Having a well-defined and distinguishable customer experience (CX) goes a long way in reinforcing your market position and even disrupting hierarchies. Here’s why leaders are looking inward to improving CX in 2022:
- It creates strong brand loyalty which helps in customer retention.
- Retaining a customer with an impressive CX is far cheaper than onboarding new ones
- It helps you build prognostic models to stay ahead of market volatility and evolving customer expectations
However, implementing a consistent CX across different channels is easier said than done. Here are the five ways you can improve CX to reduce churn and save costs:
1. Build a customer journey
Before rolling out a systemwide strategy, you must research what your customers want, what they prefer, how they shop, and their age and demographics. You can gather feedback and data through social media and blog comments, surveys, testimonials, product reviews, customer support feedback, and any forum where your product or service is discussed.
Use Dave Gary’s empathy mapping technique to improve customer understanding across different teams. Empathy mapping focuses on six behaviors of customers – what they see, hear, say, do, feel and the goals they have. By using an empathy map, you can align your team with customers’ expectations and develop relevant products.
The buyer’s journey has three essential stages — awareness of the problem, consideration stage involving research and purchase, or the decision stage. The modern journey also includes a post-purchase stage called usage.
You need to find all the touchpoints in the buyer’s journey and assign roles to give them purpose and lead them to the next step. Use the data gathered from various sources to improve this transition. Having a fleshed-out customer journey is the first crucial step to making sure customers keep buying from you.
2. Hyper-personalisation beyond only name
These days, customers look past generic ads that don’t speak about their problems or try to provide solutions. Location-based targeting is one of the most popular personalization metrics used by brands today but not everyone has an eye-popping ad budget.
Start by building personalized recommendations based on purchase and search history. Use the empathy map we discussed above to predict their needs and give them choices. Use double opt-in to build an email list and use an email verifier to trim the list. Next, segment the email list based on shared attributes and send highly curated email blasts with relevant offers. However, it’s important to not overdo personalization and respect privacy where it matters.
3. Automation in customer support
One of the better ways to improve website engagement for new visitors and reduce the wait time for customers is by using AI-enabled chatbots. According to a Zendesk report, live chat has a customer satisfaction rating of 85%, making it a highly successful option for brands.
Chatbots allow you to build automated, always-on, and scalable engagement platforms that can solve queries within minutes. This way you not only qualify the issues but also empower the customer support team to focus on pressing issues. Chatbots are also ideal in upselling products to users, something that can be done by using customer actions and keyboard presses as “triggers”[1] [2] .
4. Analyze data to predict issues
CX strategies yield the best results when you find areas of improvement and work on them. One way to do that is by analyzing the large amount of customer data available on customer relationship management tools. Properly go through the journey to see where customers aren’t converting, the feedback they’re leaving, and how they’re affecting your KPIs.
A few of the major CX metrics you need to focus on are net promoter score, customer effort score, cart abandonment rate, customer loyalty, and sentiment. Analytics gives you complete visibility over your campaign and you can A/B test various methods to address the shortcomings.
5. Create a customer-first culture
While keeping the focus on customers, don’t forget your employee experience. Employees are the ones who represent your brand and interact with customers. Start by creating a culture where team members are encouraged to contribute and put their best in helping the customers. Educate and train them on how to reduce resolution time and improve the quality of solutions and always maintain a clear feedback loop to help them grow.
When there’s little to differentiate in price or product quality in saturated markets, the only way brands can create an edge is by providing a superior customer experience (CX) over their competitors. Follow the above five steps to improve your customer retention metrics and position yourself as the segment leader in 2022.