Improve Customer Experience (CX) with Six Key Steps
This blog is from the AskNicely archive and has been updated with new ideas for improving the customer experience for 2021!
Customer experience (CX) speaks to how people feel when they're interacting with your business. When you have a broad set of quality customer experience data, you have access to intimate views of the customer's values, desires, and motivations.
The first critical step to staying competitive in an ever-crowded landscape is to collect that broad set of quality CX data. In fact, 81% of service businesses strive to improve customer experience as a primary strategy to compete for business.
Businesses strategically employ CX metrics like Net Promoter Score to continuously improve services and maintain a competitive customer experience. Once you've started gathering accurate feedback data from customers, you're ready to begin improving customer experience.
Here are six key ways you can improve your NPS and provide a better customer experience each day.
Know Your Customers Better
Before you can give customers what they want, you need to know who they are and what they prefer. There are numerous ways to begin collecting essential data and feedback. For example, your website or e-commerce platform, Google Analytics, and your paid social platforms provide rich demographic data. Automated survey tools like AskNicely's customer feedback software platform give you the direct voice of the customer.
By collecting individualized data and creating profiles through an experience management platform, you'll be able to answer key questions, such as:
- What are the best demographics? By sorting data on a broad scale to spot trends among specific groups according to age, gender, location, or other identifiers, you can anticipate possible preferences for individuals.
- Are there purchase history trends? You're probably already aware of seasonal trends, but what other trends can you find? Are mobile devices playing a larger role in purchases?
- How have customers engaged with your brand before? If you have a customer relationship platform, run a report showing early interactions. Can you discover how prospects re-discovered your brand?
- What are your customer service request trends? Do your customers often struggle with similar challenges? Which method of customer service provides the most satisfaction (calls, email, chat support, etc)?
Avoid getting lost in all the data by focusing on the most impactful, actionable information. A customer experience management platform gives you full visibility over the metrics that matter most.
You'll be able to:
- Automate customer feedback surveys to effectively map your customers' journey
- Maintain individualized customer profiles to track all engagement history and personalized data in one place
- Integrate your survey data platform with the rest of your tech stack for a more comprehensive profile
- Visualize your best locations and employees vs. the rest
- Provide the real-time feedback to your employees that improves customer experience every day
Open Up Communication
When you know how to connect with your customer base, you can engage them more efficiently. This sets the stage for direct, personalized outreach programs:
- Promotional campaigns: Send exclusive offers and upsells for items or services that people have a history of browsing or buying
- Referral campaigns: Incentivize returning customers to recommend your brand to their friends and coworkers
- Re-targeting: Has it been too long since a set of customers has visited your site? Add them to your paid media outreach coupled with an enticing offer
The best experience management platforms centralize data that enables effective outreach. Make sure your platform is:
- Collecting engagement data to identify a person's preferred communication platform – email, social, app, etc.
- Analyzing survey responses to identify enthusiastic customers for referral campaigns
- Automating and optimizing feedback collection to make sure you're acting on the most current CX data
Refine Customer Service
Customer service is only one component of overall customer experience, but it's a big one. Customer service is a high-touch moment in the customer journey, and it can be a heated moment for some.
Customer experience management platforms are a huge asset in understanding what's working in your customer service and what is not. They do this by tracking a variety of data points:
- Identifying successes and failures by asking targeted questions with quantified response metrics
- Discovering previously unknown pain points by deploying open-text survey questions
- Providing detailed analytic reports that can be used to train new staff (and engage current staff as well)
Optimize Your Website
User experience (UX) is another component of overall customer experience – it's critical to generate feedback about how people engage with your website. Especially because people usually don't stay very long on websites they don't enjoy using.
To break it down, sites with high UX ratings share some fundamental traits:
- Fast loading
- Easily navigated
- Mobile-friendly
- Aesthetically appealing
- Streamlined checkout system (if applicable)
Does this describe your site? If you're unsure, then the answer is probably no. And if you're totally confident, it's worth asking: what makes you so confident? Do you have data to back it up?
If you have a reliable CX management system, you're able to:
- Collect data from different points in the checkout process
- A/B test new features on your site
- Create personalized experiences based on customer profiles
Integrate More Customer Data To Improve Customer Experience
Customer experience is one of the most essential dimensions of business operations, and yet it can be one of the trickiest to track. Tracking customer data effectively requires a constant, automatic, expertly engineered CX feedback management platform.
Collecting quality data allows you to know your customers better, and keep track of their preferred modes of communication. The data will also show you the strengths and weaknesses in your customer service, according to the customers themselves. Tracking the subtleties of user experience with your website empowers you to optimize your site and try out new improvements.
And instead of keeping this data siloed among individual departments, a great experience management platform allows you to share data in an accessible, dynamic way that encourages every team member to critically approach their tasks with the customer in mind.When you provide top-tier experiences to your customers, your Net Promoter Score elevates as well.
Engage Every Department
From the help desk to the marketing team to the graphic designers to the payment processing department... Every department plays an important role in creating and improving customer experience.
However, for those team members who rarely interact with real live customers, it might be easy to forget how daily tasks affect CX. This kind of disconnect can have a hidden yet insidious effect on your company's performance and morale. This is where AskNicely's customer experience management platform provides the unique advantage of helping everyone on the team visualize the performance of everybody else. AskNicely's Insights platform empowers employees across every department to connect more directly in a customer-centric culture. This manifests in different ways according to your type of business:
- Setting clear, measurable personal and team goals
- Establishing standards and scorecards for full visibility
- Providing the gift of feedback on actionable steps every day
AskNicely helps improve the customer experience by improving the employee experience at the same time. Team members stay engaged and motivated when they're given clear, positive, actionable feedback. Other coaching platforms create a top-down management overview that focuses on punishment for falling short on quotas, but AskNicely believes in the power of positive feedback as the pathway to awesome customer experience.
