Customer service is dead.

Well, in a sense.

Today is the last day that my business will have a customer service person. Now? Customer Experience Manager (CXM).

In 2016 customer service is almost redundant. If you think about customer service, it’s 100% reactive – you’re reacting to emails, phone calls, messages and any contact that a customer makes with you. Instead, I’m shifting the focus from reactive to proactive. Our CXM will be responsible for providing the ‘wow’ factor, which rarely actually happens with a reactive mindset. The ‘wow’ factor happens when you proactively implement strategies that delight customers and predict what they want in advance.

But, why?

The answer is simple. If we can give customers the best possible experience with our business, they’ll come back and buy again, and better yet, they’ll recommend us to their friends. One of the greatest opportunities in our business is to tap into our existing customer database to turn them into regular recurring customers. We want our customers to be so loyal to our brand that it wouldn’t even cross their mind to check out our competitors, because why would they when we offer everything they need & more?

From a sales perspective, it’s much easier and cheaper to sell to your existing customers which we could be doing a lot more of. They already know our brand, they know what we’re about and they’ve purchased from us before.

Customer Experience looks at the whole business and every interaction we have with customers. It looks at everything from our product packaging, the emails we send to customers, the customer journey, preventing issues before they happen, implementing loyalty/referral programs and a bunch of other things.

How will we measure the customer experience?

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
• Avg # of Orders per Customer
• Avg Order Value (AOV)
• Return Rate

See you later, customer service.
Welcome, customer experience.