Meet Magento UK '22 - JH Panel: Investing in Customer Experience

The date: June 21st, the time: 9.00 am, the place: The Mermaid, London
The event? Meet Magento UK 2022!

Hello there, and welcome back to another of our Meet Magento UK 2022 event blogs. Today we're looking at the sixth session on the business track which sees a mystery speaker (TBA) join Joseph Russell on a JH pannel talking about the customer experience. But before we jump into that, it's time for some house rules.

MMUK22 is an in-person, live event. It's extremely exciting and after a long 2 years, some welcome news. However, as with all live events things are subject to change. All of the information in this blog is based on the current information at the time, if anything changes then we'll do our best to keep you up to date but if you are attending the conference on the 21st of June, it's always best to check the official MMUK 2022 website for the most up to date info. With that down and out of the way, let's get to the fun stuff.

OK, so at this moment in time, no information on this session has been released beyond the tile but that just means that we can have some fun with predictions. I think the title is pretty self-explanatory right? This panel will be about the Customer Experience or CX, as it's commonly shortened too, and why investing in it will help your business grow. But for those of you who may be new to the world of store ownership or eCommerce let's go over some of the basics.

CX is the customer's buying journey from start to finish and looks at the experience that the customer has along the way. Good CX will result in happy customers, bad CX will result in unhappy customers. A lot of businesses either shy away from CX programs or don't see the value in it and so don't invest, as if the Customer's Experience is a system or a plugin, it's not! You cannot avoid CX, even if you only ever have 1 customer, because customers will always have an experience of you, your site and/or your business. Ultimately, you either provide a good experience or a bad one. The goal is to provide the best.

As we said above, CX is about the whole of the customer's journey from start to finish. From the moment they first meet your brand, be it through Google Ads, Instagram, browsing, word of mouth or wherever. This is not about putting George on the phone and getting him to respond to customer e-mails because he's great at communication, now that's not a bad thing and it does help your CX but it's only one small part of the wider CX machine. Great CX looks at every part of the customer journey and seeks to identify and eliminate all pain points the customer may encounter. It looks at the angry emails and considers that there may be a pattern, maybe it's a technical issue, a design issue, a description issue, a transparency issue or maybe it's just an issue with the customer that you can't fix, but then that's where George and his amazing customer service brain comes in.

Now it's important to note here that you are never going to make every customer happy, the goal here is to make the journey as painless and simple as possible while holding to your vision and company values. The saying goes that the customer is always right, now we know that's not true but that doesn't mean you have to tell them they're wrong either, some customers just aren't for you and you aren't for every customer so be careful not to change too much in pursuit of that one grumpy customer and risk losing your loyal following.

There are many benefits to having great CX, and like we've said before CX isn't an app you download or a system you put in place, whether you like it or not you have CX, the question is, is it good or bad? Here are just a few of the ways great CX can help your business.

Great CX will always encourage brand loyalty, the better the experience the more customers will want to return to you and the harder it will be for your competitors to take them away from you, in fact, according to Gartner, over 60% of consumers believe that customer experience is more important than price! Why is that important? Well because the big companies, the Amazon's and Tesco's of the world can be blown out of the water by amazing CX! You have something to offer your customers that the bigger companies don't, so use it.

Influencer marketing is typically thought of as getting the big YouTuber or TikTok star with millions of followers to promote your brand but in reality, we've been using influencer marketing since day 1 of commerce! Mrs Jones from down the road, Mr Tucker in the club, Suzzie the hairdresser, Tom from the caf, all of these people who talk and spread the word of their experience with your brand or product, these people who influence others to either try you out or to run a mile.

Great CX will make for happy, loyal customers and happy, loyal customers will make for great, free, marketing!

While your happy, loyal customers are raving about you to all of their friends and family they are doing two things.

Firstly they are still buying from you. Their loyalty is literally paying off and odds are they are buying from you more often as you have now become their go too store.

The other advantage is that while they are still buying from you, they are also bringing in new customers for you, who in turn, because of your amazing Customer Experience journey, also become loyal customers, which increases sales and lowers the cost of customer acquisition.

Believe it or not, great CX also goes a long way to helping your Employee Experience, or EX. The more you eliminate those pain points the less angry customers are going to be calling poor George. The less angry calls he gets the happier he becomes, the happier he is the more productive he is, the more productive he is the better he gets at his job and the better he is at his job the happier the customers are... do you see where I'm going with this?

And again, it's not just about customer service, the happier your customers are, the more they buy, the bigger difference you make in the world, the happier you are and you know what they say, a happy boss makes a happy place. Yes, there will be bad days, things will go wrong and troubles will come but we're talking here about the bigger picture, the 9 times out of 10, the normal attitude and vibe of your office and staff.

Great CX helps create great EX which in turn produces things like loyalty within your brand, meaning less turnover of staff, more skilled workers etc. Your staff with also create free PR and influencer marketing for you, they'll be more productive which in the long run will make you more money and more money means better pay, equipment, team building or whatever which in turn feeds into great Employee Experience and Customer Experience.

CX, and by extension EX, is happening whether you like it or not. In this session, Joseph and the mystery guest will very likely cover the things in this blog and more, including tools and systems you can use to help you, and I suspect it may be based around a case study or at least have some real-world examples.

This session is for everyone, regardless of your industry or the size of your customer pool, CX is happening and if you want to get good at it you need to learn about it.

 - Strategy Director at JH
 - 2nd MMUK appearance
 - 15+ years experience

LinkedIn = linkedin.com/in/joseph-russell 

Twitter = twitter.com/whatjoesays / @whatjoesays

MMUK19 session = Panel: Convert More Mobile Visitors to Buyers

Unfortunately, we aren't able to make it to MMUK this year, however, if we were, this session would be one of my most anticipated sessions. Understanding that CX is more than an idea or a program to follow is essential but that doesn't mean that you can't learn ways of making the customer's journey that little bit or a whole lot better than it is now.

Thank you as always for joining us today, come back tomorrow, same time, same place, as we look at the final session of the business track "The Value of Older Consumers in Ecommerce" with Janis Thomas. Until then, stay safe and have a great day!

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