Customer Experience Improvement – 7 Ways to Improve Customer Experience
Trustmary teamLast edited: October 20th, 2022
Customer Experience Improvement – 7 Ways to Improve Customer Experience
The development of the customer experience has shifted to the agenda of more and more companies, as they have grown to understand its importance. NPS, one of the most commonly used metrics to measure customer experience, has not been unnecessarily called as the “One number you need to grow.”
As competition intensifies year by year, developing customer experience has become a necessity rather than an opportunity in many areas.
However, few companies are on the map about how customer experience should be improved or even measured.
In this blog we will go over 7 concrete things to help you improve your customer experience.
7 Ways to Improve Customer Experience
1. Measure customer experience
Developing customer experience always starts with measuring. It is difficult to develop customer experience without knowing what to develop.
How does one measure customer experience, though?
By conducting customer feedback surveys. They help you realize how your customers feel about the current state of your products and services.
The above mentioned Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a good way to define a starting point for customer experience. It provides you with one number against which you can benchmark your development in the future.
You ask one question: “How likely are you to recommend our product or service to a friend or colleague?” The customer gives an answer on a scale from 0 to 10.
In case they give a score that is under 6, they are Detractors. Those who give a score of 9-10 are Promoters. Everyone in between are Passives.
Next, you subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, and you get a number between -100 and 100. That is your net promoter score.
Easy, right? Now you can easily measure the development of this number by conducting regular NPS surveys.
You can get started quickly with measurement by starting a free trial on Trustmary.
2. Get to know your customers better
The better you know your customers and their needs, the easier it will be for you to respond to your customers’ needs.
This should be self-evident, but rarely seems to be the case, as customer surveys we do invariably bring up issues that the company wasn’t aware of.
Even though NPS is a handy tool for measuring the overall satisfaction of your customers, it does not tell you why people feel a certain way. To find that out, you need to ask more questions. They can be more specific rating questions, or open-ended questions.
Questions to ask include e.g.
- How satisfied are you with the service you received?
- How would you rate your shopping experience today?
- How would you rate the customer service?
- How could we improve your experience?
- What aspect of the experience did you like the most?
Surveys are not the only way to learn about your customers. A successful voice of customer program includes other tactics as well, like analyzing customer sentiment. You should monitor what people say about your brand “behind your back”, so to speak.
Go to discussion forums and social media to see what people say to others about your brand. It gives you a different angle, as people do not always directly say what they think.
3. Define an ideal customer experience
By defining an ideal customer experience, you are concretizing what your business has to offer and who it is suitable for.
Once you have a map of what your ideal customers want and how you want to meet their needs, the noise from outside your target audience will no longer interfere with your customer experience development.
Finding out the ideal customer experience is no easy task. Start in the core of your ideal customer profile: who are your current loyal customers? What do they have in common? That should help you with defining the ideal customer.
Then you can start investigating how their ideal experience would look like. Once again, conduct surveys, interviews, review user data (see heatmaps of your website, inspect clicks, all that jazz), and run A/B tests to figure out what works the best.
Hopefully, you will get close to the answer.
4. Improve customer experience with new customer testimonials
Potential clients need relevant information to support their decision. While testimonials and customer stories improve your closing, they also improve a customer’s customer experience when he or she can identify with the person in the testimonial.
It has been proven that testimonials and video testimonials improve conversion rates.
In fact, research shows that video testimonials work because
- They help visualize how products and services truly work
- They help viewers to understand an actual customer’s story
- They illustrate what kind of impact the product or service has on people’s lives
- They are more authentic than what the company says about their product or service
Testimonials remove the feeling of uncertainty from our purchase decision. When we come across a new product or brand, we might be sceptic about the quality and credibility. Seeing authentic testimonials from real customers eases that feeling of doubt and makes the shopping experience more pleasant.
5. Optimize flow rather than resources
Flow thinking helps significantly in developing customer experience. If you think of your business only from resource perspective, you will never achieve the kind of customer experience you can achieve by optimizing your flow.
A good customer experience flow means that the customer always knows what they should do next. You lead your customer through the sales funnel kindly but confidently.
Some principles to follow for a flow experience:
- Awaken customer’s curiosity
- Provide clear Calls to Action
- Follow through with you value proposition
- The customer’s expectations need to be fulfilled whenever they complete an action
6. Interact with your target audience where they are
If your target audience is actively using Twitter, interact actively with them there. If they use Reddit, you better be active there.
No social media has an intrinsic value, but for the customer experience, it’s useful to be reachable through the channels your customers use.
When you have some presence in social media, you can address issues that your customers might bring up online. You can respond to reviews and complaints. Most importantly, you can monitor what people say about you on social media (=assess sentiment).
Think about any recent scandal that a company has been involved in: what could have they done if they had no presence on the platform where the issues were brought up?
Additionally, when you respond to negative feedback on social media, you have a chance to preserve your face and reputation. You might even be able to prevent people from churning.
7. Personalize and / or segment your marketing
Marketing has a role to play in the customer experience and if you treat all your contacts as one mass, the customer experience will never be optimal. By intelligently segmenting your mailing lists and target audiences, you guarantee a better customer experience.
Here are some ways in which you can target marketing to specific segments:
- Did someone download your content? Send them email recommendation about another great resource, or encourage them to apply the theory in practice.
- A customer started a freemium? Offer them free tips on how they can utilize your tool best.
- Someone abandoned their cart on your online shop? Send a feedback survey and offer a discount on their cart.
- A new follower on social media? Showcase user generated content on your social media channels to increase the effect of social proof.
- Personalize marketing messages according to demographic information (location, gender, age, etc).
Employ account based marketing techniques to accomplish the personalized experience.
In summary of developing the customer experience
Customer experience can be developed in many different ways, but any universal wisdom that would make a big difference is difficult to give in a blog.
However, you can start exploring the possibilities immediately by conducting customer feedback surveys.
One of the best tools to do so is to utilize Trustmary’s survey builder. It includes templates for NPS, CSAT and many more survey types. You can also personalize the surveys as much as you want, and distribute them in multiple channels.
After you have collected insights into your customer experience, it’s time to draw conclusions and implement changes.
As a result, you have satisfied customers who are willing to leave testimonials, which in turn helps future customers set their expectations straight.
Best of luck on your journey to customer-led growth!
Further Reading
FAQ
What is customer experience?
As the name says, customer experience means the experience that your customer has when they interact with your business. It includes issues like customer service, usability, marketing, and much more. A good customer experience can secure a long term customer relationship, whereas a bad one might make the potential customers churn forever.
How to improve customer experience?
There is no exclusive answer for this question, or a one-size-fits-all solution. You need to research what you customers think about their customer experience now and what they think would make it better. After that you need to implement the changes. However, a few common tactics include conducting customer feedback surveys, offering enough information, making the sales funnel flow seamlessly, personalizing the experience, and making sure that the customer service works well.