Wouldn’t it be great to impress customers so much that you improve a multitude of business outcomes from customer retention to annual revenue, despite increasing competition and customer demands? The trick is to optimize your customer experience across all interaction channels, both in-person and online. Differentiating your business through the experience you provide is proven to be much more profitable than differentiation through products, pricing or features. Here’s how to make customer experience a driver of business growth.
What is Customer Experience Optimization?
Essentially, customer experience (CX) is what it’s like to interact with your business across touchpoints throughout the customer journey. Are you able to solve customer problems and exceed their expectations? It’s about impressing customers to create a positive perception of the business. Whether intentional or not, each interaction between a customer and a business influences the customer experience.
Keep in mind that while customer experience is related to customer service, they are not the same thing. Customer service describes the practical touchpoints where a business delivers customer support such as self-service tills in-store or a live chat on a website. Customer experience is focused on the overall impression interactions such as these give customers and how that affects their engagement, satisfaction and buying behavior.
Customer experience optimization evaluates and improves the effectiveness of customer experience in promoting positive business outcomes. Businesses that optimize CX see more word of mouth recommendations, positive online reviews, repeat business and customer loyalty, and ultimately happier customers and more sales. CX optimization involves both the in-person and digital experience of the business as both are touchpoints in the customer journey. In the digital age, customers switch between online and brick and mortar shopping so there should be a consistent standard across both.
The businesses that benefit most from CX optimization have a strategy for continual optimization, collecting data across all their channels to highlight potential improvements. However, to maintain profit margins while fulfilling customer needs and delivering customer satisfaction, businesses need to target their customer experience optimization efforts. Focus on high-impact improvements to ensure return on investment.
What are the 4 E’s of Customer Experience?
When building your high-impact customer experience optimization strategy, ensure your improvements meet the 4 E’s of successful customer experience. Whether solving a problem or helping a lead to make a buying decision, the 4 E’s impress customers.
Ever-present – Are you there when your customers need you? The digital age has created an expectation of immediacy. Whether a customer has a question or is raising an issue, they should be able to reach a resolution with minimal wait time. Elevate your user experience, by being present on multiple communication channels so customers can contact you through their preferred one.
Empathy – Especially if things go wrong (it happens to the best of us!), your customer experience should be embedded with empathy. Interact with customers with emotion and understanding to ensure customers feel like they are being heard, understood and valued. It’s a lot easier to demonstrate empathy when you have detailed insights into the perspective of your customer base, from their pain points and frustrations to their priorities and preferences.
Empower – Give your team the tools they need to deliver to a CX that delights customers. With the proper training and information, staff can provide support in a customer centric manner that exceeds customer expectations. It’s more efficient if customer issues can be dealt with by the customer-facing team instead of always being escalated to management so consider the permissions and access you give your staff.
Energize – Energetically and proactively engage with customers instead of waiting for them to communicate first. Give customers something to be excited about. That will set you apart from other businesses and encourage brand loyalty. Be willing to make every customer interaction special through personalized attention and effort.
A customer experience that follows the principles of ever-present, empathy, empower and energize will set you miles ahead in the eyes of your customers.
How To Optimize Customer Experience
There are various different improvements and strategies businesses could implement to improve their customer experience. To identify the changes to prioritize, follow these steps of CX optimization.
Ask customers how they feel
The point of CX optimization is to improve customer perceptions and therefore their likelihood of becoming a loyal customer. Gather data on how customers currently feel about your business and any changes they’d like to see by asking them directly through surveys and indirectly through social listening. Create feedback forms that allow customers to share their insights and experiences as well as monitor online reviews on third-party sites. Data-driven and customer-led optimizations get much better results.
Create a journey map
How do your customers become your customers? By understanding the customer journey, you can optimize their experience from the first interaction to the hundredth interaction, improving your conversion rate and customer retention rate. Customer journey maps allow you to break down the process of becoming a loyal customer into stages. This makes it easier to take the perspective of your customers and redesign their journey for better business outcomes.
Base your customer journey on the stages of awareness (when a customer finds your business), interest (what maintains their attention), purchase (what brings them to the point of conversion), experience (when they start using the product), and loyalty (what encourages customer loyalty and advocacy).
Effective customer journey mapping involves 3 key elements:
- Map customer behavior – What are they trying to do? For example, they might be Googling solutions for a pain point they are experiencing which is how they find your website.
- Establish customer attitudes at each stage – What is emotionally driving them to continue on their journey? It could be a desire for change or frustration that they can’t solve their problem themselves.
- Match-up interactions – What opportunities for interaction are there at each stage that encourage them to maintain a relationship with your business? Make note of the key players such as the staff members monitoring the live chat or the marketers designing campaigns.
Once you have created the map, consider whether there is anything worth adding, improving or replacing.
Understand why they made their purchase
When you understand what is driving your customers, it’s easier to align your customer experience with what they are looking for. Beyond the characteristics and demographics you can gather about your customers, look at their psychographics and expectations. What do they care about? What excites them? What frustrates them? You’re looking to find what it is about your business that motivates them to make a purchase. This might be different for different customer personas. Use information on what drives purchases to personalize key touchpoints and as a result, optimize their impact.
Conduct user testing and session recording
There are interesting tools you can use to improve the digital experience of your business. Session recordings allow businesses to collect data about how customers interact with their websites, apps and other digital communication channels. For example, if website visitors often click away on a certain web page, it needs to be optimized. Before improvements are publically implemented, businesses can conduct user testing to monitor how test users interact with digital channels and make refinements. The great thing about this is that businesses can collect customer feedback and data based on existing interactions. They don’t have to ask any more of customers to gather insights.
Optimize consistency
Customer experience optimization isn’t a one-and-done activity. There are always more businesses that can learn about their customers, the customer journey and the priorities, needs and buying behaviors of their customers. What customers want from their experience of a business could change over time. So the collection of customer feedback, evaluation of the customer journey and implementation of customer experience optimization should be continual. Proactive businesses stay ahead of the game.
The Role of the CRM in Customer Experience Optimization
If the idea of continuously conducting customer experience optimization overwhelms you, fear not. With the right systems and tools in place, it doesn’t have to be as time-consuming or resource-heavy as it sounds. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system centralizes all the data and processes to do with CX optimization, making it much more streamlined.
It makes it easier to manage communication with customers at all stages of the customer journey and nurture relationships over time. The Podium unified inbox allows you to manage all your communication channels including web chat, text messaging and social media so no query slips through the net. Customer data from all previous interactions are collected on the same platform to support speedy responses and attentive relationship building.
Additionally, the Podium CRM can collect customer feedback directly through native surveys and manage online reviews on review websites. Online reviews are part of the information-gathering process and it’s also an opportunity to offer customer support by responding to their feedback. With integrations, automation and an AI assistant, Podium’s CRM is the platform for customer experience optimization.
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Future Trends in Customer Experience
Expectations and opportunities for optimized CX are ever-changing as customer demands and the marketplace shift. To inspire your CX optimization process, here’s some insight into future trends to prepare for.
- Personalization – With user data collection being so common now, consumers expect businesses to be able to provide a personalized experience whether in-person or online.
- Immersive – Emerging technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality are changing our experiences in the digital world including our experiences of online shopping.
- AI and automation – The role bots can play in the customer experience has massively improved. The automation of repetitive tasks using AI can support efficiency and responsiveness in business interactions.
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Do you want to be known as the go-to in your niche in the eyes of dream customers? Provide an increasingly impressive customer experience using the tools available on Podium’s lead conversion platform built for small businesses ready to make a big impact.
