Improve Your Customer Experience in 6 Steps

By Jeff Epstein

Customers are the lifeblood of a successful business. While most brands understand the importance of providing excellent customer service, fewer are familiar with how to deliver a strong customer experience (CX).

First it helps to understand the difference between customer service and customer experience. Customer service focuses on the way a service is delivered before, during, and after the purchase; CX refers to the sum of all the interactions that the customer has during their relationship with a brand, and requires more strategic planning to pull off successfully.

Besides making customers feel good about you, the benefits of delivering a strong CX are substantial. Companies that follow through with CX strategies tend to have higher revenues, better customer satisfaction rates, and fewer complaints. When customers feel good about your business, they will return over and over again.

Not sure where to start? Here are six steps your business can take to improve your customer experience.

6 steps to improve customer experience

1. Establish a customer-focused culture

To truly deliver an impactful CX, you need to establish a company culture which prioritizes customer satisfaction from the top down. In addition, you must factor in the customers' perspective into your company's overall vision.

To accomplish this, you will need all of your employees to be involved, and not leave any of them guessing how to uphold the company's mission. Create a set of guiding principles for how the company engages with customers. These can range from abstract (“Show humility.”) to more concrete (“When speaking on the phone with a customer, ask if they understand where to find their information in their online profile.”).

If your employees live by these principles, they will put customers at the center of every decision they make.

2. Enlist a customer experience manager

To take your CX commitment a step further, recruit a customer experience manager (CXM). CX should be a multidisciplinary effort that spans customer service, marketing, sales, and product design. Having one person who is responsible for customer experience can unite your employees around this common goal.

The CXM is responsible for all customer engagement tasks and comes up with relevant content for each target market. This gives him/her access to customer feedback that can help ensure the customer perspective is being represented in any product or service redesign.

3. Understand who your customers are and how they engage with your business

Of course, you need to know who your customers are to deliver a tailored experience. Knowing your customers' demographics, such as age and residence, is not enough; think more broadly to consider ways people will be using your product or service, their expectations of service they will be receiving from you, and ways they prefer to interact with you. Challenge your staff to think less about how your product/service works and more about customer problems it can solve.

Part of meeting customers’ expectations is communicating with them over their preferred channels. Gone are the days when they could only call customer care to get assistance. Today you can interact with customers by phone, email, text message, and social media, depending on who your customers are. For instance, people over 40 may prefer using the telephone while a younger demographic expects to connect over social media.

Consider your industry, too. If you’re working in a very formal, professional industry, communicating by phone or email might be more appropriate than over social media. No single interaction medium fits all, and you will need to experiment to determine which is best for your customers.

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4. To improve customer experience, digitize the CX

Individual nuances notwithstanding, more customers today expect a modern, digital experience from the brands they engage with. You, therefore, should equip your business with the tools necessary to meet customer standards.

An easy place to start is by offering mobile support. Mobile phones are the fastest adopted technology of modern times, and in the United States, 97% of adults own a cellphone. If your business isn’t extending CX to mobile touchpoints, you’re missing a big opportunity to engage customers.

Many mobile interfaces, however, are badly designed and difficult to use, even when website content is optimized for mobile viewing. This can result in customers calling the company and tying up contact centers with simple questions when they could have found the answers to their questions on their own. Companies that use customized call tracking and chat software can benefit from built-in integrations that make support resources available for mobile viewing.

Leveraging live chat technology is another option to connect digitally with customers. Live chat offers a real-time channel that finds solutions for customers and without them leaving your website. Some providers allow co-browsing, where customer care agents take temporary control over a user’s browser and provide technical troubleshooting, or they direct customers to web pages offering resources.

Live chat can also boost a business's operations by collecting contextual information showing which pages the customer has visited before and what products they’ve viewed. This metadata can be used to improve a company's sales and marketing efforts, as well as improve technical troubleshooting for support staff.

5. Deploy self-service tools

Whether they’ve had a bad call center experience in the past or demand instant answers without having to wait in a queue to speak to someone, some customers prefer to handle business on their own terms with self-service tools.

Because self-service portals can take care of many customer questions without additional intervention, they increase a company’s capacity to assist more customers, giving call center workers more time to engage with customers who prefer receiving direct support from an employee. When self-service tools are available on a website, customers receive the best of both worlds: direct support from employees and the ability to find answers on their own.

6. Adopt a data-forward approach

Providing exceptional service doesn’t happen by accident. Data helps formulate a customer experience strategy. You should gather feedback from customers on how you are meeting their needs, wants, and expectations; constantly measure results to know if the processes, teamwork, and technology you’ve invested in are paying off.

There are many ways to collect customer feedback. Asking customers to rate their experience with your company in a quick survey can help you learn where changes need to be made. To make it easier for customers to provide feedback, use a 10-point scale and ask questions like, “How likely are you to recommend this experience to a friend?”

Improve customer experience with a positive experience at every customer touchpoint

A generalized commitment to customer service will only go so far in winning over today’s customers. To win customers’ attention—and dollars—your business needs to consider a CX strategy that offers a positive experience at every customer touchpoint.

Exceptional CX may not happen overnight, but with a clear vision and constant customer feedback to direct your initiatives, your company will soon see a major payoff.

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