Customer Experience

Customer experience (CX) is the result of clients’ interactions with your company throughout the customer journey. This term involves everything that impacts the person’s perception during every touchpoint.

Watch the video to learn 4 exceptional customer experience strategies!

In this article, we explore the importance of customer experience (CX), compare it with customer service, and evaluate the role of personalization in CX. We also provide the five best tools and ways to measure and improve CX.

Why is a customer experience important for your business?

According to Super Office, 86% of customers are ready to pay more for a better experience. These inspiring statistics show the importance of a positive customer experience for every company. This section explains its advantages.

• Increased customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. When clients get a positive experience during every touchpoint, they feel satisfied and become more loyal to your brand. These people want to interact more with your company and buy more products.
• Better customer retention and lifetime value. Satisfied customers are less likely to pay attention to small mistakes and switch to competitors after the first lucrative offer. This has a positive impact on your bottom line, as retaining existing customers is more cost-effective than acquiring new ones.
• Word-of-mouth marketing. Customers who have a great experience are more likely to share it with friends and on social media. Semrush Blog states that 90% of people are much more likely to trust a recommended brand. As a result, providing a positive experience to one customer can help attract more potential customers, saving you money on paid promotions.
• Reducing clients’ complaints and returns. When people get a positive experience, they are less likely to complain about something and return your product because it has minor disadvantages. Additionally, satisfied customers contribute to your brand’s reputation by sharing positive feedback, comments, and reviews.
• More innovation. When companies focus on enhancing their customer experience (CX), they often analyze customers' needs, preferences, interests, and challenges. This helps to identify what customers genuinely want and sparks new ideas and strategies. Innovations like product launches, improved customer service with chatbots, user-friendly landing pages, virtual reality, and social media shopping contribute to a more innovative brand. As a result, customer satisfaction increases, and a seamless experience with your company is achieved.
• Positive brand reputation. Customer experience is crucial in shaping your brand’s reputation. In today’s digital age, brand information is readily accessible, and customers can learn about your business in seconds through product review websites. By providing exceptional support and service, you encourage customers to share their experiences. Positive reviews, comments, and feedback will not only enhance your brand reputation but also influence potential customers' purchasing decisions.
• Competitive advantage. Having a good product or service, seamless customer support, a unique website, and a great social media shopping experience allows your brand to stand out from the competition. Even if you offer a product or service similar to those others have, you can still differentiate yourself from other businesses by providing a perfect customer experience. This not only encourages repeat purchases but also builds customer loyalty.

Now you understand why customer experience is so important. Continue reading to discover its difference with customer service.

Customer Experience vs Customer Service

Customer experience includes service, but it is much broader. Below, we explain what these two terms include and how to differentiate them.

Customer experience refers to the overall perception a client has throughout their entire journey with your brand. This includes all touchpoints, such as interacting with your website, engaging with your social media content, going through the purchasing process in-store or online, and communicating with your sales or support teams.

Customer service focuses on client support. It typically involves interactions with customers who seek advice and assistance, file complaints, or provide feedback about your products or services.

In simple terms, customer service is concentrated on direct, reactive communication, whereas customer experience is more about proactively enhancing customer satisfaction and leaving a positive impression of your brand.

According to Medium, 90% of companies now prioritize the customer experience. In the next section, we provide the ways to improve it and highlight the areas you should focus on.

The Role of Personalization in Customer Experience

According to the study, 81% of respondents prefer businesses that offer a personalized experience. Personalization allows companies to enhance their customer experience and satisfaction. By tailoring offers to clients’ preferences, needs, and problems, you are more likely to meet their expectations.

Personalized content and communication help you better resonate with your target audience’s interests and encourage greater engagement. Offering a tailored experience to your customers can establish an emotional connection. When customers feel that your brand takes care of each client, they are more willing to trust your business and stay loyal.

Personalized recommendations, instant responses, immediate solutions to customer problems, and tailored email campaigns boost customer satisfaction and reduce churn. This leads to better retention, more repeat purchases, and, over time, noticeable improvements in sales and revenue.

Take Netflix, for example. The streaming service effectively uses personalization to recommend TV shows and movies to its users. Netflix sends email campaigns tailored to customers’ viewing habits, updates them on new episodes, and provides reminders about newly added series.

Duolingo effectively leverages personalization on its platform. Before starting the learning journey, the company asks students a series of questions to determine their target language, proficiency level, learning goals, and preferred intensity. This allows Duolingo to deliver content that aligns with each learner's specific needs and interests.

Zendesk also prioritizes personalized user experiences. After registering for a free trial, prospects are prompted to answer multiple questions, enabling the company to deliver personalized content.

Now that you know why personalization is essential, it’s time to proceed to the next section to figure out how to build a seamless customer experience with omnichannel marketing.

Building a Seamless Customer Experience with Omnichannel Marketing

A seamless customer experience involves providing the right information, assistance, and support across multiple marketing channels. This is where omnichannel marketing comes into play. With an omnichannel strategy, your business can deliver consistent messaging, interactions, and offers across online and offline touchpoints. Omnichannel marketing offers numerous benefits, including higher customer retention, increased satisfaction, and stronger brand loyalty.

Multiple examples highlight the effectiveness of omnichannel marketing in enhancing customer experience. Below, we showcase some outstanding strategies from well-known brands.

Spotify delivers a seamless experience across multiple devices by aligning with listeners' needs and expectations. Users can access music through their preferred platform—whether it's the web app, desktop app, or mobile app—and enjoy synchronized features that ensure their favorite songs are always available. For example, a song playing on a mobile device will automatically appear on the desktop app, saving users the trouble of searching for it again.

Innisfree ensures that customers can seamlessly redeem their rewards after participating in its loyalty program. Clients can do this in-store, online, or through an app.

Now that you know how omnichannel marketing helps you provide an excellent customer experience, it’s time to learn how to manage customer interactions properly.

Customer Experience Management

When discussing customer experience, you’ll often encounter the term 'customer experience management.' This refers to the process of managing interactions with customers to improve customer experience at each touchpoint of the customer journey. It helps you assess how effectively customers engage with your brand and provides insights on improving engagement and satisfaction. Various strategies can achieve this, including optimizing user experience, enhancing customer service, and refining email marketing tactics.

Managing customer interactions becomes much easier and more efficient with the right tools. In the next section, we’ll highlight 5 top platforms that combine powerful features, competitive pricing, and excellent usability.

5 Best Customer Experience Management Tools

There are many platforms available to help manage customer experience. After evaluating several options, we’ve selected the 5 best tools to consider. So, let’s dive in.

SendPulse

SendPulse is a multipurpose marketing solution that provides businesses with all the necessary features to build email campaigns, chatbots, web push notifications, and landing pages. It empowers seamless transitions between channels. The service is a great fit for companies of all sizes and industries, allowing them to reach small and large audiences. Using the platform's Automation 360, even enterprises can handle interactions with all customers and deliver relevant content.

Personalization and segmentation features will help you group customers based on their preferences, needs, and problems and deliver relevant personalized email campaigns. The platform also helps create chatbot messages, web push notifications, and SMS that resonate with clients’ interests. SendPulse ensures your messages are delivered at the right moment and are triggered by specific actions customers take on your website. This way, you can be confident that your audience will engage with your product when it’s most relevant to them.

Pricing:

• free plan: 500 subscribers, 5,000 emails, 5 flows, 1 event, and 50 elements in Automation 360 monthly;
• paid plan: 500 subscribers, unlimited emails, 10 flows, 10 events, and 70 elements in Automation 360 for $6.40 monthly, billed annually.

Brevo

Brevo is a platform empowering companies with a variety of tools to effectively integrate email, SMS, CRM, WhatsApp, marketing automation, push notifications, and live chat without any coding skills. All these channels help you improve customer experience, resulting in higher sales and better relationships with clients.

Its automation allows you to react instantly to customer behavior and deliver messages that resonate with your audience’s needs and expectations. By sending welcome emails, anniversary emails, or confirmation emails after clients perform specific actions, you improve their satisfaction and deliver the content they need. A personalized onboarding strategy, relevant product recommendations, and timely responses help you build trusting relationships with customers and enhance their experience.

Pricing:

• free plan: 300 emails daily, email templates, transactional emails, SMS and WhatsApp campaigns;
• paid plan: from 5,000 emails, no daily sending limit and Brevo logo (add-on), basic reporting, and analytics for $9 monthly.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a multichannel solution that helps you provide a personalized customer experience by establishing relevant messaging, live chat, and automation. The service is powered by AI, allowing you to interact with customers on autopilot in a more human-like way while still providing the necessary information and support. With Zendesk, you can manage these interactions seamlessly across multiple platforms, including your website, mobile apps, and social and business channels.

By building chatbots, you can offer 24/7 support and enhance the customer experience through personalization. Leveraging customer data allows you to initiate relevant, meaningful conversations that meet their expectations. The service allows you to build chatbots or live chat for your website or mobile app, as well as popular social networks like WhatsApp and Facebook. All the data from your interactions with customers is stored in a centralized workspace. This way, you can ensure that your agents get all the necessary information about clients for useful interactions.

Pricing:

• free plan: 14-day free trial;
• paid plan: a ticketing system, email, chat, voice, social messaging, AI agents, prebuilt analytics and dashboards, 1,000+ apps, and integrations for $55 monthly per agent if paid annually.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media management tool that enables you to ensure a smooth customer experience on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. The service has various tools and features, ensuring consistent communication and higher engagement with your social media networks.

This marketing solution allows you to provide instant answers to customer questions, replies, and comments. Sprout Social, powered by AI, automatically identifies messages that require a response, personalizes replies, and suggests alternative responses. These alternatives help improve tone of voice and create a more in-depth answer.

Pricing:

• free plan: 30-day free trial.
• paid plan: 5 social profiles, all-in-one social inbox, social content calendar, profiles, keywords, and locations monitoring, and paid promotion tools starting from $199 per seat monthly, if paid annually.

Chatfuel

Chatfuel allows you to automate communication with customers across Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and your website. With its help, you can ensure that all clients and prospects receive relevant and timely responses, regardless of the platforms they are using.

Chatfuel lets you build chatbots that operate around the clock, replace your human agents, adapt to requests, and provide relevant responses. These chatbots fit businesses from different industries because they can perform multiple tasks, including answering FAQs, booking appointments, qualifying prospects, recommending products, and reacting to customers’ comments and replies. The platform is supported by AI, meaning that the bots use natural language and relevant answers from the knowledge base and look like human agents are involved.

Pricing:

• free plan: 7-day free trial;
• paid plan: 1,000 conversations, comments autoreply, story replies, re-engage messages, re-engage history, and more for Instagram and Facebook for $23.99 monthly.

Now that you know the best platforms, it’s time to check out some effective strategies for improving customer experience.

11 Ways to Improve Customer Experience

According to Bain & Company, while 80% of companies are sure that they provide a great customer experience, only 8% of clients believe their experience is positive. Below are effective strategies to enhance your brand’s customer experience and set it apart from the competition.

1. Define and understand your target audience. Collect as much information about your clients as possible. Create a representation of your ideal customers and identify their age, gender, social status, pains, needs, interests, and preferences. Usually, there are 3-5 segments of buyer personas. Then, work with each separate group and identify what product and service they would like to get. It might be a good idea to conduct market research at this step.
2. Develop a customer journey map. Define all the key steps clients go through during their buyer journeys. Visualize how your brand can capture attention and spark interest. Consider key touchpoints and the impressions potential customers may have. Next, define how you’ll engage them after the purchase. Analyze the customer journey to identify pain points at each stage and find ways to address them.
3. Create an emotional connection. According to the research by Beyond Philosophy, more than 50% of a customer’s experience is based on emotions. Look beyond the product and consider the impression you want to leave with your clients. Review the customer journey map and identify ways to build an emotional connection with your audience. To create a positive experience, focus on your brand’s accessibility, ease of purchase, and personalized communication with each customer.
4. Educate your team. If you want your employees to provide excellent service, you need to train them. Make education one of the main values and provide as many opportunities as possible to study and improve skills. Develop your company's guiding principles and ensure they are communicated to your employees. Your team members should understand the importance of delivering an exceptional customer experience and be equipped with the knowledge and skills to do so.
5. Ask clients for feedback. Your customers can show you the non-obvious drawbacks of your product. Encourage them to leave reviews by placing questionnaires on your website and requesting feedback through social media, email, or phone calls. Offering a discount or bonus in exchange for a review can be an incentive. However, make sure your requests are not intrusive. It's also crucial to respond to feedback and address any issues mentioned in the reviews, demonstrating your commitment to improvement.
6. Measure the ROI of a positive customer experience. While it can be challenging to quantify the direct profit from delivering an excellent experience, this step is essential. Understanding the impact of changes within your company allows you to make more informed decisions and feel more confident about your future strategy.
7. Implement personalization. Nowadays, people want to receive offers that resonate with their needs, preferences, interests, and pain points. By providing personalized recommendations, tailored offers, relevant email campaigns, and enticing promo codes based on previous interactions, you can convert prospects into clients more effectively. You can also incorporate proactive customer support for even better results.
8. Consider using omnichannel marketing. When customers use various devices and channels to connect with brands, it’s essential to ensure consistency and seamless experience. By combining the most popular marketing channels, including in-store, online, and customer service, you can provide instant responses and improve satisfaction. Moreover, if you unify data across all the channels, you can ensure a consistent and coherent experience regardless of the platform customers decide to choose at that time.
9. Use chatbots. Chatbots offer numerous benefits, including 24/7 support, instant responses, answers to FAQs, product recommendations, and appointment booking capabilities. Furthermore, when integrated with ChatGPT, chatbots can provide comprehensive, human-like responses drawn from your knowledge base—without the need for agents.
10. Simplify sales processes. To prevent churn, streamline checkout, returns, and account management. Features like single-step checkout, clear return instructions, and instant assistance help customers make quick purchasing decisions and minimize hesitation.
11. Send valuable and relevant content. To establish good relationships with customers, you should share educational content, including how-to guides, tutorials, infographics, reports, and testimonials. You can also provide clients with loyalty and referral programs, promo codes for repeat customers, and exclusive discounts for new orders. This way, you’ll be able to show your appreciation and care for your customers.

However, before improving your customer experience, you need to measure it first to determine how happy customers are with your company. In the next section, you’ll find the most crucial metrics to pay attention to.

How to measure customer experience?

Measuring customer experience looks rather difficult because this metric is based on people’s emotions. However, marketers know the ways to deal with this situation. Below, we provide the steps to measure the experience of your clients.

1. Discover the most important metrics

Customer experience is complex and consists of many parts. There are some metrics marketers usually use to assess the effectiveness of the customer journey.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS). This metric identifies how likely your customers are to recommend your brand. It is used to discover the percentage of clients who love and are neutral toward your company. You can find out more about NPS and its calculations in our article.
• Customer Effort Score (CES). This metric measures how much effort people need to make to reach the next point in their customer journey. According to Gartner, 94% of customers with low-effort interactions will buy the product again compared with 4% who made high efforts. To calculate it, ask your clients to score how easy your product is to buy, from 1 to 7. Then, calculate the total score and divide by the number of responses.
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). This metric shows how satisfied your customers are with your product and services. To discover it, conduct a survey and ask your clients about their satisfaction with all the steps in their customer journey. Read our article about customer satisfaction surveys to find out how to obtain this measure for your business.
• Repeat purchase rate. This metric shows the percentage of customers who make more than one purchase from your brand. A high repeat purchase rate indicates that customers are satisfied with your products and have a positive perception of your company.
• Customer lifetime value. This refers to the total sum customers spend on products or services during their relationships with your brand. It lets you decide how much to invest in customer acquisition and retention. If you want to learn more about the metric, check out our article.
• Social sentiment score. This metric gauges customer satisfaction by analyzing their online reviews, comments, and social media posts. By evaluating the tone of reviews—whether positive, negative, or neutral—you can identify areas of your customer experience that may need improvement.
• Referral rate: This metric measures the percentage of customers recommending your brand to others. It allows you to evaluate customer satisfaction and brand advocacy.

2. Conduct customer surveys

Besides all the mentioned metrics, you can conduct surveys to ask clients about their personal experiences and collect non-numerical information. The answers may be subjective, but they can help you understand consumers better. Ask questions about specific touchpoints and react to the feedback to improve the experience your company provides.

3. Analyze customer behavior

Analyze how prospects and customers engage with your company by tracking interactions on your website. Monitor metrics like bounce rates, time on site, page views, and conversion rates. Additionally, pay attention to cart abandonment rates to identify potential issues. Understanding why leads don't complete their purchases—whether due to a complicated checkout process, lack of preferred payment methods, or excessive personal information requests—can help you address obstacles and improve conversions.

4. Keep an eye on online reviews

Besides social media, you should also pay attention to online review platforms like Google and Yelp. Monitoring reviews and ratings will help you identify the problems customers often face when purchasing your products. For this purpose, you need to focus on recurring topics in customer reviews. After identifying the main issues, you can solve them and improve your customer experience seamlessly.

Overall, customer experience is crucial for every area of your business. It influences customer satisfaction, retention, sales, and revenue. By sending relevant email campaigns, providing seamless customer service, and ensuring a simple and fast checkout process, you can establish trusting relationships with clients, resulting in repeat customers.

Last Updated: 16.12.2024