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How To Improve Customer Experience
If you're a people-first business or brand that advocates “the customer is always right” old-age slogan, you're at the right place. So, carry on reading!
Treat this as an article I crafted just for you, because I want you to have the greatest reading experience possible! The blog post aims to serve your need to satisfy your own customer base. (INCEPTION!)
Without further ado, let's get our heads around customer experience!
What is customer experience?
CX — or customer experience — describes the holistic sentiment and perception the customer gets with every interaction they have with your business. This approach relates to a pretty linear set of steps of your inbound marketing endeavours — starting with the first impression the customer gets from you and ending with their purchase and feedback.
Customer Service VS Customer Experience
There's a common misconception between customer experience and customer service. Customer service belongs to a wider ecosystem (that of customer experience), and involves particular touchpoints within the overall experience (it forms a sort of a “Matryoshka doll” effect) where a customer seeks assistance — for instance, when they contact a service provider to request a refund.
On the other hand, customer experience encompasses every single interaction a customer has with your business, from the moment they clicked on your paid Google ad, to when they phoned one of your company's reps to enquire about a specific item size availability.
Benefits of good customer experience
Delivering good customer experience should be at the heart of any brand's activity. The better experience a customer receives, the more positive reviews and repeat custom you'll garner, while minimising the friction of complaints.
More precisely, the three benefits of superior CX include:
Customer loyalty and satisfaction
Increased word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations
More sales and growing ROI
What is poor customer experience?
Before I touch on the ways you can refine customer experience, let's go through the factors that define poor customer experience.
Hotjar surveyed 2000 CX experts and, not surprisingly, there's consensus amongst the respondents that bad customer experience is caused by:
Long waiting
Employees not anticipating or understanding customer struggles
Bad customer service with rude employees
Unanswered queries
Overly automated communication rather than human touch
Non-personalised treatment
In fact, a recent Salesforce report reveals that 76% of an overall 6,700 participants want to cater to their needs. While a CX journey roadmap can be the catalyst for a loyal and paying customer, a negative experience can impede your lead and sales generation efforts.
For online and/or ecommerce cases, typical points of conflict are:
Complex or lengthy forms
Invisible CTAs
Too many steps until payment
Non-responsive website to other devices while browsing
Here are a few more examples in visual format:
How to improve customer experience
Draw a customer journey map
As you accelerate towards your business goals, consider hitting the brake for a while to let your customers join the ride. A customer journey map is a good starting point.
Don't give me the “huh” look — I'll explain!
A customer journey map plan is a snapshot of all the steps someone takes when engaging with your products or services. This covers all the omnichannel exchanges that rest beyond the “add to cart” and “proceed to checkout” practices, including online advertising, content marketing, social media communications, and customer service.
When setting up your map, ensure you keep your mind and ears open to what your internal team has to propose. Insights into the customer experience vibrate across every corner of your business, so it's imperative you take into account opinions from all of your stakeholders.
Equally significant are the pre- and post-sale aspects of the customer journey. If you want to nurture a lasting customer-brand relationship, ensure you deliver the products/services at the designated time, send thank-you emails, or offer redeemable loyalty points that make them feel valued. (If you ask me, MailChimp is my go-to platform when it comes to email marketing).
By mapping out these interactions into a unified whole, you help your employees visualise the overall customer experience. It will also allow them to grasp what customers expect from them, as they can figure out how their input can positively impact your potential buyers.
No matter what, don't forget to ask for feedback whenever someone buys from you. Utilise both the positives and negatives to fully optimise the customer experience.
Check in with your team
Most of a prospective shopper's journey depends on whom they communicate with throughout the lifecycle of their experience. If your team members think they are lacking the tools or training necessary to execute their tasks, or they feel undervalued, it can impact their performance.
To hype up your colleagues when results aren't up to par, you could:
Have a 1:1 with everyone and analyse the feedback to see whether there are common or repetitive patterns in the challenges they face.
Review current systematic operations (from customer service centre etiquette and other support systems to CRM software) and spot what's foul.
Observe and rectify processes when needed to promote a more delightful CX.
Note that customer experience may be also stifled due to employees failing to live up to working culture expectations. It's worth assessing whether the entire workforce understands the values and demeanour required when dealing with customers.
Conduct inter-departmental audits
In order to reach the core of the problem as to why your customers are getting snagged, you first need to do some peripheral tracking of CX. As I've mentioned earlier, your customers are likely to “mingle” with most of your company's departments. So to get an overview of how it works, you should run audits across your whole business.
Your CX won't shift overnight... It's a gradual process, but there are three segments you can catch a hold of first:
Customer service / care strategy
Marketing
Sales
1. Customer service / care strategy
Let's face it, being the first line of contact as a customer service advisor sucks at times. The amount of stress and customer frustration these heroes have to go through when jumping on a raving call, or typing a comforting email response, is beyond expression. But minus the “I want to speak to your manager” drama of Karen proportions, you can gain key takeaways from your company's support centres, so pay heed to the collected data.
Now, it's time for action! Work closely with the support team, gather the constructive criticism and incorporate it to your website's FAQ. In this way, you'll have resolved pain points before a customer even reaches out to address them. You might also consider deploying tools like Optimizely to track your messaging on a multi-channel basis via both human beings and chatbots to maximise engagement.
2. Marketing
The marketing department is a little goldmine if we suppose that customer acquisition is your main focus. If you want to get a taste of user expectations, brand awareness and proactive communication, just turn to your kick-ass marketers!
Together, you can monitor agreed metrics on your campaigns (e.g. customer lifetime value, website bounce rate, search performance, newsletter sign-ups, app downloads, etc) to figure out your brand's connectivity with your target market. This initiative will also show you which operations work and which don't, so you amend your strategy for future campaigns.
In essence, your team has solid answers to which activities generate qualified lead, or what content is consumed most. Evaluating your marketing team will offer insights into how your target segments discover your business, and how you can act to better frame your reputation.
If you want to plot a top-notch marketing strategy, here's a little something for you!
3. Sales
Your sales team members are the front liners of customer profiling, converting, and buying habits — they can spill the tea on what motivates people in making a purchase.
Your in-house sales network can expose all the struggles that consumers encounter, including the ways they expect your product or service to kick away any roadblocks. Additionally, in case you're wondering why certain leads didn't convert to returning customers, your selling department will tell you what resulted in a missed opportunity.
Conclusion
Regardless of your niche, customer experience is the cornerstone of what differentiates your brand from competition. No matter how stellar your product or service quality and branding are, if the taste you gave to the customer is bitter, be sure they won't come back.
It's crucial to run a customer-centric business, considering that they largely contribute to the fulfillment of your goals, so invest time and budget in upgrading your customer experience game in order to turn them into brand ambassadors that make you shine!
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