A customer experience program is more than just a strategy. It’s a commitment to understanding and improving every interaction your customers have with your brand. Leaving CX to chance is not a strategy. The most successful organizations build structured programs that measure satisfaction, identify pain points, and drive meaningful improvements across departments.
In this blog, we’ll break down what a customer experience program is, why it’s vital for long-term growth, and how organizations can use research to strengthen customer relationships. We’ll also touch on the topic of most effective methods for collecting and analyzing customer feedback.
We’ll also dive into the methodologies that help collect customer feedback, from surveys and interviews to user testing.
Customer experience (CX) insights in market research refer to the valuable information and data gathered through various research methods to understand how customers perceive and interact with a brand, product, or service.
A lot of customer experience insights data typically looks at the buyer’s journey, what a customer thinks about when they buy something from you, and more. It can even include other things that they attribute to your brand.
In the past, our market research company has used various methods (focus groups, customer surveys, interviews, and more) to collect customer experience insights. It’s the most effective way to gather insights to see how each part of your business affects the customer in their buying journey and make improvements.
If you’re hoping to increase customer lifetime value, average order value, or other things like customer loyalty then customer experience is something you should take a close look at.
Your customers’ experience with your brand is not something to ignore or belittle if you care about giving them a better experience and growing your business.
Without a structured customer experience program, even great teams can fall into the trap of being reactive rather than proactive. Missed handoffs between departments, inconsistent customer interactions, and fragmented communication all lead tofrustrated customers and rising churn rates.
A strong CX program changes this. It aligns your entire organization around delivering a consistent, customer-focused experience at every touchpoint. This creates a real competitive advantage that directly impacts your bottom line.
It can also help executives and managers make important business decisions that lead to long-term brand growth.
Here’s how a customer experience program drives growth:
Today, most companies compete primarily on customer experience rather than just price or features. In fact, research shows that 89% of companies now compete mainly on CX.
Brands that deliver personalized, seamless interactions don’t just satisfy customers. Those brands capture and retain market share. When customers have a great experience with your brand, they’re less likely to switch to competitors, even when offered lower prices or flashy new features.Companies that deliver meaningfully different experiences are 2.5 times more likely to significantly grow their market share. That’s the power of focusing on customer experience as a strategic priority.
A CX program uses customer insights to identify and fix problems before they drive customers away. By gathering real-time feedback through surveys, reviews, and other touchpoints, you can spot friction points early and address them proactively.
This approach builds trust and loyalty. When customers see that you’re listening and making improvements based on their feedback, they feel valued. Those positive experiences turn satisfied customers into loyal advocates who stick around longer and recommend your brand to others.
Think about brands like Amazon. Their relentless focus on convenience isn’t just about being fast. It’s about creating an experience so smooth that customers keep coming back.
CX programs don’t just benefit customers. Great CX data can also help streamline your internal operations and teams. When you map the customer journey and identify pain points, you often uncover inefficiencies in your own processes.
Maybe customers are frustrated because your support team doesn’t have access to purchase history. Or perhaps the handoff between sales and onboarding is clunky. A CX program reveals these issues and helps you fix them.
The result? Faster resolutions, smoother customer journeys, and lower operational costs. When your systems and processes are aligned, both customers and employees benefit.
A customer experience program is a structured initiative designed to manage, measure, and improve how your organization interacts with its customers. A great program moves beyond one-off feedback efforts and establishes an ongoing system for gathering customer insights. The goal is to turn insights into action and create improvement across every touchpoint.
A strong CX program aligns your people, processes, and technology so that each customer interaction (all the way from first awareness to post-purchase support) reflects your value proposition. It is not limited to customer service, but spans marketing, sales, operations, product, and support. The goal is consistency, ease of interaction, and building trust over time.
When effectively executed, a customer experience program becomes a strategic asset. It helps you identify friction points in the customer journey, foster loyalty, reduce churn, and drive referrals. By adopting a proactive mindset for CX, your brand can create a cycle of improvement that supports long-term growth and strengthens competitive advantage.
Delivering the best products possible is a challenge and is not an easy feat to complete. Product testing paired with customer experience insights can give some early feedback on whether a product will perform well for a brand or not.
In our experience with product testing, having input from existing customers is a crucial thing that some companies forget.
Many companies and brands struggle with churn without understanding the reason behind it.
Using the insights from customer experiences can help bring issues or concerns into the open to show what could be responsible for an unexplained churn rate.
When doing something like a customer experience insight survey, it’s possible to ask your customers what they think of your brand compared to others, maybe even some of your competitors.
It gives the opportunity to see what customers think of your brand matched against others and for what reasons.
It’s useful to see this info unfiltered to try and rectify any shortcomings or differences. It can also help you create a product or service that is competitive in the current market.
Recommended Reading: Conducting a Competitor Analysis [Ultimate Guide]
Collecting customer experience insights involves gathering information from various sources to understand how customers perceive and interact with your brand, product, or service.
Here are several effective methods to collect CX insights:
Perhaps the best way to collect insights from customers is to go right to the source with customer satisfaction surveys. They are specifically designed to collect measurable, quantitative data that is excellent for gathering feedback, identifying trends, and resolving pain points.
Additionally, there are several customer satisfaction metrics such as customer satisfaction (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), and customer effort score (CES) that you can track over time to truly know if your strategies to improve CX are working.
Focus groups gather a small, diverse group of customers to discuss specific topics or experiences related to your brand with a skilled moderator. They allow for rich, qualitative insights and group dynamics observation.
An alternative to focus groups is in-depth interviews. Similarly, you can ask open-ended questions about customer experiences, pain points, and suggestions for improvement. Additionally, they provide an opportunity to delve deeply into individual experiences, perceptions, and feedback.
User testing is a powerful method for gathering CX insights as it involves observing real users interact with your product, website, or service in a controlled environment.
By providing specific tasks or scenarios, user testing allows you to directly witness how individuals navigate, perceive, and interact with your offering. Through their actions and verbal feedback, you gain valuable firsthand insights into usability, user-friendliness, pain points, and areas of improvement.
Additionally, participants’ thought processes are often vocalized, offering a window into their decision-making and emotional responses.
This method provides concrete, actionable data that enables you to refine and optimize the user experience based on actual user behavior, ultimately leading to a more customer-centric and effective product or service.
As we’ve discussed, using market research to gather customer experience insights is a crucial component of business strategy. But, just exactly how can you use these data-driven insights to drive real organizational change? Here are a few examples.
For your products and services, it’s critical to have them be competitive in the market. That can include both pricing and the product or service itself when compared to the customer experience.
Having products that meet your target market’s needs at a price they are willing to pay is most businesses’ dreams and goals (or so they say when they talk to us). It’s also important to think about how the market and your customers’ wants and needs might change.
That’s where using customer insights from product testing and pricing research can help.
With proper data from the inside of your customer’s minds, you should be able to get a good idea of your brand’s value in their eyes.
Things like brand loyalty, brand engagement, and brand awareness are all things that may be able to be pinpointed with the right customer experience insights research.
For instance, bigger brands and companies like to do brand promotion and customer engagement activities together around the holiday season.
These things typically come from customer experience insights that show how well consumers react to them when compared to other times or even other companies.
It’s best when your customers can help your business grow by showing and helping you give them what they want.
With certain customer experience insights, you can increase average order value, increase prices, and even increase conversions by finding out how to tailor your product and marketing to them.
You can use the data from a customer experience insights project to find out if customers cross-purchase, re-purchase, and more.
It’s also possible to find out if any are likely to or continue to do so. If not, it’s always good to find out why not in order to increase the value of your product or service.
Ready to take the next step toward improving your customer experience? We help organizations design, launch, and measure customer experience programs that turn insights into action. From survey design and data collection to analysis and implementation, our team provides end-to-end research support tailored to your goals.
Contact Drive Research by filling out the form below or emailing [email protected].
