9 Ways to Improve Customer Experience

 
Getting the customer experience (CX) correct, or wrong, has a significant impact on your bottom line. According to Business Wire, 86% of consumers will leave a brand they trusted after two to three poor customer experiences. Similarly, 84% of consumers value their experiences with companies as much as they value the products and services those companies provided.

Focusing on improving CX can help your organization build loyalty, increase retention and transform customers into brand advocates. CX improvements will boost revenue and support other critical business goals. Read on to explore nine ways your company can improve customer experience.

1. Understand Your Customers’ Needs

Unhappy customers are often unheard or misunderstood customers. Improving your customers’ experience starts with understanding what consumers need and want—not what you think they need and want. Speak with your consumers directly and frequently at all stages of the customer journey through various touchpoints in your organization. Go beyond customer service team insights and drill deep into where friction points exist throughout the consumer life cycle.

Action Plan

Explore what your consumers want, need and prefer. To do that, you can:

• Conduct customer surveys and analyze feedback to better understand what consumers are experiencing. 
• Identify what customers find frustrating, including what makes them disengage and drop off. At the same time, analyze what consumers appreciate so you can replicate positive efforts.
• Review customer support interactions—such as chat support, email correspondence and contact center transcripts—to discover what customers expect from your organization.

2. Leverage Customer Journey Mapping

To act on what your customers need and want, you must stop considering use cases in a vacuum. A proactive way to improve customer experience is through journey mapping. 

Customer journey mapping evaluates consumer experiences from the customers’ perspective and considers friction points in their interactions with your organization. Once you understand where along the journey your customers are feeling friction, you can act to smooth their pathway to journey completion.

By addressing pain points while also replicating positive interactions, you improve overall CX and deliver better outcomes for your organization. A customer journey map helps you identify and manage the process, providing exceptional end-to-end service.. 

Action Plan

Mapping can be as simple as collaborating with members of your organization who understand various touchpoints and journeys. You can also skip the hassle of trying to map each experience from scratch and leverage innovative, prebuilt customer journey maps to understand your consumers quickly and efficiently.

3. Use Customer Journey Orchestration

The next step in improving CX is customer journey orchestration, which connects the gaps between your teams and your systems. In order to properly manage the customer journey process, you’ll use specialized orchestration software. 

Journey orchestration software integrates separate consumer interactions across various touchpoints and creates a series of compelling interactions. These synergized interactions build customer loyalty and enhance engagement. 

Without orchestration tools, your company’s communications with consumers are siloed—as a customer engages with your sales, marketing or service departments, each interaction is segmented. By facilitating communication between departments, you make these connections between interactions. This keeps customer journeys from feeling separated and inconsistent, improving CX. Customer journey orchestration enhances interactions by delivering:

• Personalized communications based on omnichannel behavior
• Seamless customer service
• Cross-channel lead prioritization
• The right message at the right time for each customer

Action Plan

Invest in an innovative platform with customer journey orchestration capabilities. You can transform interactions across the entire customer life cycle, connecting touchpoints and delivering an incredible customer experience.

4. Utilize Journey Analytics Data

Your organization can also leverage journey analytics to improve CX. Journey analytics help you track and measure how consumers interact with your organization across channels and processes. Understanding channels and the ways customers engage with your brand is vital to improving CX.

When you understand your customers’ needs, interests and behaviors at each touchpoint, you can connect better with them and deliver more personalized experiences. Journey analytics integrates customer intent with data from various channels, including website, email and contact center analytics. You can use journey analytics to customize content and personalize website interactions. 

Conventional analytics focus on the channel’s key performance indicators (KPIs), like time spent browsing your site, clickthrough rate and time to serve. Although valuable, these analytics don’t uncover individual CX friction points.

Journey analytics provides you with:

• Insights into customer expectations, needs and wants
• An understanding of what efforts are boosting or hindering your revenue
• Action items to improve your customer experience and journey

Action Plan

You need continual tracking and monitoring to improve CX. When your company invests in innovative customer journey analytics software, you’re investing in gathering the insights you need to drive conversions, build customer loyalty, boost revenue and reduce costs to serve.

5. Leverage Personalization Strategies

Personalization is another way to improve customer experience. A recent Mckinsey study reports that:

• 71% of consumers expect organizations to personalize interactions.
• 76% of consumers get frustrated when organizations don’t personalize engagements.
• Organizations that excel at personalization drive 40% more revenue than companies that don’t.

Personalization engages your customers and establishes consumer loyalty and satisfaction. When you customize content and track individual interactions, customers will feel you value their needs and preferences. This builds confidence in and loyalty to your brand, boosting engagement and leading to a positive return on investment (ROI). 

Using Artificial Intelligence and Tech to Personalize Experiences

Making the most of personalization requires you to leverage all you know about your customers to streamline their journey. Enhancing and tailoring individual journeys strengthens the bond between your organization and its customers. 

Instead of sending generic promotions and information to all customers, you can personalize content according to geographic location, browsing history and expressed preferences. Thanks to innovative tech like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, you can customize your offerings. That includes the ability to use natural language processing software to understand what customers are asking in free-form messages and leverage chatbots to ensure your customers have support 24/7.

The latest digital tech is ever-evolving, expanding the level of personalization available in your communications, services and support. Today, AI is a scalable and affordable way to engage and reach individuals personally.  

Action Plan

To streamline the customer journey and maximize personalization, you can:

• Leverage data to customize survey questions.
• Decide on essential personalization criteria, like location, demographics or purchase history.
• Use geographic location tech to tailor offerings according to region.
• Customize deals based on past purchases and behavior. 
• Follow up on survey responses personally to encourage future participation and show you’re invested in each customer.
• Enable your website with dynamic displays based on user preferences.
• Collect feedback from customers about personalization efforts and optimize your interactions. 

6. Enable a Seamless Omnichannel Experience

Your organization has more than one device or channel to focus on. You must shift to an omnichannel mindset to remain competitive and deliver first-rate customer experiences. Delivering omnichannel experiences includes ensuring your online platforms cater to mobile devices, not just desktops. Designs and displays should be responsive and user-friendly to enhance CX.

Beyond your platforms, your organization should establish a connected customer experience online and offline. The customer journey should be seamless, whether your consumers connect with you in person or engage with you via your website, social media or app. 

Consumers may connect with your brand on multiple platforms and expect your business to keep track. Suppose a customer connects with you via chat, then switches channels and calls you. They won’t want to repeat the entire conversation.

Omnichannel capabilities provide more consistency for consumers. With 90% of customers expecting consistent experiences across channels, your organization should prioritize developing an omnichannel strategy for CX. 

Action Plan

Partner with a future-focused organization that will help you deliver a truly omnichannel customer experience.

7. Focus on Employee Training and Engagement

Almost 80% of U.S. consumers say convenience, speed, knowledgeable help and friendly service are vital in establishing positive CX. This statistic indicates the critical role your employees play in keeping your consumers engaged and happy. 

Your customer-facing teams are the brand ambassadors of your organization. Empowering them to deliver customer-centric service takes investment. Conduct regular training programs to help all employees understand your products and services. Training should include:

• Product training: Intensive product training will help your employees deliver information and insights to customers with ease. When your employees are confident in their product knowledge, they’ll handle customer interactions effectively. This will speed up response times and allow them to offer frictionless service to customers.
• Soft skills training: Soft skills training will help employees learn to engage with customers with more energy, patience and professionalism, leading to enhanced interaction and greater satisfaction.

The more empowered and happy your employees are, the more equipped and inspired they will be to deliver excellent customer experiences. 

Action Plan

Establish a customer-centric and employee-centric culture in your organization to boost your profits and employee morale. Get help developing a customer engagement strategy to maximize your results and support your employees. 

8. Utilize Technology for Enhanced Support

AI and innovative tech can help you provide superior customer service and experiences. Some of the technology you can leverage to enhance customer support includes:

• Chatbots: Chatbot technology speeds up time to serve, and it can save your organization up to 30% in customer support costs. Bots answer queries in real time and alleviate pressure from your call centers. The speed of service delivery and 24/7 availability contribute to excellent CX.
• AI-powered analytics: Your organization can leverage AI-powered analytics to monitor your most important metrics in real time. Connect and capture data from various points in your company and view key insights on one dashboard. Use these insights to deliver personalized and enhanced service.
• Self-service technology: Over 70% of customers want the ability to solve issues independently. Self-service options offer them a great customer experience and free up company support staff to handle queries that will benefit from human intervention. Intuitive self-service platforms will build your organization’s reputation by giving consumers quick and frictionless ways to engage with you.

Action Plan

You can invest in conversational AI technology to reduce your support costs and deliver exceptional CX. Conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) understands speech, context and intent, helping consumers get accurate assistance quickly. 

9. Monitor and Measure Your Customer Satisfaction

The final step in improving your customer experience is monitoring and measuring customer satisfaction. Your organization should:

• Implement KPIs for measuring customer experience.
• Regularly track and analyze customer satisfaction metrics.
• Optimize and adjust strategies based on continuous feedback.

Action Plan

Leverage customer journey management tracking and monitoring technology to understand why customers buy or drop off across journeys. Use these valuable insights to bolster loyalty and boost sales. 

Case Study: A Story of Success 

A global retail brand dealing with consumer packaged goods (CPG) wanted to build stronger customer relationships and become its customers’ go-to advisor. One of the retailer’s goals was to expand its relationship with consumers from months to years. Here’s an outline of the retailer’s dynamic online consumer journey and success story: 

• The challenge: The brand needed a consumer engagement hub that automatically identified and engaged with each visitor—then guided them to the next stage of the journey. The retailer found that its content wasn’t engaging individuals. Beyond that, the brand website was not tracking where drop-offs were happening, what pages users were visiting and what consumers were doing on the site.
• The need: The retailer needed to understand who was on its website. The brand also wanted its site to show relevant content to each consumer, tailored to their unique journey.
• The solution: The brand leveraged CSG Xponent to enhance customer experience. The cloud-based Xponent platform collected vital data the retailer could use to personalize interactions and identify returning consumers. The Xponent system also used gamification and rewards programs to deliver a dynamic customer journey.
• The results: The project took less than two months from design to implementation. Today, consumers who visit the retailer’s site receive individualized engagement. The Xponent platform also collects real-time data to tailor experiences further. The results? Personalized journeys that last from one day to three years. Plus, the site received more than 30,000 additional visitors in the first eight weeks.

How Can CSG Help Improve Your CX? 

CSG Xponent helps create unforgettable customer experiences on the correct channel when consumers are ready and interested. Xponent leverages your customers’ data to make it happen—one platform that does it all. 

We offer various ways to improve customer experience:

• Journey mapping: Our award-winning mapping software helps you understand experiences from a consumer perspective. It identifies pain points you can address to provide high levels of customer satisfaction.
• Journey orchestration: CSG’s orchestration tools help you execute journeys by connecting databases and customer-facing systems, delivering seamless and tailored experiences across multiple channels.
• Journey analytics: Xponent helps you track and gauge how consumers interact with your organization across multiple platforms. The analytics feature lets you view critical metrics holistically to get big-picture insights about the customer journey and any friction points along the way.
• Mapping software: CSG Xponent Ignite will save you the time and effort of mapping each customer journey from scratch. Xponent Ignite offers a holistic maturity model, an ROI calculator and a library full of existing customer journeys from various industries. 

Developing your customer journeys is simple and quick with CSG.

Contact Us Today to Optimize Your CX Strategy

CSG is an award-winning, purpose-driven, growth-focused software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. We help organizations solve their toughest challenges with future-ready solutions.

You can leverage CSG Xponent to understand and anticipate needs, helping you better upsell customers, increase retention rates and communicate rapidly and effectively.

Contact our team today to learn how CSG will enhance your customer experience program.