It’s not about customer care—or any single area—but the overall impression your brand makes throughout the customer journey. It’s their perception of every area of your brand and that will make or break your success.

And no matter how big a company grows, customers are what drives it forward.

They’re the beating heart of each brand. Like a real heart, they need the care to ensure their health and longevity.

So in this guide, you’ll learn exactly how customer experience drives business growth. We’ll then outline three strategies for boosting it.

Greater Retention

It’s simple logic: without quality customer experience (CX), your clients have no reason to stay with you. There are plenty of other companies who will happily sweep your dissatisfied clients off their feet.
The numbers back that up, too—56% of consumers stop engaging with a brand after a single poor interaction. Repeat business requires a quality customer experience, without exception.

Word of Mouth Referrals

33% of people discovered new products by word of mouth in 2022. The most powerful marketing engines can’t beat happy customers recommending their products to friends and family.

You don’t need a case study to understand why that is—happy customers want others to experience the joy your product brings them. Investing in happy customers means gaining their referrals.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

41% of marketing teams say Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is their most critical KPI. And that’s not a huge surprise—CSAT quantifies the overall “health” of your business.

Brands with high CSAT scores enjoy loyal customers with low turnover. That’s crucial because—depending on your industry—getting a new customer can be far more expensive than retaining an existing one.

Investing in better customer experience means higher customer satisfaction. This, in turn, leads to high customer lifetime value (CLV), reduced churn, and lower customer acquisition costs.
PS: Nicereply makes it easier than ever to gather CSAT data without pestering customers with long surveys. Check out how we do it here.

Four Strategies to Boost Customer Experience

Having learned why customer experience matters, let’s learn how to improve it. Here are four strategies for making your customers happier than ever:

1. Get To Know Your Customers

You can’t improve customer experience without knowing your customers. Optimizing your business requires understanding your target market’s ideal experience.

And the best way to understand your clients? Creating personas of your target customers.

Personas combine all information you’ve gathered about your clients in a format your team can quickly understand. They synthesize all demographic data into real-life people with unique goals and desires.

You now have specific people to consider when optimizing marketing, UI, customer support, or any other part of your business. This inspires a “why” behind every adjustment, transforming the optimization process into an intuitive process.

Increased customer satisfaction is a natural result of understanding your customers well.

2. Gather Feedback Whenever Possible

91% of companies make business decisions based on customer feedback.

If customer satisfaction is the heart of every business, gathering feedback is the bloodstream. Feedback lets your business understand user pain points and solve them successfully.

But with no effective feedback strategy, brands are in the dark about their client’s issues. The inevitable result is increased churn as customers search for better alternatives.

Thankfully, feedback collection tools make a once-difficult task easy. Software like Nicereply makes gathering CSAT, Customer Effort Score (CES), and Net Promoter Score (NPS) data a one-click process for busy customers.

In-signature, post-resolution, and in-line links to surveys turn a once-frustrating task into a seconds-long affair.

Coupled with extensive integrations and detailed analytics, Nicereply is a full-featured feedback solution. Our platform’s fast setup and outstanding success have earned us a 98% satisfaction score across Zendesk, G2, and Capterra.

3. Provide Exceptional Customer Service

Your success depends on your support team’s ability to solve user problems effectively.

Microsoft found 90% of consumers consider customer service quality when making a purchase. But that’s not all—58% of them will switch companies because of poor customer service, too.

It’s not hard to grasp why customer service is so crucial. Whenever customers have issues, questions, and general feedback, your service department is their connection with your brand.

Increase Availability

Better customer service starts with accessible customer service.

You can’t help your customers if your support team takes too long to respond. That’s why 22% of consumers stop doing business with a company when they can’t reach a service rep.

If hiring more service staff isn’t an option, consider investing in chatbots.

While AI can’t fully replace human agents, it can increase productivity by automating repetitive tasks (answering simple questions, directing users to the right department, etc.). AI’s abilities will expand, too—Stella Connect estimates AI will handle 95% of customer interactions by 2025.

4. Map Your Customer Journey

Improving the customer experience means improving every step of the customer journey. But to do that, you need to understand it in detail.

Enter the customer journey map. It illustrates your customers’ interactions, needs, and perceptions during their interactions with your brand.

Cross-referencing this journey with your core CX metrics (CSAT, CES, etc.) is a powerful tool for finding opportunities to boost satisfaction.

Customer Experience Is Everything

As you can see, customer experience is the engine driving your company toward its goals.

Firms investing in CX enjoy sky-high retention, referrals, and customer satisfaction. But those who don’t aren’t so lucky—they’ll keep losing customers to brands who take CX seriously.

Don’t sweat it, though—if you follow our four strategies outlined above, that won’t be your problem.

Know your customers, gather feedback from them, provide great customer support, and map your customer journey. Combine a practical approach to CX with consistency, and you’ve got a sure-fire recipe for taking your brand to new heights.

How did you like this blog?

---