6 Surefire Ways to Improve Customer Experience

improve-customer-experience

A successful business runs on many wheels. It might have high-quality products, affordable pricing, a top-notch marketing team, and more. Yet, it still might lose customers if it cannot provide a great experience to its users.

Brands have evolved when it comes to attracting customers, but so have the customers. They are aware of their preferences and needs and open to exploring other options at the slightest inconvenience. In other words, having a better product or being a more prominent brand is no more a crowd-puller in today’s business landscape. 

However, suppose you can provide your customers with an unforgettable experience. In that case, the chances of attracting more users or retaining them become convenient.

Customer experience has become the buzzword for most businesses today. It is seen as the benchmark that defines the success rate of any business. Statistically, 86% of the customers prefer to pay more for an improved customer experience. Therefore, not having a strategy to fulfill your customers’ expectations might deter growing your business.

Simply put, the impression that you create of your brand to your customer is defined as customer experience. It lasts throughout their buying journey and even beyond that. 

Therefore, following the basics of good customer experience practices can help your business achieve sustained growth.

So, how much does customer experience affect a business or design a process that delivers a rich customer experience? Let’s find out.

Why improving customer experience practices is essential for businesses? 

Delivering an immersive customer experience is mandatory for any business today. Below are some direct benefits of having well-defined customer experience practices.

  • Boost sales conversions: 

When customers interact with your brand or buy a product, they expect you to value them. The process of brand discovery to conversion takes some time. Providing your customers with an unforgettable experience according to their preferences can make decision-making easier for them. 

You have to engage your customers accurately and deliver what your brand promised. A delighted customer can help you generate 2.6 times more revenue than a somewhat satisfied happy, which increases to 14X extra revenue than a dissatisfied customer. 

The key to achieving such a conversion rate is a consistent customer experience across platforms and channels. A well-connected buying journey builds a positive experience. It helps you exceed the customer expectations, resulting in higher sales conversion.

  • Higher customer retention: 

As the previous point established, providing a customer experience can boost sales conversion by quite a notch. However, modern-day businesses have realized that acquiring customers alone is not much achievement. 

Companies look to retain as many customers as possible and drive repeat conversions to derive maximum benefit from their customer base. 

Acquiring new customers can become costlier by seven times than maintaining the existing one. Therefore, strategizing an effective customer engagement plan can help drive retention efficiently.  

  • Increase customer loyalty:

Besides improving sales volume and retention, excellent customer experience practices can also instill brand loyalty. Today, brands and customers are connected over several common platforms, such as social media channels. 

The transparency in your product quality or customer service is shared incessantly by the customers. Providing a good experience turns your customers into brand advocates. 

Satisfied customers drive more customers to your business through word-of-mouth marketing and help you eliminate the acquisition cost for these new sets of buyers. Conversely, any negative experience leads to poor reviews, prompting prospective shoppers to move elsewhere.

How to Improve Customer Experience

The process of delivering a good customer experience begins as soon as users discover your brand and starts interacting with it. Below is a list of some of the best practices for optimizing the customer experience for your brand.

1. Audience segmentation and understanding of buyer’s persona:

Before improving your customers’ experience, you need to understand your audience. Your audience consists of many customer information, including age, gender, location, income, and hobbies and interests. 

Each of these demographics and personal choices determines the buyer’s persona. Using a particular strategy that works on a set of audiences might on others. 

You should segment your audience according to their persona to create an inclusive experience while interacting with your brand.

2. Personalize and engage:

Your customers like to feel valued while interacting with your brand. Personalizing your communication can help you drive a human touch while engaging them. Customers expect you to treat them as real people and have an honest conversation while interacting with your brand. 

Quick-response customer care service or an automated response center helps you improve customer experience quite efficiently. It also allows you to understand the customer’s pain points and provide solutions faster.

3. Omnichannel Strategy:

The digital platforms are expanding. Your customers are now available across channels, media, and devices. Reaching them with the right content at the right time through the right channel has become a necessity.

Having an omnichannel strategy that corresponds with your audience using cohesive communication is much essential in driving effective engagement. 

Further, the messages should not be repetitive or frequent. Instead, they should be coherent, systemic, and are sent according to the different stage customers s of buying journey of the customers to generate maximum engagement.

4. Avoiding the data silo:

Driving audience engagement is dependent on your tech stack. Several platforms could drive your campaigns, interact with your customers, and collect user data. 

Running these campaigns is further distributed among various team members across departments. Often, this leads to the creation of data silos in an organization, where the audience insights are restricted within the tech platforms, resulting in a poor customer experience. 

Avoiding the creation of data silos is a vital requirement for delivering a seamless experience that exceeds customer expectations. The data silos might form due to the limitation of the tech stacks or lack of interaction among team members. 

Whatever might be the reason, you should identify and break the formation of the silos to use customer data effectively and provide an immersive experience to your customers.

5. Opting for full-stack solutions:

Having multiple tech dependencies can lead to data silos or inconsistencies in customer communication. A full-stack solution helps brands adopt the capabilities across channels and platforms, break data silos, and send seamless communication to engage the customers. 

Further, the solution can leverage user data across channels and match the changing customer experience across all active touchpoints. As a result, it improves the audience engagement and helps them connect with your brand cohesively, leading to better conversion and retention.

6. Measure, analyze, and improve:

Creating a sustainable and enriched customer experience is not a one-time task. However, measuring the success metrics and analyzing the process’s bottlenecks can help you identify the missing link that leads to a poor experience. 

It would also help you identify the customer behavior and improve the parameters according to their expectations. The amalgamation of business analytics, artificial intelligence, and big data is already here. 

They can help you measure customer satisfaction in real-time and deliver a unified experience to your audience.

Conclusion

Delivering a poor customer experience can cause tremendous financial loss. Customer expectations are increasing as they become more empowered. 

Having the right strategy in place and executing the best customer experience practices helps you improve conversion and drives retention and loyalty, irrespective of the size of your business.

Ideas to Improve Customer Experience

You’ve done everything I’ve asked, now what? Well, it doesn’t have to end there. Here are some other tips and ideas you can use to improve CX:

  • Engage with leaders in your industry
  • Invite your VIP customers to events
  • Send them a ‘Thank You’ postcard
  • Call your customers to thank them

Moeen Khan

Moeen is currently a Sr. Content Marketer at Ameyo. Moeen is a copywriter, content developer, and content strategist with an ability to relate stories, a flair for detail, and a hint of humor. Moeen loves working with Technology-based companies (He is obsessed with Artificial Intelligence!), Tech, SaaS, Web Development, Mobile App Development, and Agencies. Moeen’s favorite brands are unique, full of character, and have that ostentatious vibe.