Improve Your Customer Experience in 8 Steps
Carel Schrier
Customer Experience, abbreviated CX, is the sentiment a customer experiences during every interaction with your business. This evaluation runs parallel to your inbound marketing approach. It starts at the first point of contact with the customer and ends with your feedback points.
Customer experience explains what happens in the run-up to phone support and why the overall customer experience can lead to frustrations. While a positive CX can be the catalyst for a loyal customer base, a negative experience can influence potential prospects even before they interact with your business. By being proactive in your approach to CX, your team can not only help resolve these difficult customer situations but also draw up a long-term plan for problems that may arise later.
Are you ready to offer your customers a better experience? In this blog we have 8 tips ready to help you get started.
Tip 1: Map the customer journey
Before you rush into all kinds of decisions that impact your whole business, it is good to first draw up a plan. In many cases it helps to fill in a customer journey map. We have created a fillable customer journey map for you, which you can download for free.
With a customer journey map you map out every step your customer takes. This goes beyond just purchasing a service or product. Think, for example, of interactions on social media, online advertising and customer service cases.
When you get started mapping this out, make sure you look at it from different perspectives. Insights from the customer journey affect the entire business, so it is good to involve your colleagues in this.
It is also essential to take into account the customer experience of both the preparation and the aftercare within your sales process. It is of course tempting to devote most of your attention to the interactions that lead to the sale, but aftercare is hugely important when it comes to building a complete customer experience. So think about the various touchpoints the customer interacts with and how those experiences influence the customer's perspective.
By mapping these interactions onto a single spectrum, it becomes easier for employees throughout your organisation to visualise the overall customer experience. It will also improve their individual understanding of customer needs and expectations, because they can pinpoint exactly where their work will influence the customer's journey.
With this insight, your team can better identify the gaps between their desired and current performance and redirect efforts towards new areas of your customer experience that are open to improvement.
Tip 2: Give your employees the right tools and value them
A large part of a customer's experience can be attributed to who they communicate with during the buyer's journey. If employees feel they lack the tools needed to do their job efficiently, or feel undervalued, this can affect their performance.
To give your employees a boost when current customer experiences are not optimal, you can:
- Identify common employee pain points using employee feedback tools
- Review the current systematic process (from contact centre to CRM software)
- Adjust processes to promote a more positive CX
It is also possible that there is friction within the customer experience because employees are not meeting the expectations promised by the company culture. Evaluate whether your management, managers and employees all understand the values expected of the company culture. It is important that they adhere to these for every customer.
By ensuring that the employee experience is positive, the chance of great customer experiences can be increased.
Tip 3: Look at the customer experience from multiple internal perspectives
Since the customer journey is influenced by every facet of your business, it is important not to focus on just one department when carrying out a customer experience audit. As mentioned earlier, customers interact with every part of your business in one way or another. To get a complete picture of your CX, you need to take into account the unique perspective of each department. Below we describe three departments to help you get started.
Marketing
Your marketing team will most likely be focused on acquiring customers, so they have the best insight into brand awareness and user expectations. They will understand which content your visitors consume most and what generates the most qualified leads. By examining your marketing, you gain insight into how people find your business and what you can do to shape your reputation better.
Sales
Sales has insight into the early stages of the customer relationship. They are on the front line with the customer and their interactions reveal what really motivates individual leads. Employees on your sales team have information about the challenges customers face daily and how they expect your product or service to address these obstacles. For leads that do not convert into customers, your sales team can help you understand what led to this missed opportunity.
Service
It is important to know that what you communicate in your sales and marketing processes actually matches the real experiences of your customers. Your customer service and success teams can provide insight into this reality. They are usually the first line of communication for feedback. They hear honest feedback from customers daily, so their perspective on what causes the most problems for your customers can provide a wealth of insight.
For example, they can tell you which questions are asked most often during support calls and which topics on your feedback forums generate the most activity.
Tip 4: Focus on this initiative
Your customer experience will not change overnight, so it is important to show a clear focus on your new initiatives across your whole business. Appoint someone to lead the execution of your plans to improve customer experience. This person could, for example, be a customer success manager or another person who is a good fit for this project. It is their job to communicate changes, facilitate activities, organise research analyses and carry out the actions needed to ensure your new approach to CX is consistent across all departments of your business.
You may think this is a big step for your business, but according to research by The Economist Intelligence Unit, businesses that prioritise customer experience more often show higher revenue growth. Although change commonly meets resistance at some companies, investing early in your customer experience strategy can ultimately deliver a great deal of value for your business.
When you try to implement new initiatives, you may see reluctance among senior level employees. This will often be due to their traditional approach, which they have been used to for years. You need to make sure you encourage these employees to get involved, as they are important for driving change at higher levels of your business. In the end, employees will follow whoever is in charge, which means that not aligning leadership on customer experience can result in three harmful roadblocks:
- Inconsistent interactions between business and customer
- Providing information that could potentially be useful to customers or employees
- An overall lack of employee support
Tip 5: Personalise your interactions with your customers
Depending on the scale and size of your business, personalisation can mean many different things. Personalising experiences for your customer can help form a bond between brand and buyer. Providing the customer with vouchers after their first purchase, for example, can personalise their experience and build brand loyalty against competitors.
Personalisation is of course not just focused on discounts, but it can take many forms:
- Thank-you letters or emails to customers after purchase
- Follow-up surveys of customers
- Dynamic website offers based on user preferences
Making the customer feel valued, even after a sale, is a great way to improve the overall customer experience.
Tip 6: Make sure your whole team sees the CX data
If you want to get your whole business on board with your brand-new customer experience optimisation plan, it is important that everyone has access to your findings. By keeping your employees informed of the conclusions drawn from the research, your team can optimise daily internal processes such as customer routing, workflow automation or customer tags. But this is not the only thing sharing information is valuable for. It can also help your business respond faster to customer needs, improve product/service quality and increase upsell opportunities.
Responding faster to customer needs
According to Metasaas, 31% of SaaS licences go unused, which makes it even more important to resolve obstacles for customers as quickly as possible. Having data on where your customers are likely to encounter obstacles will help your team prevent user frustration and smooth out any confusing pain points in the customer journey.
Product/service quality
As mentioned earlier, customer service or the success team can provide insight into how usability issues with your product or service affect the overall customer experience. By bringing together leaders and employees from your success team and product team, you can review the main categories of tickets so you can identify the most common usability problems.
Increase upsell opportunities
Your sales team will be able to identify upsell opportunities more easily, because they have a better understanding of the best timing for reaching customers. They can locate specific opportunities on the customer's timeline to get in touch about, for example, product add-ons, so they can increase total revenue over time.
Tip 7: Learn from the moments customers drop off
According to research by Bain & Company, increasing customer retention by 5% can increase your business's profit by 25% to 95%. A good way to start is to use, for example, in-app analytics, if available, to analyse areas of the customer experience where engagement is low.
Low engagement usually indicates a higher risk of customer churn, especially in the SaaS industry. It will help to create an engagement correlation that can help you identify which customers are at the highest risk of churn. You can set up analytics to determine which engagement percentage results in the greatest chance of churn, and then set up a monitoring system to alert your customer success team when a customer approaches those values. This gives your team the opportunity to proactively reach out to resolve an issue before it is too late.
Even for the customers you cannot prevent from leaving, you need to find out why they decided to move on. So offer customers multiple channels to leave feedback and take their opinion seriously.
If you are truly focused on creating a better experience for your customer, you will want to hear about the cases where your business fell short. Make it easy for the customer to cancel their account, but use your success team to find out exactly why this customer decided to cancel.
Tip 8: Consider combining customer experiences with UX/UI design
Consider where the customer experience begins. Before a potential customer reaches a representative of the service department, they will carry out some of their own research before formally asking for help.
It is absolutely essential that people can easily navigate your business website and that it is clear what you offer. 88% of users are less likely to return to a website if the user experience was poor. To keep the customer experience simple, have your developers or marketing team optimise your digital domain to offer an engaging and informative experience here. This ensures the customer journey can start off on a positive note.
Bring an outstanding customer experience to life
Changing your customer experience starts with being proactive and planning your strategy. Your product or service may be a perfect fit for a customer, and they can simply miss out on it because of underlying problems in the experience. Use these tips and apply them to your strategy to keep your customers happy and coming back for more.
