The customer experience (or CX) is the new battlefield in today’s competitive business world.
Though many companies realize the importance of delivering great customer experience, there is still a wide gap between customer satisfaction and the company’s expectations.
Here I list 6 practical ways that can help your business deliver a better customer experience.
1. Listening to your customers from Omni-Channel
Prior to providing customer service, it is important to listen to your customers from an omnichannel.
Social listening is reliable for companies to engage with more customers in real time. With social media scraping tools, companies are able to automate the process of collecting customer feedback from the web with less effort and lower labor costs.
2. Measuring your customer experience throughout the customer journey
When it comes to the measurement matrix of customer experience, many companies only focus on touchpoints – such as individual transactions. Mckinsey’s research shows that performance on the customer journey is strongly correlated with customer satisfaction and business outcomes.
Companies are facing a multi-touchpoint, multi-channel, and hypercompetitive consumer market. A journey-centric measurement matrix enables companies to check out the customer’s experience throughout the entire transaction process. Only in this way can they understand how to improve delivering customer service, and enhance customer satisfaction and retention.
3. Using EDM (Email Direct Marketing) to help your customers
Email marketing has long been a powerful customer conversion and retention tactic for many companies. Stats show that 59% of B2B marketers say email is their most effective channel in terms of revenue generation. Only when you help your customers achieve their objectives and goals, can you achieve yours.
You may need to apply customer segmentation techniques to create the appropriate messages for the specific groups of customers and use personalization techniques to ensure the recipient is addressed as an individual. For your reference, here are some Email Marketing Planning Templates collected by HubSpot from different companies.
4. Building up comprehensive self-service resources for your clients
Any tool or information that could help a client or user solve an issue on his/her own is considered a self-service tool. Generally speaking, self-service resources include:
- Online knowledge base
- FAQ (frequently asked questions section)
- Tutorials and guides (text, infographic, or video)
- Online community forums
- Automated chatbots
- …
In most cases, customers prefer to address their problems on their own right away, rather than waiting. If the self-service options are not ready to use, you probably should invest more time and money into developing comprehensive and easily accessible self-service options for your clients.
5. Paying attention to your customers’ emotions/sentiment
Sentiment analysis tools help you understand the sentimental degree of your customer’s conversation on a large scale. Effective sentiment analysis enables you to monitor social media data. You can collect positive, neutral, or negative feedback from your clients in real time.
In this way, you can optimize online marketing campaigns accordingly. More importantly, it helps prevent or diminish the negative impact of social media crises. There are numerous sentiment analysis tools in the market, specializing in different industries and applications.
6. Using automatic tools to facilitate your customer experience management
Thanks to the development of information technology, automation is an inevitable trend in today’s digital world. You no longer need to address all the things manually in such a rapid-changing business world. Automated software allows you to achieve the same results more effectively.
Customer experience management (CEM) software is a great integration of customer listening and feedback data analysis. It provides a single but complete view of the customer experience.
