategies can transform customer interactions.

Case Study 5: Company Es Loyalty Program Innovation

The loyalty program introduced focused on creating rewarding experiences that cater directly to customer desires. By harnessing insights from customer feedback, the program was designed to evolve continuously, meeting changing preferences. This innovative approach ensured that members felt valued and heard, resulting in enhanced engagement and satisfaction.

Key elements of this exceptional loyalty program included personalized rewards based on individual spending habits, milestone bonuses that celebrated customer loyalty, and exclusive access to special events. Each component aimed to foster an emotional connection between the brand and its customers, ultimately driving long-term loyalty. These exceptional CX strategies not only increased participation but also fostered a community around the brand, encouraging customers to share their experiences. As a result, the loyalty program became a cornerstone of the overall customer experience, empowering customers and motivating them to build a lasting relationship with the brand.

Conclusion: Lessons Learned from Exceptional CX Strategies

Exceptional CX strategies reveal the profound impact of understanding customer needs. Through these case studies, we identify that proactive engagement and feedback mechanisms are essential. Listening actively enables businesses to adapt swiftly, enhancing overall customer satisfaction.

Moreover, crafting personalized experiences fosters loyalty. By mapping the customer journey, organizations can pinpoint critical touchpoints that need improvement. These lessons illustrate that a committed focus on customer insight not only addresses existing concerns but also anticipates future needs, ensuring long-term success in a competitive market. Adopting these strategies can position any business as a leader in customer experience.

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Dow’s bold approach to customer experience

Dow’s innovative customer experience program is helping revolutionize the B2B industry.

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The better the question

How can you balance the customer business equation?

Dow explores customer experience as a pathway to business success.

D ow is a company with a passion for advancing science and innovation to find solutions to change the world for the better. It has a long history dating back over 125 years, serving customers in high-growth markets such as packaging, infrastructure, mobility and consumer applications. With manufacturing sites in 31 countries, Dow employs nearly 36,000 people and generated sales of approximately US$45 billion in 2023. It is striving to become the most innovative, customer-centric, inclusive and sustainable materials science company in the world.

In alignment with that ambition, Dow’s executive leadership recognized immense potential in intensifying the company’s focus on customer experience (CX) and collaboration. So, in 2017, Chief Commercial Officer Dan Futter and his team set out to unlock the connection between customer experience and Dow’s overall business-to-business (B2B) success. Interestingly, two years earlier, research group Forrester had posited that superior CX drives revenue growth in certain industries. 1  Yet in 2017, it had found that CX quality in the US was declining year-on-year.  2

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“At the time, we had business, functional and regional teams running instinctively on delivering good customer experiences,” said Dan. “But the big opportunity was to tie our efforts together with a common approach to listening to customers, shared goals, and new digital systems for connecting and evaluating information. That allowed us to prioritize and pull together in the same direction.”

In a crowded market, exceptional customer experience can be the catalyst needed to jump-start the equation between customer satisfaction and business growth, as it helps businesses stand out by delivering value to customers in ways that competitors may not be able to match.

“At Dow, our purpose is finding solutions to the world’s toughest challenges – which requires collaboration with customers and other stakeholders,” says Riccardo Porta, Dow Global Director of Customer Experience. “With that also comes a leap of faith and a fundamental belief that if we do good by our customers, it will be good for Dow, our employees and our stakeholders.”

Customer experience work was unfamiliar territory for Dow. Typically, customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and net promoter scores (NPS) are the domain of business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations. Still, Dow wanted to explore customer experience in a new way — one that would eventually have tremendous significance across many B2B organizations within advanced manufacturing.

At its highest level, the customer experience program’s goal was to make it easy, enjoyable and effective for customers to do business with Dow.

Riccardo Porta

Dow Global Director of Customer Experience

Channeling its commitment to science and innovation, Dow asked Ernst & Young LLP (EY) professionals to help identify the compound linking customer experience to business success in the B2B environment.

The better the answer

Creating new bonds with customers

A superior customer experience program links improved customer journeys to better business outcomes.

To uncover what each customer valued, Dow developed a relationship survey and conducted a series of customer journey mapping sessions. These activities allowed customers to describe each interaction they had with Dow — from lead generation to product usage. “At its highest level, the customer experience program’s goal was to make it easy, enjoyable and effective for customers to do business with Dow,” says Riccardo. “But these three criteria by themselves are not extremely actionable. So, we complemented these survey questions with more granular conversations to fully understand the experience customers were having along their journey with us.” This shift allowed Dow to move from merely asking for feedback to truly listening. The results provided a rich source of data for the team to analyze.

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“Dow had developed multiple ways of assessing its customers’ satisfaction, but they wanted to take it further. They wanted to generate the insights necessary to build differentiated, high-impact customer experiences that would add long-term value to their customers, their organization and their industry,” said Jay Finnane, EY Global Consulting Account Lead.  

The team quickly realized the cross-functional nature of customer journeys. Consistent delivery of positive customer experiences requires strong collaboration of functional and business teams, and a common definition of success. This insight highlighted the need for all parts of the organization to work in harmony and offer a unified “one Dow” experience. Following this, the team redesigned workflows, previously centered around internal efficiency, to align to customer needs.

“It can be exceedingly difficult to separate the noise from what we call the ‘moments that matter.’ When doing so, it’s incredibly important to identify the customer touchpoints that have the most influence,” noted Riccardo. “These insights led us to identify how we could create better experiences for our customers while driving purposeful growth for our organization.”

The learnings from Dow’s listening and research prompted the team to propose a revised enterprise-wide customer segmentation, a portfolio of service offerings, and a framework to help prioritize both customer needs and internal projects. Some customers value efficiency and low price, others flexibility and speed, or collaboration and innovation. The combination of customer segmentation and service offering provides the framework to guide a broad range of services, including managing credit limits, offering technical support and determining the level of dedicated customer service.

To bring it home, the team identified another correlation — customer experience and employee satisfaction. “One ‘aha’ moment during our customer journey mapping exercise was when we found, in the vast majority of instances, customer pain points aligned to employee pain points,” explained Riccardo. “One example was customers having to wait to get answers to specific questions. Typically, the reason for the delay was that employees were struggling to find the right information in a timely manner.”

The design of Dow's new standard customer experience program underpinned all these discoveries – they were equipped to listen to and understand the customer, identify and design the right service offerings, and activate and scale the program across the organization. Following this methodology has allowed everyone within the business to gain line of sight on the impact their work has on customer experience and subsequently correlate it to financial performance.

Dow employees can now connect customer experience to financial performance.

New centralized Dow teams support and manage the program, including a CX steering committee, chaired by the CCO and made up of global functional leaders; a North Star Team that includes all business unit presidents, the CIO, CCO and functional VPs; a CX implementation team; and passionate CX change champions volunteering from all parts of the business.

Finally, to help put the methodology into everyone’s hands, Dow also launched a customer-experience website where employees can learn more about the program and have access to the tools required to improve the customer experience at every touchpoint.

The better the world works

From industry pioneer to modern customer experience champion

Dow’s best-in-class customer experience program helps shape the future of advanced manufacturing.

When this work began, Dow had multiple approaches to and ways of measuring customer experience. Now, Dow has the systems and processes needed to put customers front and center throughout their entire journey.

Dow actively integrates end-to-end customer experience thinking into its operations. Employees across the organization recognize that customer experience considerations are fundamental because of the link established between customer, business and employee. By actively embedding digital capabilities, like a new Cxi dashboard, and redesigning work processes, Dow creates a more compelling customer experience and drives internal productivity. That is because delivering a consistently positive experience to customers requires all parts of the organization to function in a very well-orchestrated way – which results in wide-ranging improvements to processes, tools and people’s skills. Dow proactively eliminates defects and addresses inefficiencies that generate unnecessary costs and rework.

“As you work on and drive customer experience and customer-centricity, you are improving the organization’s efficiency and effectiveness overall, and that in itself is a structural competitive advantage,” says Riccardo.

“Focusing on the outcomes of the customer experience can be a whole new way of thinking. But this approach has really paid off for Dow. With a data-driven mechanism to gather and analyze customer feedback, Dow is ahead of the competition and a recognized leader in the industry,” says Brad Newman, EY Americas Advanced Manufacturing & Mobility Industry Market Leader and EY Global Client Service Principal for Dow.

The results were clear and compelling. Dow’s Customer Experience Index score increased 30% between 2018 and 2023, with demonstrable positive impacts on the wider business, including double-digit reductions in complaint frequency and time to resolve complaints, a 10x increase in business leads generated via digital channels, and record levels of employee retention.

Superior customer experiences set businesses apart from competitors.

Dow has also been able to balance previously competing needs. “If we compare end of 2022 to end of 2021, we were able to operate with lower inventory volumes, while improving product availability, customer satisfaction, and customer confidence in product availability by double digits,” says Riccardo. “For us, that’s a huge success because it’s also a great example of how you can turn a trade-off scenario on its head and achieve both goals.”

“People may look a bit surprised to hear these measurements, because there is a common misconception that the most critical outcome of customer experience programs is improving survey responses,” continues Riccardo. “But the goal of our program is to improve our operations to enable better experiences that, in return, result in customer preference and loyalty that rewards Dow.”

Dow’s commitment and hard work earned them five accolades in the 2023 US Customer Experience Awards™, taking the overall award for top-scoring entry; gold awards for Digital Transformation, best use of Insight & Feedback, and Best Measurement in CX; as well as a silver award for Best B2B Customer Experience.

Dow and the EY teams have set their sights even higher, realizing many manufacturing companies are dealing with similar challenges. The two are now working to make the CX methodology available for all advanced manufacturing businesses to adopt.

“We are chairing the Advanced Manufacturing CX Consortium (AMCX). Our goal is to help establish a benchmark for measurement of CX, and over time show that companies that have superior customer experience also have above average return for their shareholders,” says Riccardo. “That will help us build the case for CX across B2B and help all B2B companies grow their CX programs and value to customers.”

•  "Customer Experience Drives Revenue Growth, 2016," Forrester website , https://www.forrester.com/blogs/16-06-21-customer_experience_drives_revenue_growth_2016/, 21 June 2016.
• "The US Customer Experience Index For 2017: CX Quality Worsened,” Forrester website , https://www.forrester.com/blogs/16-06-21-customer_experience_drives_revenue_growth_2016/, 27 September 2017.

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A Customer Experience Case Study: Lemonade

RevOps , or revenue operations, is a strategy for businesses to align revenue-enhancing teams and activities while improving the customer journey. When discussing RevOps, the emphasis is usually on overcoming silos and having departments such as marketing, sales, and customer service working seamlessly. However, it's equally beneficial from the customer's point of view. The insurance company Lemonade is an instructive case study to illustrate best practices for optimizing the customer experience.

How Lemonade is Disrupting the Insurance Industry

Lemonade is an innovative insurance company, founded in 2015, that offers products such as homeowners, renters, life, and pet insurance. Lemonade has similar services as other insurance companies but has radically changed the customer experience. Here are some features that set Lemonade apart.

• • Strong branding. Lemonade has carved out a distinct niche for itself. Clearly targeted towards tech-savvy younger customers, it promises "Insurance built for the 21st century."
• • Personalized service. One of the qualities that distinguish Lemonade from other insurance companies is the level of personalized service. Maya, the company's chatbot, makes it easy for website visitors to get information and sign up. Maya takes visitors through a questionnaire that guides them to the most appropriate services and provides quick quotes. Another chatbot, named Jim, handles payouts.
• • Flat fee. Pricing is often confusing for insurance customers. Lemonade also  appeals to millennials  and other younger customers, who tend to have less experience with insurance policies. The company takes a flat fee of 20% from their customers' premiums, which is simple and straightforward. As they point out, their fee structure also eliminates a conflict of interest with customers. The flat rate, combined with their Giveback program (see below), means that Lemonade doesn't lose money by paying claims.
• • Giveback program. When customers sign up for insurance, they choose a nonprofit to support. At the end of the year, any unclaimed money from an account is donated to the nonprofit.   Lemonade Giveback   provides customers with the satisfaction that they're performing a social good, something that's extremely relevant to millennials. A  Deloitte Global Millennial Survey  revealed that 42% of millennials would start patronizing a business with a positive impact on society, while 38% would stop supporting a business with a negative impact.

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Source: Lemonade is disrupting insurance. The incumbents will have to respond Lemonade vs Traditional Insurance Companies: Customer Experience

Lemonade claims that it  collects 100x more data points per customer  compared to other companies. In a blog post, Lemonade describes how collecting and studying data are helping to  improve its loss ratio . This is the ratio of losses to premiums. As the article explains, a very high loss ratio isn't sustainable for an insurance company, while a very low one is profitable for the business but not good for customers. Lemonade's system of charging a flat rate and donating leftover funds to charity allows it to maintain a stable loss ratio.

One of Lemonade's taglines is to turn insurance "from a necessary evil to a social good." The Giveback program plays a big role in this. But what does this really mean for the average customer? Let's explore if (or how) the customer experience differs with Lemonade when compared to traditional insurance companies.

Do Everything Online

At a time when  73% of millennials prefer to shop online  using their phones (the figures are 2x higher for Zoomers, or Generation Z), Lemonade has perfectly tapped into this target market. The traditional process for getting insurance information requires the user to contact an agent, fill out a form, and wait for a quote. With Lemonade, the process is streamlined to be much faster and more convenient. The system's built-in AI (Maya the chatbot) provides personalized service without the user having to talk to a live agent.

What really sets Lemonade's customer service apart is the way it seamlessly transitions customers from one function to another. A new user is presented with information tailored to their buyer persona as they see comparisons of data so they can choose the best service. They can just as easily access claims processing when needed. All of this is automated, without the need to wait on hold or fill out complicated forms.

For a thorough review of the UX advantages of Lemonade's landing page, see  A UX Review of Lemonade Insurance in Less Than 5 Minutes .

Image Source: Lemonade

Fast Payments

Another distinctive customer experience feature of Lemonade is guaranteeing fast payments without any paperwork. As with the application process, customers can complete everything online. Claims are approved in seconds.

Easy to Switch

Lemonade targets customers who already have insurance as well as people buying it for the first time. Their "Check Prices and Switch" guides users through the process. As with other tasks on the site, Maya the chatbot guides users through a series of questions to highlight the advantages of switching to Lemonade.

Mobile Apps

Speed and convenience are supported by mobile apps that customers can download. Customers can set up and manage their policies on their mobile devices.

Active on Social Media

Another way Lemonade taps into its millennial customers is by providing news and policy information on social media. Their twitter account  is frequently updated. They're also active on Facebook and Instagram. Social posts aren't simply ads for insurance, but links to news items and timely blog posts.

Lemonade posts stories that are educational and helpful to its audience. For example,  a recent post addresses concerns that renters may have about eviction and suggests resources to help. This type of post isn't directly related to Lemonade's services, but it establishes them as a useful source of information.

What Lemonade Has Accomplished

Is Lemonade actually disrupting insurance and stealing customers from more established companies? The Motley Fool, in the article,  Can Lemonade Disrupt the Insurance Market?  shares some impressive facts.

• • While 50% of renters are under 30, only 37% get renter's insurance. Lemonade is targeting this largely untapped market.
• • Customers who signed up with Lemonade three years ago have increased their spending on renter's insurance by 56%.
• • Between 2017 and 2019, Lemonade increased the number of premiums sold from $9 million to $16 million.

While the article goes on to question whether Lemonade can succeed at converting older and more affluent customers, in our opinion this innovative model will prove to be a clear competitive advantage for Lemonade. 

Lessons From Lemonade

Here are some lessons that businesses in any sector can take from Lemonade.

• • Long-standing products and services can be marketed in a new and fresh way.
• • Target specific demographics (e.g. Lemonade targets millennials and renters).
• • Today's customers appreciate speed and efficiency.
• • Provide simple and personalized services. AI tools such as chatbots can help improve the customer experience.
• • Use automation tools to collect and analyze data.

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10 B2B Case Study Examples to Inspire Your Next Customer Success Story

• October 24, 2023

Case studies, also known as customer stories, are valuable content assets for attracting new customers and showing your expertise in a competitive market.

The more case studies you have, the simpler it gets for your customers to make decisions.

Case studies provide a firsthand experience of what it’s like to use your product or service, and it can give an “Aha!” moment to potential customers.

While product demos and white papers are great for generating leads, their use is limited to highlighting product features. 

On the other hand, case studies showcase the transformation a business has undergone while using your product.

A case study offers potential customers a glimpse of the positive changes they can expect, which is more compelling than simply showcasing your product or service’s excellence.

• Customer mission should be given at the beginning
• Follow up about specifics and metrics
• Use quotes from their side to highlight
• Work out the biggest benefits of your offering and make reference to them
• Make sure your success story follows a brief and logical story structure

In this article, we’ll review 10 examples of outstanding case studies that have collectively helped secure millions in new client business. Let’s get started.

What Is A Case Study?

In simple terms, a case study highlights how a product or service has helped a business solve a problem, achieve a goal, or make its operations easier. 

In many ways, it’s a glorified and stretched-out client testimonial that introduces you to the problem that the customer is facing and the solution that the product has helped deliver. 

Case studies are invaluable assets for B2B SaaS, where sales cycles tend to get lengthy and costly. They’re a one-time investment that showcases your product’s features and benefits in rooms your sales team can’t be in. 

What Makes A Good Case Study? 

There is no one-size-fits approach to a good case study. 

Some case studies work better as long, prose-forward, and story-driven blog posts. Whereas some are better as quick and fast-fact content that doesn’t add to the chatter but gets straight to the point. 

Here are some of the tenets of good case studies:

• Product-Led : Focuses on showcasing the product as the solution to a specific problem or challenge.
• Timely : Addresses the current issues or trends relevant to the business’s ideal customer profile (ICP) . 
• Well-structured: Follows a clear, organized format with easily digestible writing style and synthesis. 
• Story-driven: Tells a compelling and relatable story that puts the reader in the customer’s shoes. 

Case studies must tell the customer’s story regardless of style or content density.

Other than that, visuals in case studies are powerful in increasing conversion rates, by providing real evidence and taking attention.

Companies can also use their website, social media, and newsletters to promote case studies and increase visibility.

Below, we have ten diverse case study examples that embody these principles. 

B2B Case Study Template from Our Team

We will share great and proven B2B case study examples that you can get inspired by in the following section, but before that, let’s take a look at an easy and effective template from our team.

10 Best B2B Case Study Examples To Take Inspiration From

Plaid is a fintech company specializing in equipping users with a secure platform to connect their bank details to online applications. Addressing the pressing concern of financial security, Plaid leverages compelling case studies to showcase the remarkable transformations their clients experience.

Take Plaid’s case study of Betterment, for example. 

The study begins by stating the goal that the customer is trying to achieve, which is to “onboard new users and drive engagement.” Right next to the goal is company details, and followed below is a singular problem and its solution.

The case study continues by keeping the business’ desired result front and center and offers a generous outlook on the SaaS business.

The core process of how Plaid helps Betterment is cleanly laid out, which is a brief version of a ten-page white paper. 

What follows are several benefits that Plaid offered to Betterment. 

Plaid’s subtle yet effective product integration and clear, well-organized process make it simple for customers facing similar challenges to envision the solution.

2. SalesHandy

SalesHandy is an email automation software that personalizes high-volume cold emails. The company heroes client success stories for its case studies and opens the heading with their wins. 

Check out this B2B case study example from Sedin’s case study published by SalesHandy.

Readers need context, and case studies should always begin by outlining the exact problems their product or platform aims to solve. 

Here, SalesHandy expertly introduces us to Sedin’s use case and the challenges that the business is facing.

After a lengthy context, the case study highlights Sedin’s core challenge in the words of its personnel. 

This personable approach ropes readers in and lets them empathize with Sedin’s challenges. 

With a single scroll in, SalesHandy lays out the solutions to Sedin’s core challenges and integrates its product. 

This highly detailed case study covers all corners and includes the exceptional results achieved in record time. SalesHandy closes the study with a word from the character already introduced to the readers. 

SalesHandy doesn’t shy away from giving a detailed account of its process, which is crucial for highly technical products and enterprise packages that involve multiple decision-makers. 

B2B Case studies, first and foremost, should be written in a language that your ICP understands. 

Playvox is a customer service platform that helps businesses streamline business operations. 

This industry-specific case study of Sweaty Betty by Playvox addresses unique challenges within a niche industry, such as account assessment times for retail and online shops. 

The case study starts with the results it achieved for Sweaty Betty. 

The case study follows a straightforward, albeit impactful, challenges-solution-results format as we scroll down. 

But instead of listing out solutions in bullet points, Playvox uses customer voice to present the transformation that Sweaty Betty went through. 

With this formatting, Playvox doesn’t have to tout the platform’s usefulness. Sweaty Betty is doing it for them. 

4. Base Search Marketing

We promised diverse case studies, and here is a stellar B2B case study example of a single deck case study of Shine Cosmetics by Base Search Marketing.  

Base Search Marketing is a boutique link-building and SEO agency that works with startups and mid-level businesses. 

This case study, which can be reviewed as a brochure, gives you an overview of the customer and lays out the challenges that the business is facing. 

You’ll notice how the study uses the CEO’s quote to mention a pretty universal problem that most startups face: “limited resources.”

By highlighting the results in the left tab and laying out the process on the right side, this case study does a masterful job of covering all corners and telling a desirable customer success story.

Another approachable form of case study is slide decks, which you can present in boardrooms and meetings and act as a sales pitch. 

Loganix nails it with its case study deck for rankings.io. 

If you have a complicated product or service requiring an in-depth explanation, then using this format would be a great option. 

The solution, stated in simple bullet points, drives the message home.

Fewer words. Cleaner decks.

Using this methodology lets the audience walk through the case study with visuals, bullet points, and concise text. 

6. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a SaaS leader in the social media space, and this Outcome-led Case Study proves just why it is so good at capturing the markets.

The study kicks off with a result-forward headline, piquing the interest of readers who are interested in getting similar outcomes. 

There’s much to appreciate in this succinctly written case study, but the headlines get our attention and hold it.

With every scroll, results are presented to you in the form of graphs, quotes, and visuals. 

The study ends with a quote from the customer, which repeats the outcome stated in the headline. 

Leading remote teams is a challenge that numerous teams will face moving forward. CoSchedule makes operations easy for these teams, and it doesn’t shy away from stating just how through its case study. 

7. Wizehire

Case studies have evolved from lengthy blocks of text confined to PDFs to a new digital era emphasizing impact over verbosity.

Wizehire’s succinct case study is a prime example of this shift. It uses fewer words to create a powerful impression.

From the very first page, the case study introduces us to Kris, the customer and central figure of the story. Without the need for extensive scrolling, we quickly grasp vital details about Kris: his role, employee turnover, location, and industry. 

In the second slide, we are immediately taken to the solution that Kris got by working with Wizehire. 

The case study ends with a passionate testimonial from Kris, who deeply believes in Wizehire. 

The case study has less than 300 words, enough for local entrepreneurs like Kris Morales, who want to hire talent but don’t have the resources for proper vetting and training. Until, of course, Wizehire comes along. 

8. FreshBooks

When a reader can see themselves in a case study, it takes them one step closer to wanting to try the product.

This case study by Freshbooks uses a beautiful personal story of an emerging entrepreneur. 

Using a deeply personal story, the study appeals to people who are just starting and aren’t accountants but suddenly have to deal with employee invoices and a dozen other bills. 

The text progresses in an interview-style study, with the customer taking the mic and illustrating the challenges that startups and small businesses face. 

This style works because readers crave insights directly from customers. Getting authentic testimonials is becoming increasingly challenging. Well-crafted case studies can be valuable substitutes, provided they seem realistic and from the heart. 

Featuring quotes or testimonials from satisfied customers throughout the case study adds to its credibility and authenticity. Just like this testimonial Case Study by Slack .

Slack is a giant in the realm of digital communication, with more than 20 million active users worldwide. However, it is tough to break into the market of group communications. After all, Slack competes with both WhatsApp and Microsoft Team regarding market share. 

To level the playing field, Slack features case studies from top entrepreneurs and market players who have been served well by it. 

Its case studies are laden with personal stories about how the platform boosts productivity. 

At the same time, the software also plugs in the “try for free” banner to make sure that customers are aware of the inexpensive nature of the software.

It’s not easy to get such detailed testimonies from the C-suite, but when you’re Slack, businesses tend to make an exception. 

Some case studies are based on highly niche subjects, where nothing is at the top of the funnel. Kosli nails it with this highly technical case study of Firi.

Technical case studies are designed for niche audiences who are already aware of the problems that the software can solve. Case studies like these are clean and smart and come with solutions that have a counterpart solution. 

There is absolutely no fluff and nothing that can be a reason for C-suite executives to bounce from. 

It’s full of information-packed pages designed to hook the reader in and present the tool as a formidable solution to their problem. 

You’ll notice how they weave Kosli through the entire case study, and the first-person report comes from the customer. 

B2B Case Study Examples In Short

In the B2B SaaS industry, converting new leads and securing new business has become increasingly challenging. In this landscape, impactful content assets such as case studies and customer stories are sometimes the only things moving the needle. 

Crafting a compelling customer story empowers brands to enable potential customers to engage directly .

🚀 Customer stories evoke empathy from buyers

🤝 Customer stories help build up your relationships with vocal brand advocates

⬇️ Customer stories lower your prospects’ information cost

Once you’ve determined the most effective way to convey information that resonates with your leads, you can collaborate with your content and design teams to create impactful case studies to generate new business and prove your expertise and experience in the market. 

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Bringing efficiency to a leading food delivery platform's overwhelmed contact center

See the results our global, disruptive client achieved after they transitioned to Contact Center Outsourcing Solutions from TELUS International.

The challenge

Our client is a pioneering technology company that has facilitated on-demand food delivery services through their website and mobile applications since 2013. Their contact center has two key goals: making sure restaurants receive the right order information and customers receive exactly what they ordered.

Prior to their partnership with TELUS International, the company outsourced their customer care to another service provider who was responsible for assisting customers throughout the order and delivery process. Their contact center operations were overwhelmed by their daily interaction volumes, which severely impacted their customer experience performance and overall quality standards. With interaction volumes escalating at a double-digit rate, the company needed an efficient solution and a capable partner to return them to their desired service levels.

The TELUS International solution

From the point of initial discovery with the client, our experts recognized opportunities to improve the contact center operations and defined strategies to keep up with increasing interaction volumes. The recommended solution involved Customer Care via our Contact Center Outsourcing Solutions , which necessitated a transition of services away from their existing service provider. A transition of this nature can be complex, and so our experts developed a detailed roadmap for success.

To ensure our client regained efficiency in their contact center, we deployed STAR implementation methodology — an acronym that stands for Set up, Transform, Activate and Relay. This methodology spans several aspects of the engagement, including recruitment, training, workforce management, quality, operations and facilities and IT.

• Set up: Focuses on analyzing and planning for requirements. Key deliverables include calibrated recruitment and training plans, capacity plans, project plans, technology design and facility design.
• Transform: Focuses on building the core technology and processes. Key deliverables include readiness for training, operations, backend systems and facilities.
• Activate: Focuses on recruiting and training team members as well as the launch of the service. Key deliverables include a scaling team, customer-facing services and quality evaluations.
• Relay: Focuses on the transfer of activities to operational owners. Key deliverables include documentation and learnings.

Beyond the application of the STAR implementation methodology, we leveraged the diverse, earned knowledge of our subject matter experts across training, workforce management, facilities and a number of other functions. This led to standardization of processes and targets informed by best practices and industry benchmarks. Frequent calibration sessions were held in collaboration with our client to analyze performance and maintain alignment.

The implementation of our solution included hiring more than 400 team members across two distinct geographies — the Philippines and Guatemala. TELUS International team members support our client's customers across numerous channels, including email, chat and voice.

The results

Our client's transition to TELUS International was swift, with our team of experts developing and implementing a plan that took just two months to complete — 50% less time than the expected timelines for similar programs . But there's more to this success story than speed. The TELUS International solution also yielded the following results:

• 12% reduction in average handle time (AHT), helping to alleviate the pressure the contact center was experiencing
• 98% order accuracy throughout the transition period, which is critical to customer satisfaction among food delivery platforms
• 82% team member engagement, which is considered world-class
• Hired, trained and deployed over 400 team members across two distinct geographies
• Following the success of the initial solution, the client has since begun partnering with TELUS International for Fraud Prevention & Detection

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• 3 minute read

How technology allows retailers to better respond to consumers

• August 15, 2024

Driving operational excellence through real-time data

Effective data collection and analysis are the foundation of data-driven retail strategies. 

By leveraging data insights, retailers can better understand customer behaviors, preferences, and trends, enabling them to provide a more personalized and efficient shopping experience.

Digital clienteling tools equipped with robust data analytics capabilities are invaluable for identifying individual, store-level, and aggregate data trends. 

These tools help build accountability and inspire continuous improvement throughout the organization, this blog will explore how.

Personalizing the customer experience

By tracking and analyzing customer interactions and preferences, store teams can tailor their approaches to meet the unique needs of each customer. Retail technology, like digital clienteling, plays a crucial role in this process.

Digital clienteling tools provide sales associates with comprehensive customer profiles, including past purchases, online behaviors, and personal preferences. This information allows associates to offer personalized recommendations, anticipate customer needs, and create a more engaging shopping experience.

These tools can also facilitate communication through various channels, ensuring that customers feel intimately understood by the brand.

Making strategic business decisions

By understanding key performance indicators and operational metrics, retailers can make informed strategic decisions that streamline processes, optimize resource allocation, and improve overall efficiency.

Digital clienteling further aids in making strategic business decisions by providing deep insights into customer behaviors and preferences. By leveraging data from customer interactions, purchase history, and engagement patterns, retailers can tailor their strategies to meet evolving customer demands.

This personalized approach not only enhances the shopping experience but also allows retailers to adapt quickly to market trends and consumer preferences, ensuring they remain competitive and relevant in a dynamic retail landscape.

Utilizing predictive analytics for inventory management

Retailers can employ predictive analytics to anticipate customer demand and manage inventory more effectively.

By analyzing historical sales data, market trends, and seasonal variations, predictive analytics tools can forecast future demand for various products. This allows retailers to optimize their stock levels, reducing both overstock and stockouts, and ensuring that popular items are always available when customers want them.

Case study: How to use data-driven insights to refine store operations

Using a data-driven approach to their outreach templates through Tulip Clienteling, one global retailer was able to understand which messaging resonated best with their audience. 

As a result, the brand has experienced a surge in conversion rates, and is significantly ahead of the industry benchmarks in multiple outreach channels including 3x higher-than-benchmark conversion on WhatsApp outreach and 2x higher-than-benchmark conversion on WeChat. 

Hear more customer stories like this here .

Bringing it all together

Embracing advanced retail technologies such as digital clienteling not only enrich the customer experience through personalized interactions but also enable retailers to make informed strategic decisions, optimize store operations, and swiftly respond to changing market demands.

By leveraging data-driven insights, retailers can transform their operations, ensuring they meet and exceed customer expectations while driving growth and efficiency.

Want to know more about the digital clienteling technology behind the customer experience at world’s most iconic retailers like David Yurman, Versace, Jimmy Choo, Mulberry, Saks Fifth Avenue, Ferragamo, COACH, and Michael Kors?

Click here to learn about our #1 Clienteling solution and watch a short demo here .

Still have questions? Contact us — we’d love to hear from you!

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Cirrus Aircraft creates exceptional experiences for customers

What matters to Cirrus Aircraft is creating a personal aviation experience for its owner community that’s the pinnacle of safety, innovation, quality and service.

The decision to purchase an aircraft is complex: Where do you learn to fly? Which airplane is right for your needs and where do you demo it? How do you finance and insure it? Where do you store and service it? How do you resell it when you’re ready to upgrade? Despite the complexities, a connected customer experience for aircraft owners and a 360-degree ecosystem around the plane didn’t exist within the industry.

Eric Miquelon, Avanade North America president, met with Zean Nielsen, Cirrus Aircraft CEO, to talk about how Cirrus Aircraft is delivering a connected digital experience even years after owners take delivery of their aircraft.   Read the full interview and find out how customer experiences will power Cirrus Aircraft’s new era of growth.

The experience we want to enable is one of arriving on time, safely, comfortably and recharged for your next activity, and we can’t do that without technology.

Learn more about Avanade X  and how we help our clients imagine what’s possible, put technology to work for people and create a greater enduring impact in the world.

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Case Study: Lumiere’s Lustre, an Alluring Space For Budding Artists and Major Film Studios Alike

A major film studio location scout searching for an enlightening space. A lowkey social media manager looking to spice up their company’s visuals and videos. A burgeoning business seeking out an exceptional dining experience in a customized atmosphere.

These people might not seem to have much in common, but the pros at Lumiere know they share much more than meets the eye — and they’re ready to breathe life into all their event and venue needs.

Lumiere offers a bit of both, and then some, with full understanding of their clientele and their venues. With several spaces across London that cater to studio space, as well as dining parties, corporate lunches, awards events, and more, they stand as a glimmering example of what customers searching Tagvenue can find to suit their unique needs. 

Even with a prestigious standing and well known name in the arts community — with clients such as Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and Virgin Media to their name — Lumiere still relies on Tagvenue’s platform to reel in eclectic customers and corporate clients alike. 

People looking through their options on Tagvenue can find exactly what they need, where they need it, including L umiere . We caught up with Lumiere’s Head of Enquiries, Bookings, and Contracts, Ona Okonkow, to learn more about their approach as a venue, and their smooth experiences with customers on the other side of the Tagvenue platform. 

“Tagvenue has kept us stable throughout all these years,” Okonkow said over a video call in July. “We never had to renegotiate with you. We’ve had to meet with other companies when we were not happy with the service provided. But with Tagvenue, we’re always happy, and you’ve always been very straightforward. 

“It’s the easiest platform that we have.” 

Check out Lumiere on Tagvenue

Discover the various spaces available at Lumiere for your next event.

Customer-Centric Approach People Can Rely On

A huge emphasis for Tagvenue is having consistent communication and being engaged with incoming enquiries. Knowing the stress that comes with trying to plan an event, such as an important dinner or filming session, Lumiere follows the same ethos when someone reaches out via Tagvenue. 

“Particularly for the first time, we are told there is a lot of stress when doing an event. You have to worry about catering, A/V, organization,” Okonkwo said. “These things we take care of, so they can come in and have a very flawless, peaceful event.” 

“We are just really really very outgoing.Our presence makes it easy for people to come back.” 

A Tagvenue partner since 2016, Lumiere knows that sometimes someone making that enquiry for the first time doesn’t know where to start with all the questions they should ask, and the things they need to be aware of. 

While Tagvenue provides plenty of resources to help get you started on making a first (or 10th) enquiry, we also set the tone with every venue across our platform to make sure every single one understands the importance of the one-to-one relationship and helping guide people toward a successful booking, and even more successful event. 

“The opening part we are trying to understand if what you want to do is possible in our venue,” Okonkwo said. “We are gonna help and ask you the questions, such as what is the style, do you need catering, what type of catering, etc. The type of space you might need can change.” 

A clear understanding on both sides is at the heart of Lumiere and all our venues provide to bring ease of mind as well as a stress-free experience when planning any event. 

“Because we help and guide and give advice on  how to better have the event take place, the basics of what we need really is what time you’re coming in, how many people, and then we can take care of it from there ,” said Okonkow of taking things off customers’ plates. 

Making Any Customer Feel Like a Star

Sure, Lumiere’s venues have hosted people such as Judi Dench and royal documentaries, but their spaces remain open to the public, so just about anyone can come in and get the star treatment regardless of their needs, and level of fame. 

Founded by world-class Spanish photographer Carlos Lumiere in 2007 , the connection to people on the other side of the lens led to him creating welcoming spaces to suit an array of needs. 

“It’s pertinent to making their life easier and making our life easier as well ,so we can roll quite well together, so they don’t have surprises on the day of the event,” said Okonkow of their relationship-building approach with every customer. 

That includes inviting every enquiry into the space to see it first-hand and feel the vibe of the space, and the people they’ll be working with to create the perfect event.

“What we really can’t stress enough is to view the space before the event. All the pictures are very beautiful, but there is nothing worse than feeling, ‘Oh I saw this in the pictures and it wasn’t there (in the space).”

Extra Amenities and Services Elevate the Venue

When searching Tagvenue for that idyllic space, it helps to know what amenities and extras the space can offer. 

Lumiere makes it clear who they are and what they can do for you on their Tagvenue pages, a perfect example of making everything as easy as possible. 

It could be that you don’t have any extra needs and want to keep things simple. 

However, seeing what possibilities are out there can bring new things to the forefront of your imagination, and even the smallest detail added in can elevate an event to a new memorable level. 

Lumiere has production and logistics teams among their options to help someone create their own magic. Some of the bigger brands come in with their own teams, though, and remake the space entirely. 

“The service we offer is quite bespoken and quite tailored to what the customer needs,” Okonkwo said. “If it were a small production, we also do our own filming as well.”

Compromise is key to offering customers a range that can suit a first enquiry as well as one that evolves. 

“All our spaces are decorated. Some people choose this space because they don’t have to do as much decoration and branding,” Okonkow said. “Some take the space and work with it (to their vision). It’s easier to just brand with the colors they need and we’re not really strict with that .

“Our one rule is whatever you put up, as long as it comes down, we are not fussy about that.” 

Creating an Unforgettable Experience for Each Customer 

Tagvenue’s relationship with partners is how we can offer customers an exceptional experience in searching for and booking the venue they need. 

Lumiere remains one of our favorites after nearly a decade together because of just that. 

Recently, Ona and the Lumiere team helped a client that wanted to recreate the cinema experience for an event, with the catering team designing snakes that looked like popcorn holders and even an entry way that resembled the entrance of a movie theater. 

“Everything from the catering to the setup had to recreate a movie theater, and that was fun and interesting,” she said. 

Lumiere receives enquiries months in advance of requested event dates, as do plenty of Tagvenue venue spaces . That’s why we always encourage people to reach out as early as possible, to start the conversation and build the relationship. 

Diverse Venues Ready for You

We certainly encourage anyone reading this to hop over to Lumiere’s venue page and send them an enquiry for your upcoming event. And if you’re not in London, or have a different venue need, we’ve got you covered there too. 

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Utilizing Conversational AI to Elevate Customer Service in Call Centers

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Customer service must reinvent itself in today’s fast-moving environment. Conversational AI comes in handy to create unique solutions that make customer service efficient. The cloud call center software uses AI in a manner. It could recognize and respond to the needs of a customer efficiently. That technology makes operations easier while increasing the quality of service. Offering the right call center solutions, Call Center Studio is a leader in AI. We provide modern contact centers with the most updated AI solutions. Our tools make certain that your customer service stays effective and reactive. Bring customer service to the next level with the implementation of advanced software. Use Call Center Studio for cloud call center software with great results. Experience the future of customer interactions today.

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How Can AI Help Call Centers?

AI can benefit the call center in many ways. It increases efficiency and improves customer service. Routine inquiries are dealt with precisely and speedily by an AI conversation platform. This frees human agents to then deal with more pressing issues at hand. Conversational AI chatbots respond instantly to all frequently asked questions. They ensure that customers have real-time assistance, cutting down on waiting time.

It can also interpret customer responses. The conversational AI platform offers an understanding of customer behavior, choice, and preference. It also helps in enhancing the standard of service. This information further revises responses according to the needs of individuals. Call centers utilizing conversational AI chatbots are able to function more efficiently. Greater customer satisfaction is guaranteed.

How Can AI Improve Customer Service?

AI can make customer service very efficient and responsive. AI conversation platforms handle routine inquiries, while human agents deal with complex issues. The customers have a surety of getting information on time and accurately. 

Conversational AI chatbots respond immediately to frequently asked questions. They are always on, so customers are never without support. This reduces the wait time and enhances customer satisfaction. AI conversation platforms learn from interactions continuously and evolve their responses.

This conversational AI platform aids in looking through the shower of interactions for insights. A business identifies patterns in customer behavior and preferences. Data from them helps tailor services offered by a business to resolve customer needs. When conversational AI chatbots are put into effect, it can ensure higher service levels. It smoothes and makes the customer experience smooth at each touchpoint.

What Are the Benefits of Conversational AI in Customer Service?

Conversational AI has widely revolutionized customer service with many benefits. It is efficient and more effective. State-of-the-art AI conversation platforms provide support at any time. They immediately respond to queries by customers. That means it will be fast and satisfactory. It achieves better service delivery from businesses. Apart from these, other benefits can be summarized as follows:

• Customers do not need to hold on for assistance at any time.
• AI conversation platforms reply instantly to regularly asked queries. 
• The overall wait time falls, and satisfaction grows.
• AI resolves routine inquiries, allowing human agents only an opportunity to work on the complex ones. 
• The overall productivity in the contact center increases. 
• Automation of customer interaction lessens the need for extensive staff. 
• Conversational AI platforms analyze interactions to determine what customers prefer.
• They personalize responses based on individual needs.
• AI chatbots can process several questions asked at once.
• This ability enables firms to process large volumes of customer contacts.
• AI gives consistent responses, thus ensuring the homogeneity of the quality of service provided.
• This improves the overall customer experience.
• The AI platforms collect and analyze data from customers.
• The information derived aids in enhancing the strategy of service. 

What Is AI Used for in Customer Service?

AI in customer service increases efficiency and satisfies customers. In this respect, conversational AI can deal with regular inquiries and respond instantly. This shall reduce queue time, ensuring that the customer’s inquiry is attended to immediately. Moreover, AI has the capability of responding to a large volume of inquiries simultaneously. Such characteristics make customer service more scalable and reliable.

AI also interprets customer interaction to deduce valuable insights from the same. The deduced insights help businesses understand the pattern and eventuality of customers’ needs. It facilitates personalized service and brings more effective service. AI platforms are capable enough to proactively predict common problems and fix them. This is how proactive service improves overall customer satisfaction. The same data can be used by businesses to refine their strategies time and again.

Further, a chatbot AI never sleeps. To put it differently, it works 24/7. It gives customers the assurance of constant guidance at their beck and call. This constant availability makes customers trust the business more and become loyal. With the application of AI, companies can better streamline their operations. They can offer the same high-quality service all the time. AI-driven customer service is the way for any business to ensure effective customer engagement.

AI is undoubtedly changing customer service with efficient and effective solutions. Conversational AI platforms handle regular queries, and human agents work on more complex issues. Thus bringing about both efficiency and better customer satisfaction measures. AI collects data, analyzes it, and sends personalized service to clients. It runs 24/7 to ensure that customers will always be supported at their every demand. It makes itself available to customers at all times. The integration of AI in the customer service process is, therefore, important for staying competitive. It makes operations easier and more economical while maintaining high service quality. Surely, with AI technologies adopted in companies, the business world can gain a lot. The future of customer service at this point is definitely AI-driven and highly efficient.

Take your contact center to new heights with the advanced AI solutions of Call Center Studio. Our cloud call center software can help optimize your workforce. We enable companies to innovate experiences for their customers. Get to know how AI is going to derive the most out of customer service. Contact Call Center Studio today and change your customer interactions. Start working on your wiser, AI-powered future now!

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The three building blocks of successful customer-experience transformations

Leading a customer-experience (CX) transformation can generate a lot of anxiety. Many leaders hesitate to even start because they are overwhelmed by the many challenges of driving change across virtually every silo in the organization. But this hesitation creates real risks for the business. The recent shifts in consumer behaviors and expectations  brought about by COVID-19 are forcing companies to change how they connect with and serve customers. Those that do not adjust to the next normal  will quickly be left behind. History clearly shows the value of investing in customer experience  during a downturn. In the last economic recession, companies that prioritized customer experience realized three times the shareholder returns  compared to the companies that did not. The time for action is now.

The good news is that there is now a proven formula for executing customer-experience transformations. It comprises specific steps across three core building blocks: a clearly defined aspiration, an agile transformation approach, and a thoughtful deployment of new capabilities, particularly advanced analytics (exhibit). By combining all three building blocks, companies can create a competitive advantage in their industry. In ten years of helping more than 900 companies design and execute enterprise-wide customer-experience programs, we have seen this approach deliver powerful results: 15 to 20 percent increases in sales conversion rates, 20 to 50 percent declines in service costs, and 10 to 20 percent improvement in customer satisfaction.

Build aspiration and purpose

The first step in a successful customer-experience transformation is to align on a crisp definition of the type of experience you want to deliver. When companies set out to define their customer-experience aspiration, they often fall into one or both of two traps: either the aspiration is generic and does not align tightly to the company’s purpose, or it’s unclear how the aspiration will create value that can be measured and tracked. Falling into either of these two traps leads to CX-transformation programs that lack clarity and coherence.

A good CX aspiration delivers on company purpose and brand promise. In alignment with their company missions, Nike seeks to deliver inspirational experiences, Starbucks looks to provide experiences that nurture, and BMW seeks to offer the ultimate driving experience. Costco doesn't try to replicate the experience its customers have at high-end retailers but instead provides a no-frills in-store experience that reflects its low-cost brand promise.

Companies then translate aspirations into expected business value by defining the specific changes in customer behavior they expect to see. If a bank were looking to deepen customer relationships, for example, this focus could be reflected in a decision to measure success by the number of customers who choose the bank for all their core banking needs. This focus on customer behavior completely changes the conversation in the C-suite. Leaders start talking about customers, not about financials. They prioritize the experiences that will lead to the expected customer behavior even as customer needs evolve over time.

Many of the best companies use quantitative research and statistical analysis to ground their decisions in facts about what customers value so they can prioritize the experiences that matter most. The most advanced companies use advanced analytics to run simulations of the expected impact of their potential investments so they can build compelling business cases for them.

Once they have prioritized the experiences with the greatest potential impact on customer behavior, CX leaders identify the internal processes and technology capabilities they need to substantially reimagine them. They consolidate the prioritized experiences and the development of the required capabilities to create a road map that identifies critical activities quarter-by-quarter. These companies typically plan their investments in 24-month increments with frequent stage-gates to validate that the expected financial impact has been realized.

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Transform the business.

While executives often successfully develop comprehensive CX-transformation road maps, many fall into the trap of implementing business-as-usual programs to execute the needed change. The most common mistake is parceling out various elements of the program to different functions. That leads to communication challenges, ownership issues, and accountability problems that sink even the most straightforward transformation aspirations.

Customer-experience initiatives at the companies that most successfully undertake them look and feel completely different. These companies create agile, cross-functional teams that have true ownership of their projects, deep technology expertise, and a culture of design thinking and continuous improvement. Prior to the pandemic, these teams could be found problem-solving around white boards in an open floorplan with glass walls, background music, and a continuous hum of activity. One innovative bank adopted a “culture of red shoes” to illustrate its innovation speed and agility, and the CEO would lose his dress shoes in favor of red sneakers when he visited the design labs. In the current environment, these teams have seamlessly transitioned to collaboration platforms to drive continuous cross-functional innovation. For companies truly committed to a CX culture, these aren’t superficial ornamentations. They reflect a significant investment in recruiting and nurturing agile teams with deep expertise in experience design, developing cutting-edge omnichannel platforms and technology, and reimagining the experiences, products, and services that best deliver on the brand promise.

To define customer personas and understand customer needs, the cross-functional agile teams leverage design thinking and advanced analytics toolkits to carry out rapid-fire quantitative and ethnographic research. They conduct cocreation workshops to develop innovative concepts and prototypes that address pain points. They use advanced analytics to identify and prioritize meaningful performance metrics such as reduced wait time to quantify the actual financial impact of changes in customer behavior as reflected, perhaps, in increased contract renewals, and to track progress. Once they have developed new products and services, these agile teams make sure they are scaled across the business, integrated into the technology platform, and continuously tested and refined across segments and geographies.

These design-driven actions are not nice-to-have items. In our 2018 research on the business value of design , we found that top-performing user-centric companies outpace their peers in terms of revenue by nearly two to one. Critically, they also rapidly iterate as they design new experiences, ensuring they prototype and test them with consumers to increase their chances of success.

Another critical element of all successful CX transformation programs  is a central team that combines ideation tools and methods, continuously conducts both generative and evaluative customer research, and brings together cross-functional experts with specific expertise, such as scrum masters, omnichannel technology architects, designers, and researchers. This central team ensures that the culture of technology-enabled innovation becomes a distinctive competitive asset that is sustained over time and across all geographies.

Enable the transformation

Leaders who have successfully implemented new experiences for their customers sustain the changes by building new capabilities. There are four that we find are most critical for success.

Customer-centric mindsets

From the C-suite to the front lines, employees must feel confident that they have the necessary skills and tools to deliver the best possible experience for customers. Leading companies develop academies that combine digital courses, live workshops, and ongoing nudges to support the development of new capabilities. Each learning journey is tailored to a specific role within the organization. For example, front-line employees receive practical tips on how to put themselves in their customers’ shoes and demonstrate empathy when engaging with customers. CX managers and innovation teams build skills around redesigning customer experiences and mobilizing cross-functional teams. Executives receive tips on how to support, accelerate, and celebrate customer-centricity within the organization—for example, by integrating design thinking into the early stages of the strategic planning process.

Integrated technology stack

In order to deliver exceptional omnichannel customer experiences, companies need a technology stack that spans the business. It often takes the form of a digital platform built around microservices and APIs to quickly and flexibly offer a variety of services to customers, an omnichannel contact-center platform with call recognition, chat, video chat, and email management, and a single system that integrates the platforms with each other. For example, a health insurer that wanted to redesign its customer-onboarding journey pursued two parallel workstreams: one that reimagined and simplified the entire enrollment process and another that rebuilt the underlying technology. The two teams, working together, were able to modernize the omnichannel platform and technology, which enabled them to transform what had been a set of disparate, paper-based, channel-specific processes into a seamless, digitally enabled omnichannel experience. In just six months, this company tripled online applications, realized 90 percent straight-through processing, and reduced back-office work by 80 percent and front-office work by 70 percent.

Agile operating model and governance structure

Innovation teams are only effective if they have the autonomy to make decisions. This means establishing agile decision-making processes and assigning formal decision rights to leaders on the team. These new processes and decision rights often require some internal negotiations but yield extraordinary results. For example, a B2B financial services firm that committed to a new agile operating model raised raised their customer satisfaction score from less than 20 to more than 50 in two years by increasing on-time responses to customer requests by 90 percent, reducing the request backlog by 40 percent, and eliminating the need for 600 employee-hours each month.

Performance-management system built on predictive analytics and machine learning

Leading organizations are now using predictive analytics, machine learning, and big data to overcome the well-known limitations of customer feedback, which often provides an incomplete and inaccurate view of actual customer experiences. At minimum, companies need management systems with sophisticated feedback loops that teach employees which behaviors yield the best results and guide innovation teams on where to focus their efforts. The best tools allow companies to accurately predict the current satisfaction and future spend of each of its customers based on their experiences. One major travel company built a capability that scored the experience of every single customer based on data such as location, loyalty member history, and recent trip experiences. It then used machine learning to predict customer satisfaction for each customer based on their individual experience. This new capability allowed the company to dramatically improve its follow-up with customers immediately after poor service experiences, increasing satisfaction by 800 percent for the most dissatisfied customers and reducing churn intent by 59 percent.

Adapting customer experience in the time of coronavirus

Bringing it all together.

The greatest sustained impact in customer experience comes from bringing together the three building blocks. Here’s how one European energy provider did just that. Faced with increasing customer expectations, fierce competitive dynamics, evolving market and regulatory pressures, and internal complexity, its leadership team responded with a comprehensive customer-experience transformation. This included reshaping both the go-to-market approach and operating model to regain a sustainable leadership position in their market.

To define its aspirations and the value it wanted from the CX transformation, the team quickly formulated clear business objectives. By quantifying and prioritizing the individual CX “value pools” in their B2C business—acquisition, service, retention, and process digitization—it developed a transformation road map for double-digit improvement in earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) over the course of three years.

For the second building block, transforming the business, the leadership team created a cross-functional team composed of CX “ambassadors” from ten countries and a core team of designers and CX experts. They convened for two days a week in a central location and operated as a “CX factory” to consolidate customer insights, harmonize customer-journey definitions, and translate value pools and customer pain points into tangible blueprints and prototypes for optimal customer journeys. Their analysis showed that most high-impact CX levers were applicable across all countries despite differences in individual markets. The CX factory team created a fully functional microsite for home movers, took it live in the first pilot country in four weeks, and then scaled it to other countries based on its demonstrated financial impact: increased customer retention and reduced servicing costs as fewer customers called in for support during their move.

These changes were only made possible by transforming the underlying capabilities and establishing critical enablers—the third building block. The organization embraced agile principles not only in the CX factory but also across each geographical business unit—rapidly iterating and generating ideas, prototyping, and adapting minimum viable products (MVPs) based on customer feedback. To scale these capabilities, the organization conducted virtual training sessions around key skills, such as agile, design thinking, and problem solving. It codified best practices in a virtual library for use by any team member in any country. Finally, it showcased the dramatic impact of this new way of working through videos, communications, and tools shared throughout the organization.

The redesigned journeys reduced the energy provider’s personal-contact costs by more than 20 percent and customer churn by almost 15 percent, and significantly increased both customer and employee satisfaction. In fact, one-third of the full impact potential from the three-year program was realized within the first 12 months.

How to get started

Companies that aspire to become more customer-centric can use one of the following quick-start methods.

Set a bold aspiration that reflects the brand promise

A series of three to four executive workshops is often all it takes to align around a customer-centric aspiration and the associated financial performance metrics. Many companies are able to look to internal and external benchmarks in order to set a target and establish a timeline for achieving it.

Create momentum with a ‘lighthouse’ innovation team

Many companies choose to give customers and employees a sense of what success looks like by launching one or more “lighthouse” projects that show concrete results with minimal investment. Redesigned journeys can often be prioritized, designed, and prototyped in six to twelve weeks and create excitement and support for subsequent investments. The first lighthouse can then quickly be scaled up across multiple experiences until it becomes the standard model.

Build an integrated customer insights and action engine

The most forward-looking companies have created integrated data lakes and used advanced analytics and machine learning to improve the experiences of every customer. An analytics engine that enables leadership to identify the customer interventions and investment strategies with the greatest impact can be deployed in three to four months.

Customer experience is a competitive advantage in the new normal. Only by committing to the three building blocks of a CX transformation can companies expect to emerge from the crisis with a sustainable advantage over their competitors.

Victoria Bough is a partner in McKinsey’s Denver office, Ralph Breuer is a partner in the Cologne office, Nicolas Maechler is a senior partner in the Paris office, and Kelly Ungerman is a senior partner in the Dallas office.

The authors wish to thank Melissa Dalrymple, Oliver Ehrlich, Will Enger, Harald Fanderl, Alex Lapides, Pablo Leon, Divya Mittagunta, Jesus Moreno, Friederike Schultz, Rens van den Broek, Maxence Vancauwenberghe, and Hai Ye for their contributions to this article.

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SHKB: Advisory tool improves customer experience

Better customer experience due to digitally assisted advice

Content and products can be configured by SHKB itself at any time

Customer advisors receive targeted support with preparing and holding customer consultations

SHKB wants to offer its customers a high-quality, professional and comprehensive consultation experience in order to strengthen its position as an advisory bank.

Inconsistent consultation experience

The quality of advice and the customer experience are largely dependent on the advisor. In addition, preparing and following up on meetings is very time consuming. SHKB wants to standardise and simplify the customer consultation process with digitally assisted advice. This will enable it to address its customers in a more impressive and personalised way, and ensure that customer advisors have more support during consultations.

Iterative product development

Based on SHKB’s vision, a team of UX experts, interaction designers, business analysts, architects, and developers collaborate with the SHKB product owner in an agile process to design and create a minimum viable product for the new solution in just a short space of time. The project team works closely with the customer advisors and other internal departments, and continuously incorporates their feedback into the design.

Stronger market position as an advisory bank

The consultation solution gives customer advisors a new, modern tool for preparing and holding consultations in a more efficient and purposeful way. The customer experience is also improved by addressing the customer’s individual needs and offering a consistently high standard of advice. This improves customer loyalty and also makes it easier to identify and exploit cross-selling opportunities. This holistic approach to providing advice strengthens and enhances SHKB’s market position as an outstanding advisory bank.

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