The number of marketing strategies that can help your business grow the customer base and achieve success is overwhelming. You may be uncertain about the means you should prioritize: competitor analysis, newest trends, or SEO research? All these are important sources of information, but the most valuable insights come straight from your customers.
Processing data and finding out which traits make your business more competitive against others is what will distinguish you. Not only does this approach help you obtain new clients, but it will also win back the hearts of those who’ve walked away unsatisfied.
What Is Customer Experience?
Customer experience is present as a variable in each stage of the customer journey, from the initial brand awareness touchpoint to the moment they turn into recurring customers. The term customer experience is pretty self-explanatory; it refers to all the impressions customers absorb whenever they interact with a brand.
Customer experience is present in every stage of the customer journey: from the initial brand awareness touchpoint to the moment customers become recurring clients.
This journey is full of opportunities to either make customers love the brand more or distance themselves from it.
Why Does Customer Experience Matter?
Customer experience was reported among the most fundamental priorities for e-commerce and retail businesses in 2021. A data-driven answer gives sense to this importance. At least 65% of customers surveyed estimate a positive customer experience to affect their shopping decisions more than marketing. Similarly, 53% would step out once and for good from receiving goods or services from a company if the customer experience was poor.
Retailers should understand that customer experience is greatly affected by data and its use in the customer journey. Instead of reaping full feedback during each step of the customer journey and keeping track of it, they gather less than 7% of this data through surveys. This makes the content personalization process difficult because it doesn’t quite target their true needs and concerns.
How to Collect Customer Experience Data
Data is complicated to understand, but gathering it shouldn’t be.
Data solutions are the key tool to help you collect customer insights properly. However, these tools require a proper strategy for an efficient outcome. Then, proper strategies should bring this data into well-organized models with the right context.
Here we have four data strategies to help collect data efficiently and in useful relation to the stages of the customer journey.
Analyze the Customer Journey
Back in 2000, digital marketers were focusing too much on a linear approach in customer journey mapping. This meant focusing on having customers walk towards the purchase in a straight line, while in reality, the journey is never linear, as customers interact with a brand at multiple touchpoints and with different stages of awareness.
Jot down these different touchpoints (Google SERPs, social media, brochures, website, etc.) and link the predictable outcome with the actual feedback from your customers. Metrics that will be of immense help during this process include:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) – excellent for tracking customer loyalty
- Customer Effort Score (CES) – measures the scale of difficulty for customers to get support
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) – estimates customers’ revenue over time
Distribute Surveys
Surveys are a fantastic feature that can be added to your emails, social media posts, and website pop-ups, and they can even be conducted via word of mouth. The amount of data you can collect during the process is useful because it’s not filtered. Users can leave their thoughts in a survey after finishing a call with customer service or receiving a freebie.
Clients usually get in touch with customer service representatives to solve their issues. If they leave an excellent review after a call where most clients leave unsatisfied and angry, then your business has truly great customer service.
Leverage Brand Monitoring
Buzz makes up a great part of your data. Have you launched a product and then waited for a reaction from your audience? Or maybe your company was mentioned in a large publication, and now articles are being written about it on different websites and social media channels?
Media monitoring tools produce thorough reports regarding brand mentions in both online and offline media. This involves tracing what the public says in news articles and broadcasts about your brand or chosen competitors based on certain keywords. Such data will help strengthen your customer retention strategy in both the short and long term.
Unify All Data in a Single Dashboard
Limit distractions by combining all the insights into a single unified dashboard to save hours of manually searching through metrics. Move all the data into a dashboard tool that’s interactive and provides a visual representation with indicators, charts, and tables.
Enhancing customers’ experience requires details of their behavior and, most importantly, of their feedback in context. Seeing all this data in one place helps you make the connection between touchpoints, customers, and required improvements more easily.
3 Ways to Improve Customer Experience with a Data-Driven Approach
At every step of the journey, a targeted customer leaves feedback essential to your brand’s development. Remember that the customer needs to solve a problem in their life, and if your product or service is not appropriate they will not hesitate to state this.
This feedback will allow you to improve customer service or fix other details of the process. Have the customers complained about the rude staff? Was the payment process too complicated? Note these complaints, then go ahead and fix them. Friendly customer service, on-time solutions, and simple payment systems factor heavily into the customer’s experience.
What other points should you keep in mind when improving customer experience? Before thinking about finding the best social media platform, the best email app, or the best content ideas, rest a little. The secret lies in paying attention to the core stages of the customer journey and even working on bringing back lost customers. To cut these options short, three ways that lead to better CX are:
1. Make a Better First Impression
First impressions matter. Even though processes can be optimized over time, the initial impression the first customers leave with matters. For example, the main page of your website should be top-notch, and you can achieve that by using a landing page building tool.
Customers will go out there and spread the word about this product. If they had a negative customer experience in their first encounter with your brand, they’re likely to leave a bad review that can damage your reputation for a long time. Pay attention to crafting an offer that differs from your competitors and keeps customers hooked up.
2. Eliminate the Hurdles
Customers make decisions in a fraction of a second. If your website is designed with inappropriate colors, is not optimized for mobile devices, or has glitches and takes decades to load, that will be enough for customers to bounce off.
Ensure that you’ve paid proper attention to minimizing the obstacles customers have to pass for making a purchase. The sales process should be smooth for both online and offline selling. Even retail spaces should be set in a clear area and present products easily.
3. Win Back the Hearts of Unsatisfied Customers
It’s impossible to please every single person who encounters your business, and even the most reputable brands have felt the sting of unsatisfied customers. These customers are likely to share their bad experiences with the public through reviews and comments on social media. This is not definite though. You can reach out to these customers and negotiate compensation for their issues.
Empower Your Business With Customer Experience
Customer experience sets successful businesses on their path towards stability and growth, but it can’t depend upon single metrics. Customers discover brands in different stages of needs and awareness. To nurture healthy relationships that lead to purchases, the experience needs to be customized during each step of the process.
Data provides an unshakable foundation for strategies that work. If you want to distance yourself from competitors and stack higher profits, your knowledge of customer experience may be stopping you. Start mending these relationships, and give people a good story to tell.
Improve customers experience even today by optimizing the initial touchpoints, eliminating possible hurdles, and offering compensation to unsatisfied customers.
About the author
Kasia Slonawska is a content marketer at Mailbird, an email management platform. With broad professional experience and educational background in writing, she creates unique, engaging texts that win the Google ranks.
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