We are in the era of the customer—the people who buy from your company guide your actions. And it's no wonder: According to PwC, 73% of customers say that experience is an important factor in their decision to buy.
This means that investing in offering a positive experience to customers goes beyond believing in good service - this must now be in the DNA of any company that wants to remain competitive.
To achieve this, it’s essential to understand exactly what is Customer Experience (CX) and how to improve the experience you offer customers when they interact with your brand.
What is Customer Experience?
This expression refers to all the experiences that people have with your company and that affect how they see your brand.
As people interact with your company, whether to get information, learn about your product, ask for support, or make a purchase, they accumulate experiences. This set of interactions forms the customer experience.
Positive experiences make customers more satisfied, and that means these people are more likely to buy again and recommend you to friends and family. And is there any better advertising than word of mouth?
Just to prove it, HubSpot points out that 65% of sales come from existing customers, and only 20% of your current customers are the source of 80% of your company’s profits. So, yes, CX is vital.
How to understand and improve the customer experience
Now that you know the importance of CX, the next step is to map the experience you are offering to people who interact with your brand, whether they are prospects, existing customers, or just curious.
Map the customer journey
The customer journey generally goes through 4 stages:
- Discovery: Here, the person is investigating. They don’t have a "problem to solve" yet and aren’t ready to buy anything.
- Consideration: At this stage, the person already has a "problem" to solve, that is, they already know they need to buy something and consider their options.
- Decision: This is the time to buy and, therefore, to decide who to buy from to solve the "problem".
- Loyalty: After buying, the journey continues; it's important to have a product that works and after-sales service that provides adequate support.
In each of these phases, where do people go to talk to your company? What are the channels or points of contact with you? To figure this out and map the customer journey specific to your business, there are a few steps:
- 1. List the actions that customers or prospects have with you.
- 2. Through these actions, identify customer and prospects touchpoints.
- 3. Understand the motivations behind each of these contacts and interactions.
- 4. Check that all motivations are met, as well as that all contact channels are efficient and sending the same message.
- 5. Analyze your findings to understand the journey, and their pros and cons.
- 6. Remove obstacles and dissonance, and make the paths and their stages obvious.
For efficient mapping, while listing your channels (Step 1), think about all stages of the journey, from discovery to loyalty. Customers and prospects demand that you be omnichannel, as they go through different channels after the same information.
In this cross-channel loop, people want a consistent experience: good service, easy-to-find and understandable information, and important-yet-engaging facts, targeted to the right people in the right channels.
This mapping helps you offer the same experience to customers across all your channels. With it, you not only identify the troublesome points to improve but also find opportunities to optimize the customer experience.
Know your customers and personalize the experience
With the journey mapped, you now have a broad view of what questions your customers have and where they’re looking for answers. This gives you a lot of insight into who your ideal client is and how they behave.
From there, you can start customizing the experience. By monitoring the mapped channels, you’ll find customization points. A classic example is receiving a returning visitor to your website with a special offer on a product that the person looked at, but ended up giving up on buying.
Things like personalized offers, product recommendations, and messages with variables that are completed with customer data are examples of personalization that you can use.
Personalization improves the customer experience, as the person feels seen, understood, and better served by the company. In addition, the probability of converting the visit into a purchase increases if the message and offers are relevant to that person.
If you feel that you’re missing data to personalize, even though you have mapped the customer journey, no problem: You know where to talk to the customer so you can conduct surveys and interviews to fill in your knowledge gaps.
Define CX metrics and indicators
To keep improving the customer experience, you need to understand which metrics and indicators to look at to give people the best CX.
There are options like satisfaction rates (NPS and CSAT are good examples), cancellation or churn rate, customer retention rate along with CLV (customer lifetime value), and CES (customer effort score) which measures how hard it is to interact with your company.
Understanding the metrics and indicators that make sense for you and your company allows you to start tracking each one of them to measure your progress, as well as to define ROI, which is the rate of return on all the investments you make in CX optimization.
Use technology to your advantage
Make use of technology to ensure you're at your customers' side at the right time. Let's give you some ideas on how to do this:
Chatbots: You can program a bot to perform live chat support when customers contact you, and your team is unavailable. Zoho offers an interesting chatbot solution.
Automation: Create automated communication rules that trigger messages according to the customer's actions, which can help you get closer to these people. Using Qntrl and a good CRM platform helps you here.
Workflows: Ensure that the workflow of the teams that deal with customers is very well-designed, so that no one delays service due to doubts or miscommunication. Here, Qntrl can help you again: check out an example of a customer onboarding flow here.
Engage your team
Your team is the face of the company, as they are the ones dealing with clients and customers. So, in addition to technology and maps, which are important, it’s just as essential to invest in your human resources.
Invest in offering the team good training and a great work environment, so that they’re better able to represent the company in interactions with customers.
Start improving your customer experience now
You have data to help you understand the importance of offering a good experience to your customers, as well as tips on how to improve your CX. Now it's time to get your hands dirty.
Remember that investments in customer experience return to your company in the form of reputation, customer satisfaction, referrals and word of mouth, higher LTV, and repeat purchases.
