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Your customers may love to buy what you sell, but for most, their experience of being your customer is even more important to them. In a global survey of business buyers and consumers conducted for Salesforce’s latest State of the Connected Customer report, 80% of respondents said the experience a company provides matters as much as its products or services.
If customer experience (CX) is truly that important to consumers, it stands to reason that getting it right can lead to big dividends for businesses. Indeed, companies that provide a superb customer experience can heighten their brand image and business reputation, engender greater customer loyalty, attract more customers, increase revenue, and more.
In this post, we examine more closely why optimizing customer experience is mission-critical for today’s businesses and present several strategies you can use to optimize your company’s CX.
First things first: What is a “customer experience”? It describes all the feelings and perceptions a customer has about a business or brand as well as the quality of their interactions with that business or brand at every touchpoint along their customer journey.
Customer experience optimization, meanwhile, is the practice of working to improve the quality of every interaction at every touchpoint so the CX a company provides isn’t just good but superior. The hallmarks of an optimized customer experience include:
The answer to the question above is simple: If you don’t provide a compelling CX, you can easily lose business. Invoca’s research found that 76% of consumers will sever relationships with a brand after just one bad experience. That finding applies to consumers across several major industries, including healthcare and travel.
If you need further convincing that optimizing the customer experience is important for your business — and your bottom line — consider these five benefits of prioritizing the process.
Customer experience optimization results in a seamless, personalized experience that leaves customers feeling extremely satisfied and ready to sing your praises. Satisfied customers often become brand advocates, posting positive reviews and providing word-of-mouth referrals on social media and neighborhood chat forums.
Learn to excel at keeping your customers satisfied, and you’ll see a dramatic increase in Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and a drop-off in customer churn. Both results are big wins for your business.
However, to set the stage for customer loyalty, you need to think about the experience you provide for potential customers and not just those who have already converted. Research from PwC suggests that 25% of customers believe loyalty needs to be won before they purchase, making customer experience optimization critical in winning hearts and minds.
An optimized customer experience drives campaign effectiveness for marketing and sales, and enhanced customer interactions mean higher conversion rates and increased sales revenue.
Not only that, but customer service optimization delivers greater transparency into where and how marketing is driving sales. Attribution is made far easier when you have a clear picture of the entire customer journey and detailed insight into what’s happening at every touchpoint.
Companies that commit to providing an exceptional customer experience differentiate their brand and create a competitive advantage in the marketplace. It’s important to remember, though, that an exceptional CX isn’t just about besting your competitors but also following the best practices of top brands that may not even be in your industry.
Consumers tend to measure their customer experiences against the CX of other major brands provide. Fair or not, that means your pest control business or dental practice might be competing from a CX perspective with the likes of Apple, Amazon, BMW, and Zappos, to name a few. So, keep that in mind as you develop a CX management strategy that’s appropriate for your business and its customers.
Customer experience optimization has valuable ancillary benefits. One is the sheer amount of customer data that customer experience efforts can generate for your business.
For example, if you use a revenue execution platform like Invoca, you can develop a “single source of truth” by combining data gathered from customers’ phone calls together with data from their digital experience. You can analyze this data for insights into how you can improve your CX, enhance marketing and sales budget planning and campaign efforts, and improve business strategies and decision-making.
Now that we’ve reviewed the benefits of focusing on customer experience optimization, here are 10 strategies to help you create a successful process. Some of these strategies incorporate digital experience optimization, as well as offline CX optimization.
Mapping the customer journey is an essential exercise for marketing, but it’s also a critical step toward optimizing the customer experience. A customer journey map is used to document every customer touchpoint, both online and offline. It’s a visual interpretation of the flows, interactions, and pain points between the customer and your brand.
By analyzing the map and updating it regularly, you can flag pain points and develop strategies for addressing them to remove friction in the customer experience. Constant updates to the map help you stay on top of the latest trends and changes in customer behavior, too.
Data gathered from customers’ online and offline interactions with the business can be used for personalization, which is core to customer experience optimization. Personalization includes product recommendations based on prior purchases or purchases made by similar customer personas, personalized discount coupons and offers, or loyalty rewards.
You can also personalize the online-to-offline experience for customers. With tools like intelligent call routing and PreSense from Invoca, you can transfer a caller to the right agent at the first time of asking. PreSense also preps agents by providing basic information and other insights about callers. Agents can greet callers by name, and because they can know which page online prompted a call, they’ll have a good sense of why a customer is reaching out.
Making it easy for your customers to engage with customer support in the way that they want to is another way to elevate the CX.
You can, for example, provide chatbots and FAQs on your website so customers who prefer online support can get fast answers to simple questions, like how to request a product return label. For customers reaching out to your contact center, tools such as Intelligent Voice Response (IVR) software can help streamline their call experience by allowing them to access the information they want quickly, like their bank account balance.
These solutions also help free up phone lines and reduce calls to the contact center from people with simple inquiries. This enhances the customer experience further by giving agents more time to handle complex questions and reducing hold times.
Developing and communicating consistent sales and marketing messages reduces confusion and friction that can lead to a poor experience. For example, a consumer who calls a car dealership seeking information about Toyota Prius models in stock should not receive a follow-up direct mail offer from the dealership touting exclusive financing deals on full-size pickup trucks like the Ford F-150.
Implementing an omnichannel strategy can help streamline communication and provide more seamless transitions for customers across all touchpoints (e.g., website, phone, mobile app) that your business uses to communicate and engage with target audiences.
Customers are your best data source for whether your customer experience needs improvement, as well as what you’re doing right.
You can gather customer feedback through online surveys and direct interactions and by asking for reviews. Customers often offer feedback during customer service calls, so you should be recording and transcribing those calls at scale using tools like Invoca.
Invoca’s suite of tools for contact centers includes sentiment analysis, which highlights insights into customer emotions by using AI and machine learning to scan transcripts and recordings at scale and detect changes in tone and emphasis. These resources make it easier to analyze and optimize your CX and adjust your customer service and marketing strategies on the fly.
Providing a memorable customer experience for all the right reasons hinges on your business being proactive in its efforts to engage with customers. You need to listen closely to the voice of the customer (VoC) and respond quickly when word of issues (and opportunities) come through.
Suppose a travel agent hasn’t had a chance to update their website to indicate a cruise sailing is fully booked, and they receive an online booking request from a new customer. A well-timed phone call to that customer apologizing for the confusion provides the travel agent the chance to suggest other sailings. This move also shows the potential customer that the agent cares about earning their business and ensuring they are satisfied.
While 68% of customers pick up the phone at some point during their buying journey, many conduct research and make decisions about products and services while online. Making sure your website is user-friendly, with clear navigation and easy access to information, such as in an FAQ section, optimizes the digital experience — and, by extension, the customer experience.
Keep in mind that many consumers are also conducting online research on their smartphones before they make a purchase. So, be sure to optimize your website for mobile viewing and ensure your mobile app (if you have one) provides messaging that is consistent with your website and current marketing campaigns.
Measuring marketing and sales performance and monitoring KPIs can help you track many crucial aspects of the customer experience. By continuously reviewing KPIs and the insights they provide, you can also quickly change up or refine strategies to improve the CX.
Some of the most important KPIs to track from a customer experience perspective are:
AI tools can enable many routine tasks for customer-facing businesses, leaving staff with more time to focus on the CX. For example, AI solutions for the contact center can be trained to provide quick responses to customer inquiries and supplement customer support. Chatbots and virtual assistants cannot fully replace live agents, but they can free them from manual work so they can devote more time to addressing complex customer problems.
Also, AI-powered conversation analytics can collect and analyze large amounts of data at scale to deliver actionable customer insights quickly and accurately to marketing and sales teams. This insight into customer preferences and pain points can be used to personalize marketing campaigns, inform sales strategies, and deliver a better customer experience by removing friction along the customer journey.
You should ensure the integrity of your CX optimization efforts by regularly reviewing and assessing the quality of customer interactions. Here’s where AI can also shoulder some of the burden. Using automated QA tools in the call center helps to ensure QA is applied objectively and agents are being held to consistent standards.
Invoca’s automated quality assurance allows call center managers to score 100% of calls rather than the typical small sample of calls scored manually. Another benefit: It speeds up the QA process while also providing detailed reports on every call for compliance purposes.
Customer experience optimization can create many benefits for your business, and top among them is more satisfied customers. Following the 10 strategies outlined in this post can help you get the process right, so you can increase customer loyalty, improve marketing and sales effectiveness, and gain a competitive advantage over your peers.
Invoca’s technology can help you deliver the standout CX your customers want — and expect. From advanced AI-powered analytics to help you better understand your customers and their needs, to solutions like PreSense that enhance personalization and reduce friction in the contact center, Invoca’s tools can support your efforts to make customer experience optimization an everyday practice, and ongoing priority, for your business.
If you’d like to learn more about tools, tactics, and best practices you can use to optimize the customer experience, check out these resources from Invoca:
To explore how AI-driven tools can help your business optimize its CX and grow its competitive advantage, contact Invoca today for a customized demo.
