The Xperience Academy Defined
We’ve all heard the idea of ‘good customer service’ and have no doubt experienced good and bad customer service at some point.
You may have even heard about the “Customer Experience” and “User Experience”. They sound pretty similar, right?
Well, here at The Xperience Academy, we look at it like this:
Every interaction you have with anyone, your users, your customers, your clients, your guests, your potential customers, your employees, is an EXPERIENCE. And it all counts.
When we are building a business, it's not just an important part of how we do business, it’s THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL part of doing business.
As business owners, we need to build in great customer experiences and as customers ourselves, we want those experiences to be extraordinary.
So, let's take a look at defining these terms in some way…
Customer Experience (CX) encompasses all the interactions a person has with your brand. It might be measured in: overall experience, likelihood to continue use, and likelihood to recommend to others.
User Experience (UX) deals with people interacting with you digitally as a user of a system (like your website, Social Media posts, when they book something online, or purchase online) and the experience they receive from that interaction. UX is measured with metrics like: success rate, error rate, abandonment rate, time to complete task, and number of clicks to completion.
In essence, User Experience is part of a broader Customer Experience, but Customer Experience contains some aspects outside of the User Experience.
Good CX gives a user/customer the ability to:
- Have a pleasant, professional, helpful interaction with organization/company representatives
- Feel generally positive about the overall experience with that organization/company and everything associated with it
Good digital UX gives a user/customer the ability to:
- Find information on a website quickly and easily
- Complete a desired task with ease
- Search Web pages with ease
So, if customer experience is about how we interact with a company’s brand; products, systems, processes, and people, does it then follow that the employee experience (EX) is another experience we need to look at?
Employees as customers
A recent research report states that…
“Companies with “EX Factor” treat employees like customers, infusing a sense of purpose into the experience. Seventy-six percent of executives agree that organizations need to dramatically re-engineer the experiences that bring people and technology together in a more human-centric manner. Co-creating experiences with employees based on their increasingly liquid expectations completes the EX play and creates a greater sense of brand loyalty within the workforce. Eighty-one percent of HR leaders have already rolled out or are piloting various technologies to improve the employee experience. Those that successfully activate a purpose-led EX create a community of valuable brand stakeholders all working together to shape the next era of engagement and competitiveness.”
How we attract and engage with a new team member through recruitment, onboarding, how the company treats its employees, how they feel part of the team and company.
- “As companies adapt to massive disruption, they must move quickly to redefine workforce strategies and reimagine the employee experience (EX).
- The pandemic flooded the market with talent, but there’s a shortage of desired skills, forcing companies to reassess employee value propositions.
- Organizations that focus on building their “EX Factor” will attract and retain top talent, reduce cost to serve and enhance operational agility.”
You may think this is only applicable to large corporate companies, but it’s a technique which can be used to attract the right people into a small business as well. In fact, I would say it's even more important for small businesses to define their business to attract the right team players as much as the right customers, because it's your team that makes up your company.
As customers and consumers ourselves, we are looking for the extraordinary experience created by companies, where the company earns our hard earned dollars. Those companies who create extraordinary experiences, will win over their competition, they will be able to demand a higher price as people are willing to pay more for an extraordinary memorable experience - as we move into the Experience Economy! (as described in the book of the same name)
At The Xperience Academy, you’ll learn how to put this altogether in your business. You’ll learn how to attract the right clients, build strong communities online and offline, how to attract the right team players into your business and how to create your own ExtraOrdinay Experiences for your business, teams and whilst having access to ExtraOrdinary Experiences you can enjoy yourself.
The Progression of Economic Value
The term "Experience Economy" was first used in a 1998 article by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore describing the experience economy as the next economy following the agrarian economy, the industrial economy, and the most recent service economy.