An 8-step process that guarantees a successful customer experience transformation.
Customer experience (CX) encompasses every interaction a customer has with a business, from the very first advert that catches their eye to the communications they receive while seeking help from customer service.
Web content, social media posts, marketing campaigns, and direct emails all contribute to the overall customer experience transformation and have a tangible impact on how a customer feels about using the business’s services.
A great customer experience can drive higher conversion rates, boost customer retention, and strengthen loyalty. Exceptional service can captivate potential customers even before they make their first purchase.
Conversely, a bad customer experience can halt possible sales in their tracks, dissuade repeat customers, and eliminate the possibility of word-of-mouth referrals.
Incorporating a proactive approach to the customer experience into your daily business strategy will improve your public relations and profit margin, and provide a more positive environment for your staff.
Equipping your staff with the tools they need to solve challenging situations will streamline the process and prevent future problems from getting out of hand. It’s a long-term game plan - that you can’t afford to miss out on.
For those companies wondering how to improve customer experience, in this article, we will address the steps you can take to create the customer experience transformation strategy that will work for you.
What is customer experience optimization?
Customer experience optimization is about crafting the ideal journey for potential clients, guiding them through every step of the process in the most efficient yet approachable way.
With the world of technology constantly evolving, it can be challenging to keep up. However, with 61% of customers claiming they’ll switch to a competitor after just one bad experience, it’s never been so vital.
With competition at an all-time high, businesses that fail to elevate their customer experience to meet modern standards risk being left behind.
To better target improvement areas, it can be useful to break down the customer experience into three main segments for focused analysis.
Web experience optimization
Using quantitative and qualitative data collection to determine where your app or website can be improved. Online tools such as Google Analytics can be a great place to start.
Product experience optimization
Discovering how particular products perform, leveraging on-site notifications, and mapping product adoption paths. This process involves diving deep into the data, tracking progress, and making regular adjustments.
Messaging experience optimization
Utilizing email, text messaging, social media, and chatbots to maintain open lines of communication with customers underscores the necessity of a consistent brand voice and providing your team with the necessary resources for success.
At its core, optimizing customer experience involves gathering insights, mapping out the customer journey, and continuously improving it. It's essential to tailor each customer's journey to their specific needs, requiring the entire organization to be aligned and committed.
Thus, the initial step is to forge a unified vision that outlines your aspirations for the future of customer experience.
The impact of bad customer experience
Before we go any further, let's look at the negative impacts of offering poor customer service. From irritating hold music to hidden contact details, there's plenty to analyze.
Overall, the customer experience has taken a beating in recent years. Gone are the days of meeting the local supplier over a coffee to secure the next contract. Even having the same account manager for extended periods is a rarity in the modern world. But the changes go further than that.
A combination of staffing shortages, rocketing inflation, and supply chain challenges with no end in sight has seen 19% of brands see a drop in the quality of their customer service, according to a 2022 report by Forrester. In the first quarter of 2022, customer satisfaction fell to its lowest level in 17 years.
According to a recent survey conducted by HubSpot, there are several common complaints that contribute to this fall from grace:
- The survey found that 47% of respondents highlighted the frustration of the company’s contact details being difficult to find on the website.
- Another 33% of those surveyed saw long hold times as a crucial factor, an important consideration in today’s era of AI chatbots and customer helplines.
- Being constantly transferred between representatives was another significant factor, with 29% of respondents considering this a key irritation.
The proof is in the pudding, but what are the repercussions?
In the short term, sales drop, disgruntled customers head to competitors, and companies struggle to meet their quarterly targets. Long term, it's the reputation of the brand, the CEO, and even the shareholders at risk.
This highlights the importance of stepping up the customer experience, with a true refocus on the customer. So, what are the next steps?
Fundamentals for customer experience transformation
Being proactive in enhancing the customer experience is the only way to survive in the digital age. Fortunately, there is a simple process that can take optimization from an overwhelming idea to a simple, easy-to-implement strategy.
Before jumping into the roadmap we’re about to lay out for you, we need to consider the starting point. If X marks the spot, where are you right now?
With that in mind, let’s take a look at eight essential steps of customer experience optimization.
The eight steps
Keep in mind that your customer needs to be at the heart of this experience, so it’s useful to assess exactly what they expect. As Steve Jobs once said: “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.”
This means taking your foot off the pedal for a while, ignoring the services or products you currently provide, and focusing instead on why your customers come to you.
1- Map out your customer journey
When you stop to consider your customers, it’s probable that they come in all varieties. While most successful companies do have a specific customer persona that epitomizes their ideal client, that truth is never so simple.
So, when mapping out your customer journey, you need to be prepared for all the road bumps along the way. From varied personality types to multiple means of communication, it can be a hectic journey, to say the least. That’s why it's important to keep up with evolving needs and ever-changing expectations.
But what does that really entail?
The five key stages of the customer journey:
- Awareness - This is the point of discovery, when the customers become aware of the brand through word-of-mouth or a successful marketing campaign.
- Consideration - The customer thinks the brand may meet their needs but needs time to actively consider.
- Purchase - Success! The customer makes the purchase.
- Retention - Impressed and assured by the brand’s fantastic communication, the customer gains loyalty.
- Advocacy - Whether positive or negative, this customer will now feel more inclined to share their opinion with the world.
Note that the last two steps of the customer journey are after the completion of the sale. Unsurprisingly, this is where many brands fail to impress, simply slipping off the radar, communication waning to a trickle before it stops completely.
On the other side of the spectrum, successful brands will visualize the journey in its entirety, staying with the customer right until the very end.
2- Customer experience audit
If you aim to supercharge your customer experiencecontinually, knowing its current state is paramount. This is where the auditing process comes in, giving you the opportunity to analyze your growth, highlight any positive touchpoints and pinpoint where the mistakes are slipping through.
Conducting regular audits offers a more profound understanding of your customer needs and helps you nail down actionable steps to increase satisfaction, build trust and, ultimately, increase profits.
An internal audit should cover three main perspectives: marketing, sales, and in particular, customer service interactions. And here, you’ll want to avoid relying on opinions and guesswork and focus on hard data instead.
When approaching this audit, there are some important questions that you should have clear. While this list isn’t exhaustive, it can give you a good place to start:
- How do we show our customers that we have their best interests at heart?
- Are we capturing customer feedback over multiple channels, or could this be improved?
- Are there any new pieces of software which could improve our services?
- Does the data show our responses are quick enough across all digital and physical channels?
- Do our internal and external communications communicate our values?
- Are our staff proud to work with the company? (Does this reflect within communications?)
- How easy is it for staff to meet the customers' expectations?
Essentially, a customer service audit helps you pinpoint not only the pain points of your customers but those of your staff too. Once you have these clear, you can pull up all relevant data to create an improvement plan in actionable steps.
3- Equip your staff
You may have noticed in the above section that your staff satisfaction plays a crucial role in customer service optimization. Yet, as your staff are often the main point of communication between your brand and your customers, there is much more to consider.
It’s critical to discover any issues which may be affecting your staff’s ability to perform before this impacts your customers. For example, if your employees often feel underappreciated or overlooked, they won’t be promoting the company culture effectively.
If they lack the necessary tools to do their job efficiently or are struggling with a high workload, they need a way to offer this feedback to the management team without feeling nervous or scared of retaliation.
While 59% of consumers feel that the human touch has been lost in customer service, your customer experience is intrinsically linked to your employee experience.
Remember that your employees are people. They need to believe in what they are doing to perform effectively. Empower your employees with the education and training they need to succeed, and the increased revenue will prove that the decision was worth it.
4- Create a company-wide focus on customer experience
Think beyond our customer service team, and take the focus through every level of your company. From the C-Suite to the interns, everybody working within the brand must have a comprehensive understanding of the customer experience and its importance.
Otherwise, how will you present a united vision?
When implementing any changes in order to carry out a successful customer experience transformation, you may see hesitation coming from above. And it’s understandable that employees with 10, 20, and 30 years under their belt may be more rooted in tradition.
However, these are the people you’ll need to win over, so it’s important to demonstrate that this is a consistent change with a real need behind it. Still seeing doubt? Research from the Economist Intelligence Unit shows that companies prioritizing the customer experience see higher revenue growth, an interesting read indeed.
One proven method of securing confidence across the board is to offer easy access to your findings. By keeping your employees updated about the conclusions you are making and the reasons behind them can help them promote customer experience optimization in their daily tasks.
Regular conversations regarding changes to daily internal processes and new insights will encourage positive growth.
5- Personalize the customer experience
A key part of your new customer journey should focus on personalization. And by this, we mean more than adding a name to an email. Take it further, treat every customer that approaches you as the individual they are. Whether that means keeping track of their past purchases to suggest their next buy or remembering their busy times of the year and ensuring your email marketing arrives at the right time.
We’ve even seen some marketing campaigns where every individual received a different ad, such as easyJet’s 20th anniversary campaign. In this marketing campaign, more than 12,473.600 unique emails were sent, highlighting the customers’ personal histories with the brand. This campaign led to a 100% higher open rate, and a 25% higher click-through rate.
Personalization is effective because it recognizes consumers as humans with individual interests and backgrounds. It goes beyond segmenting the audience by generation, location, or gender, and promotes a more profound connection with the consumer.
Personalized chatbots are a good example of how companies can encourage trust. While most chat windows will open with a pre-arranged script, a personalized chatbot will actively ask a question or offer help based on the customer's recent actions on the site.
Similar to an in-store customer assistant helping you try on a fancy new pair of boots, or fetching another size, this personalized approach has led to 87% of companies using chatbots to realize major business goals within a year, according to a report by Oracle.
Thank you emails, follow-up surveys, and regular check-ins also work towards making the customer feel recognized and valued, setting you apart from your competitors.
6- Automate the customer experience
Now deep into the digital age, customers have come to expect instant responses. We live in an era where everything we could need is at our fingertips, with same-day deliveries and instantaneous responses becoming the norm.
With this in mind, it becomes clear why relying purely on human agents to respond to customer queries can set you back, compared to more forward-thinking competitors.
Automated chatbots will improve customer satisfaction while reducing the burden on your human staff, increasing their experience too. These robot colleagues can also prioritize communications depending on urgency and severity, and will flag potential trouble for your human agents before they’ve even opened the message.
Automation can also be used to collect actionable customer feedback, asking for instant reviews, so your company can take rapid action. Building up a list of customer-vetted improvements will help you constantly and consistently analyze your current performance, pinpointing any problem areas.
And as we saw with easyJet’s fully personalized campaign, automation can also play a key role in personalization. The ability to create relevant, targeted ads instantly, through Google Ads, for example, can increase your revenue while keeping costs down.
At the end of the day, customer expectations are at an all-time high, and automation can be the cost-efficient solution that sets you apart.
7- Data is king
With all the data readily available through multiple pieces of software and platforms, your company can develop a customer data strategy to help guide your decisions. By mastering the data, you’ll understand your customers better and deliver a more effective service.
The Oracle report suggests that around 80% of an analyst's time is spent collecting and preparing data, rather than analyzing it, as their job title suggests. In the modern world, this is a pointless endeavor and a drain on company resources.
Whether the problem lies in inefficient data silos or out-of-date data solutions that cannot handle the constantly increasing volume, refreshing your data strategy is crucial for success.
Opting for an upgraded data management platform will help your brand target the right people, personalize messages on an individual level, and offer the support to scale your business as required. You’ll also be able to see what actions customers are not responding to, helping you when it’s time to reassess the campaign.
However, data won’t help provide an answer if you don’t know what your question is. That’s why it’s important to underline a key direction or idea before deciding on a data strategy.
This will also help you track the success of your campaign more accurately. While you may have seen phenomenal success when adding personalized videos to a targeted ad, if you can’t compare the data to a similar ad without the videos, you have no idea if the video really added any value.
Ori Mendi, a serial entrepreneur and the brains behind Kueez, a platform with over 150 million monthly users, has this to say: “The question is not ‘Does it work?’ but ‘Where does it work?’ and sometimes also ‘When does it work?’ since what works right now might not work in six months.”
8- Content is crucial
If data is king, content is his private army. From webinars to landing pages, infographics to interactive websites, you can use your data to give the customer what they need. So, if you’re wondering how to improve customer experience, this step is not one to miss.
Providing relevant and informative information at the right time enhances the customer experience because it helps them understand the brand, what you offer, and how effective your services are.
Some companies see content as a simple lead-generation tool, but used effectively, it enhances brand awareness, customer relations, and loyalty too. It’s more than writing concise copy that catches the eye, it’s the perfect chance to show off the things that set your brand apart.
The user experience also comes into this. With a poor experience navigating your website or app, a key pain point highlighted above, poor UX will reduce the average order size, increase cart abandonment, and damage the customers’ perception of your brand. It also has a huge impact on your SEO, even increasing the cost per click of the ads you run.
The golden rule? Be proactive, not reactive
Being proactive and having a concrete strategy in mind is vital for businesses contemplating how to improve customer experience. An effective customer experience transformation takes time, but no matter how good your product is, improving those customer interactions is the most important step towards creating a loyal customer base and increasing your revenue.
When charting your own strategy for customer experience optimization, we hope the steps we’ve outlined above will put you on solid ground to get the ball rolling.