Businesses are increasingly recognizing the power of customer experience when it comes to growing loyalty, lowering operational costs and securing long-term growth. But knowing how exactly do you improve customer experience is important. Companies are quickly realizing customer experience is a driving factor in both achieving new business and retaining customers long term.
With consumers willing to abandon due to poor experiences, the pressure is on companies to learn what their customers are looking for and deliver those experiences at scale.
What is customer experience?
To improve CX, leaders must first understand exactly what is customer experience. At a high level, customer experience is any impression a consumer has about a company after an interaction. This can encompass product offerings, company communications, customer service, and much more. That’s because customer experience is the overall feeling customers have from these interactions, and that impression impacts their desire to continue to do business or not with a company moving forward.
How to improve customer experience
To help develop ways to improve customer experience one has to have strategies that can guide business decisions and operations in a positive way.
Not only can a positive experience help brands engage with existing customers, but it can also help businesses stand out from competitors. By fostering a ways to improve customer experience, companies can improve sales through retention and increase customer lifetime value.
As the quest for customers continues to feature more competition, brands are looking for new ways to create connections and meet ever-rising expectations. Here are listed ways or ideas to improve the customer experience for your brand in today’s market.
Importance of customer feedback
While it may seem obvious, many overlook the significance of customer feedback. When looking for new ways to improve customer experience, look no further than the customers themselves. Their feedback can provide ample insight as long as companies check in with them regularly and in ways that support measurement and accountability.
With today’s technology stacks, leaders have many ways to improve customer experience. Some of the most common include feedback, surveys, which ask specific questions about experiences, services, and products to determine what customers really think about a brand and their engagement with it. Other options for feedback is through chat and social media.
Understanding customer
Learn by listening to customers and analyzing it from a business perspective. Leaders must take the feedback they collect and leverage analytical tools to better understand customers behavior and how it can be used to further refine business operations and goals.
Map your customer’s journey
At a high level, a customer journey is the summation of interactions, whether through direct contact or indirect review. For leaders to ensure satisfactory customer experience, they have to understand the steps an individual takes from prospect to actual customer.
Develop strong team
Quality trumps quantity when it comes to assembling a strong CX team, which can encompass everything from marketing to support. Businesses can always grow their teams to scale to demand. But having a solid foundation of a team that is well-trained on the essentials of a business including both products and culture — can go a long way to ensuring customer satisfaction.
Make sure to provide all team members with training not just on the fundamentals of how products and services work but also how the brand as a whole expects customers to be treated. Whether they call in with a question or a complaint, consider the customer’s perspective and guide staff to be problem-solvers rather than just trying to push through a set quantity of calls, emails, or chat discussions each day.
Listen to your team
Leaders can also learn a lot from the people who are on the frontlines of customer interactions. Be sure to collect feedback not just from customers but also from customer support teams. These are the groups of people who are dealing with customers firsthand and can help leaders identify areas for improvement or patterns in consumer behavior worth addressing to improve the customer experience.
Importance to customer service
Understanding a customer base and building a strong team are foundational to having excellent customer service, which often stands at the crossroads of positive or negative customer experience. Retaining would be problem of one has poor customer service encounter, even if they were previously loyal to that company.
Creating a customer-centric culture while placing the right employees in the right place at the right time can go a long way toward helping deliver premier service.
Connect with customers
Companies can also be proactive with their outbound messaging and create connections with customers that enhance engagement and loyalty while improving customer experience.
Keep all messaging, reactive or otherwise, clear and concise so customers can find what they need and continue on their way. The right messaging can also create an emotional connection with the customer, helping to underscore loyalty and empathy that places a brand in a positive light.
Omnichannel approach
The customer journey may not be as linear as marketers or business operators prefer. Instead, consider the different channels a customer uses to interact with a brand. From websites, social platforms, emails, hotlines, and even brick-and-mortar locations, customers are omnichannel, which means customer experience needs to consider this approach as well.
Usage of artificial intelligence
It might seem like a buzzword, but AI is here to stay. More than three-quarters of companies are engaged with AI already. AI enables the use of chatbots that support customer service, providing faster and around-the-clock support while also automating responses with more personalized content.
Of course, AI should not completely replace human intervention in customer service. But it can empower existing employees to perform more efficiently and effectively. Tools can provide triggered content, automation, and optimization while preparing customer service agents to precisely address customer concerns. There are also software applications that can test which content performs best to allow leaders to curate the customer journey based on what clicks with a target audience.
Tracking ROI
Most businesses have no shortage of analytics and reporting tools to determine business goals and define success. Monitoring customer experience drivers can be one of the most important metrics for a company that is struggling to retain customers or deliver positive customer experiences. Other customer experience metrics leaders can explore include social media reach, shares, and impressions. This can indicate how engaged a customer base is with a given product or service offering. Time spent on a website or critical webpages can also be telling regarding what is resonating with buyers.
Improve your customer experience
Delivering a positive customer experience can have major impacts on business growth, success, and the bottom line. Great CX helps retain customers who have already made a purchase from a brand, making them feel valued in every interaction. It also helps increase profits by maximizing the customer lifetime value and prompting recommendations that come from brand advocates. Increased engagement often yields increased conversions, making the customer experience a key priority for all business leaders.
