9 Ways To Improve Customer Experience
Make your brand more compelling by boosting CX. Discover nine important customer experience improvements you can implement starting today.
These days, no brand can hope to thrive in the competitive market without delivering top-notch customer experiences to each target audience member. Indeed, CX is – in many ways – the single most important aspect of marketing and customer retention.
If your brand currently struggles with creating and maintaining excellent customer experiences, look no further. We’ll break down nine distinct ways to improve CX for your current customers and new consumers in the future.
The Importance of Creating a Stellar CX
Simply put, your brand has to provide its customers with an excellent CX. Without high-quality customer experiences, your brand will be far less attractive compared to its competitors, and you’ll have a much harder time acquiring new customers, let alone keeping your current ones.
There are many benefits to providing five-star customer experiences to your target consumers, including:
- Higher revenue. When you provide your target audience members with excellent experiences from the get-go, they’ll be more likely to make purchases from your brand, especially as first-time buyers.
- Greater customer loyalty. Keeping your customers coming back, again and again, is vital for revenue stability and overall brand longevity. Top-tier CX is key to building and maintaining customer loyalty, as your experiences might be what primarily differentiates your company from its chief competitors.
- Improved brand reputation. As your current customers have stellar experiences with your company, they’ll be more likely to recommend your brand to their friends and family members.
This word-of-mouth marketing is free and highly effective, as 88% of consumers are more likely to trust recommendations from people they know as opposed to traditional marketing materials.
Given all these benefits, putting improving customer experience ASAP at the top of a to-do list is a no-brainer.
9 Ways To Boost Your Brand’s CX
Fortunately, there are several ways to boost a brand’s CX. Let’s take a closer look.
1. Gather More Data on Your Customers
Before you do anything else, gather more data on your customers if you haven’t begun already. The more data you have about your target audience members, the better positioned you’ll be to provide them with top-notch customer experiences.
That’s because customer data tells you a lot about:
- Who your customers are in terms of demographic information
- What your customers want
- The pain points your customers likely experience
- And more
All of these data points are valuable tools as you craft compelling customer experiences for target consumers.
2. Create a Central CX Vision
Next, analyze the data you’ve gathered and make a central CX vision. For example, do you want to:
- Make customers feel cared for and seen from the moment they check out your website?
- Focus on providing high-quality customer support experiences for customers who have questions or complaints?
- Provide bespoke sales assistance by assigning dedicated sales officers to every high-profile client you acquire?
- Some combination of the above?
Odds are your business has limited resources with which to pursue CX improvements. By creating a central CX vision or guidelines, your team can pursue a few goals successfully instead of chasing a ton of goals and not meeting them.
3. Leverage New Technologies to Offer New Value
New technologies, like AI chatbots, CRM software and platforms, and email marketing platforms, give your company the tools it needs to succeed. Leverage new technologies that can offer real, practical value to your brand.
For example, if your company gets most of its revenue from a dozen or so high-value clients, it’s a no-brainer to use CRM software to keep track of all the details, unique needs, and stages of their customer journeys. With that software, your salespeople can then provide even better customer experiences to those clients.
4. Double Down on Personalization
Personalization is also vital to improve your CX. All customers want to feel seen and heard as individuals. Practicing personalization enables you to improve your customer experiences by:
- Making each customer feel like they are special
- Delivering specific product recommendations or discounts to customers based on past purchases or shopping habits
- Building brand loyalty among your most important customers, keeping them back to make repeat purchases again and again
You can and should practice personalization in marketing, email communications, sales tactics, and basically everywhere else.
5. Develop an Omnichannel CX Approach
An omnichannel CX approach involves ensuring that your customers’ experiences are holistic and consistent across every channel and step of the buyer’s journey. CS agents, salespeople, and marketing staff should all use the same phrases, interact with customers in the same way, and refer to the same products.
The best way to do this is to double-check that every aspect of your brand follows overall guidelines, style guides, and customer interaction rules. Ensuring a holistic CX for all customers will make them feel like shopping at your brand is truly special.
6. Gather and Incorporate Customer Feedback
That said, your customers are often the best people to gather feedback from to improve your CX. Make it easy for your customers to give you feedback via surveys, complaint forms, and so on.
Don’t just collect feedback — incorporate it as well. Analyze customer feedback after you gather a lot of it, noting similarities between different feedback forms. If, for example, many shoppers note that the checkout experience is slow, clunky, and confusing, believe them. Make changes to your checkout page so it’s streamlined, smooth, and easier to navigate.
7. Refocus on Customer Support Teams
Customer support is key in this day and age. Sooner or later, your brand will make a mistake, or a customer will have a question or complaint you need to resolve. How your customer support department handles those incidents will affect your brand's reputation, whether the customer makes a purchase or comes back, and much more.
Top-notch customer support results are vital to solving customer complaints and incorporating the customer feedback mentioned above.
Plus, if your CS agents do great jobs handling customer concerns, those customers might still come back for repeat purchases even if your brand fumbled at some stage of the customer journey beforehand.
If you need some help here, Awesome CX by Transcom has your back. As CX improvement specialists, our customer support agents provide phenomenal experiences to everyone who gives them a call. We’ve been working with learning businesses for over 12 years. Our dedicated-team-only model ensures our crew is an expert in everything about your brand. Are we the best? We think so. But also so does statistica and Newsweek, who gave us the Best Customer Service Award in 2022 (and in 2021).
8. Empower Your Team
In many cases, the best way to improve CX across your brand is to give your team the freedom to do stellar work. Don’t bog your salespeople or customer support agents down in policies or procedures. Give them the means to provide customers with good experiences and positive memories.
For example, if a salesperson has the opportunity to secure a big sale by offering free shipping, let them! Don’t break that salesperson for breaking company policy. It’s better to satisfy customers (within reason, of course) by bending the rules here and there than to maintain strict procedures and push shoppers away without cause.
9. Create Self-Service Options
Lastly (for now!), improve customer experiences on your brand website by offering self-service options where possible. For example, a self-help portal or knowledge base containing answers to FAQs is a great way to give customers the means to answer questions they may have without having to wait for a customer experience agent to respond to a ticket.
You may also offer self-service options for returns, purchases, and much more. In all of these cases, self-service puts power in the hands of your consumers, which results in a more positive shopping experience for them.
As another plus, self-service frees up additional manpower and resources for your business. Your customer support agents, as in the example above, won’t have to waste valuable time answering basic FAQs and can instead focus on tackling more complex problems.
Use Awesome CX To Achieve These CX Improvements
There are many different ways to improve your brand’s CX. But whether you have a lot of experience in customer support or need ground-up support, Awesome CX by Transcom is here to help.
Why? As knowledgeable CX experts, we’re well-equipped and ready to help you by offering customer support staff, back-end office logistics support, UI design services, and much more. Reach out today to see how we can help your brand succeed.
Sources:
Understanding Customer Experience | Harvard Business Review
Why Is Customer Loyalty Important? | Business.com
Why is personalization important? | TechTarget
Word-of-Mouth Marketing: Meaning and Uses in Business | Investopedia
Content for Every Stage: Maximizing Engagement in the Modern Customer Journey | CMSWire