Four ways to create a better customer experience

Delivering the perfect customer experience (CX) might not be the simplest thing to do, but it is well worth the effort. A better omnichannel customer experience correlates with better sales and higher profits. In fact, companies that are able to boost their CX to the degree that the bulk of their customers are satisfied see their revenue double in 36 months.

The majority of customers agree that they would actually be willing to pay more for services and products if they were guaranteed a better experience. Clearly, catering to your customers can drive business performance improvement and bring you lasting success through increased customer lifetime value to boot. However, improving the customer experience involves approaching it from many different angles and coming up with data-backed strategies for organization-wide growth in the process.

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Following are a few excellent ways to get started with improving the customer experience:

1. Choose an omnichannel approach to CX

As more and more people access the internet from their phones, smart TVs, laptops and desktops, the importance of adequately handling every available communication channel has only intensified. Businesses will need to keep up with their customers' preferred communication mediums if they are to have any chance of surfacing in a sea of competitors. Adopting an omnichannel strategy involves handling every possible touchpoint in such a way that they all align with each customer's journey.

To get omnichannel customer experience right, you should aim to keep communication consistent across touchpoints. This means you will need to go beyond a mere multichannel approach to handling distinct channels—agents interacting via each channel must have full access to interaction data from all other channels to create an effective omnichannel customer experience.

2. Try customer journey mapping

Customer journey maps are incredibly useful visual tools that are meant to shed light on precisely what customers might be thinking about your brand as they interact with it in addition to the path they have taken from discovery to capture and onward to departure.

Essentially, a customer journey map is a literal map of your customer's interactions with your brand, from the very first to the absolute last. What makes this unique from, say, a basic rundown of the average interaction process flow is a major emphasis on the inner state of your customers at each touchpoint. This includes their behavior, but also their beliefs, attitudes and viewpoints. With these details in mind, you can construct a customer journey map that is extremely useful and easy to reason about in context. More to the point, a genuine customer journey map makes it easy to spot bottlenecks and inadequate processes that serve to slow or impede customers as they go about interacting with your business.

3. Communicate with your customers

Communicating with your customers may seem like a simple suggestion, but many companies stumble at this step. Communication, in this case, should be a two-way street. you should openly encourage your customers to provide feedback at every turn and ensure that this feedback is carefully assessed once it has been given. Feedback can be acquired in many ways, including surveys and private consultations with standout clients, as well as through conversation analytics and conversation intelligence software that gauge customer sentiment across every interaction.

When your customers tell you how they feel about your services, take the time to show that their input is valued and take immediate steps to implement all reasonable ideas. This proves that you are indeed listening to your customers and that their opinions matter to your organization.

4. Communicate with your employees too

Opening up a dialogue with your customers can be a great way to gain insight into their interests, but doing the same with your employees can bring about benefits you may not have expected. Your employees are often on the front lines in dealing with your customers directly. They face both the highest praise and the harshest criticism from customers on a regular basis simply by being the very people those customers interact with.

You can pick up on amazing insights and valuable intel by asking the people who work for you what their experiences are like with customers and what they have noticed customers need most from your company. And ultimately, happy employees are more productive and deliver better experiences and outcomes to customers.

Keep up with your customers

Forging a better, more satisfying customer experience essentially comes down to caring about your customers and staying abreast of their needs. A single bad experience can send customers flying into the open arms of your competitors.

Finding a solid foothold in an increasingly shifty market means making a point of pleasing your customers is an absolute necessity. The ideas enumerated above should set you off in the right direction for optimizing your brand's relationship with its customers.