A good customer experience builds customer loyalty and brand value, helping you reach a wider audience through word-of-mouth marketing and other marketing strategies. So, it doesn’t come as a surprise to see brands obsessing over creating a seamless end-to-end customer experience or working towards improving the existing workflow while considering user behavior.
When creating a friction-free customer experience across all touchpoints, you first put customers in the center. Knowing target users and analyzing their intents while interacting with your brand is the first queue to building a good user experience. You cannot deliver the same unless you know what your users want.
Customers form the crux of any business relationship. Thus, building trust and offering a satisfactory experience takes center stage when you want to improve customer experience for your brand. Here are 11 tactics to enhance how you interact with your customers and eventually create an impressive customer experience workflow that will transcend into business.
11 Proven Tactics to Improve Customer Experience for Your Brand
1. Enable your customer-facing teams
Your customer support team is on the frontline, interacting with your users directly. These are the ones who know what challenges users face while engaging with your product.
If you want to improve the customer experience for your brand, enable your support team to help users better (and faster) by:
- Giving your support team the authority to take instant calls within the company guidelines to resolve an issue. This can be issuing a refund or canceling an order.
- Analyzing impending customer complaints and taking necessary measures to help your users. For instance, if a product feature is unavailable for technical reasons, consider announcing it so your users know about it.
- Implementing omnichannel feedback to offer multiple support options. This is a good way to reach out and help your users where they are.
Whether the user is right or wrong is not the question. Your go-to strategy is to equip your support team with enough knowledge, alternative options, and ground-level power to take a call that benefits the user and the brand. Of course, it should have some boundaries that will help avoid going overboard and saying yes to every customer demand.
To further enhance the capabilities of your customer-facing teams, consider adopting a learning management system. This tool can streamline the training process, ensuring every team member is well-versed in the latest product features, customer service protocols, and problem-solving techniques, elevating the overall customer experience.
2. Implement an omnichannel customer experience roadmap
An omnichannel customer experience indicates a coordinated journey that includes every customer touchpoint and delivers a seamless experience. It allows a smooth transition from one channel to another without breaking point.
The omnichannel strategy looks into the customer journey — from the first discovery point to the after-sales support. It ensures customers get a consistent experience irrespective of their channel or device.
For instance, Google champions omnichannel customer experience, especially its browser — Google Chrome. When users log into their accounts, their history and activities are automatically synced into every device. In fact, users can access tabs on phone browsers that they left open on their laptops.
Google Chrome offers a seamless synchronization that creates a unique and smooth customer experience. This experience transcends into numbers, with Google Chrome owning more than 64.73% of the market share in the internet browsing industry.
Damian Grabarczyk, a seasoned e-commerce entrepreneur and the co-founder of PetLab Co., shares — “In navigating the diverse needs of pet owners at PetLab Co., we honed in on an omnichannel strategy that truly resonated — weaving together their diverse needs into a seamless tapestry across every touchpoint. From the first click on our social media ad to the personalized follow-up email, every interaction was meticulously designed to resonate on a personal level. The tailored, seamless experience across channels led to a 25% boost in repeat purchases and a surge in engagement, proving its importance. This strategy not only improved our customer experience but also strengthened our brand loyalty, demonstrating the importance of a well-planned omnichannel approach.
3. Personalize customer interactions
Personalization in modern-day marketing goes beyond including first names in emails or WhatsApp messages. It revolves around customizing interactions across all customer touchpoints.
Personalization to improve customer experience means understanding user behavior details like the devices they use, how many times they log in, what purchases they make, what items are in the cart, what mode of payment they usually use, what kind of product catalogs they browse, and so on. Putting all this information into your interactions is the ultimate way to deliver personalization.
One way to implement personalization to improve customer experience is by offering relevant recommendations. Every brand uses recommendation engines to drive personalized content and trigger more engagement.
For instance, if you watch a lot of Korean dramas from the thriller genre on Netflix, Netflix will pick up your behavior and send you recommendations for similar series or movies via email. It also shows similar recommendation series on its app or browser, helping users find more shows or movies that pique their interest —increasing engagement on the platform.
4. Implement customer journey mapping
Understanding your customer behavior is challenging because every customer will have a unique roadmap from one point to another. Customer journey mapping may not give you 100% accuracy in predicting a user’s browsing path. Still, it offers a visual insight into the milestones each customer achieves while interacting with your brand.
From awareness to loyalty, customer journey mapping helps understand where users face friction and what is hampering the customer experience.
For instance, Spotify mapped its customer journey and saw where the music-sharing feature best fits the customer experience roadmap.
The use case walks us through the entire experience mapping — from when users open the Spotify app to whether they like the music their friend shared.
At every stage, Spotify enlists how the customer engages in what the user is doing and thinking. It also considers the user’s emotions (usually through empathy mapping). This date, clubbed with customer surveys, helped Spotify understand how each user felt at each touch point.
Spotify identified the core pain points for their users and quickly worked towards smoothing the sharing experience. This automatically encouraged users to share more music more often.
5. Offer a self-help deck or knowledge base
Customers like to have a self-help deck or AI-powered knowledge base that can enable them to find answers to common queries. You can continue building and updating this deck based on new customer queries and product updates. For example, having an AI self-service that guides your customers to the right resources can make the process more easy for them. Again, your customer support team plays a crucial role in developing and maintaining this deck.
A knowledge base is like a repository that consists of answers to common problems users might encounter while engaging with a brand. This is easy to access and acts like a self-help book.
Contrary to popular opinion, with time, knowledge bases can become complex with myriad options – like troubleshooting, general FAQs, billing, how-tos, explainer videos, and even video guides.
Knowledge base or self-help decks can:
- Reduce the onboarding pressure by enabling users.
- Offers a way to reduce pressure on the support team by giving solutions to almost every common query.
- Identify user behavior patterns and share valuable insights about your product and business model.
For instance, WhatsApp has its knowledge base. It has sections on general chats, channels, communities, privacy, payments, and every WhatsApp feature.
Each category is divided into subcategories to address more specific queries.
Not just this, WhatsApp also sends direct messages in the chat that talk about new features, help tips, and more.
The comprehensive knowledge base covers every random query you can think of while accessing the app. Simultaneously, it engages users in real-time through instant messaging, ensuring they are up-to-date with new releases and how-to guides for a safer and enhanced experience.
6. Pay attention to analytics
Analytics is your secret key to unlocking customer experience insights directly impacting your business.
Since customer experience is not limited to one channel or device, auditing customer experience should include every department.
Why? This is because your customers interact with every part of your business. To get a complete picture, you will need to dig into the perspective of each internal department — be it marketing, sales, or customer support.
Review analytics to pinpoint the weak links in your marketing and sales funnel. For instance, the data from your CRM can show you the total number of lost deals and help you analyze what led to the loss. Your goal is to remove the bottlenecks to improve customer experience.
Amazon tops the list for using user analytics to offer a seamless customer experience. Amazon’s anticipatory shipping model is a classic example of paying head to user behavior analytics. The licensed anticipatory delivery model uses large amounts of information to anticipate the items a customer may purchase, the delivery timeline, and where the delivery will happen.
The detailed analytic models help Amazon detect an order before it is placed, and the items are automatically shipped to a neighborhood circulation stockroom, awaiting transportation upon order.
Simultaneously, Amazon uses prescient examination to reduce delivery conveyance time and other expenses while expanding the item deals and net revenue.
7. Foster customer loyalty
A crucial chunk of building a genuine customer experience also involves rewarding customers who have been loyal users. Customer referral and loyalty programs can help build higher brand value and make customers happy.
Happy customers are your key to improving customer experience — these customers will respond to surveys, try to spread the good word and stick with your brand in adverse times.
Customer loyalty programs encourage positive word-of-mouth and return as valued customers. Although these programs have certain reward criteria, the benefits are tempting enough to continue participating and being an advocate. Starbucks’s loyalty program encourages customers to collect stars against each order using the app — whether you order in-store or through the app. The app offers options to pay for in-store orders, so you never miss out on collecting the stars.
Along with exclusive coupons and offers, customers get a free tall-size drink after collecting 10 stars. Additionally, birthday special discounts and member-exclusive offers are top tier in their loyalty program. All this, combined with a good-looking app, in-app personalization, and smooth navigation paths, makes users want to use the app more frequently (and be a brand advocate).
8. Conduct a UX audit
A user experience audit is a great way to detect friction in your product and website. A UX audit can detect flaws like pages not loading, incorrect information, navigation logic, etc. before a user encounters them.
UX audit, when done properly, helps brands understand their customers better. Nowadays you have UX research tools that delve into user behavior and tie it with core business metrics that help improve customer experience across their journey.
A well-executed review can help businesses increase retention, boost sales, and create a customer experience that adds value to the brand. With a UX audit, you can:
- Improve the overall usability of your product or services: You get detailed insights on how easy it is to navigate on your website or app and how you can make it more neutral and intuitive for a better customer experience.
- Grow conversion rates significantly — helps you identify why a CTA is not performing. You will discover the scope to improve or design your CTAs, directly impacting conversions.
- Know your users better — With a UX audit, you can refine and improve your user personas. You will understand why certain users don’t see value in your offering. This will help you better communicate with your potential users and push them forward in the conversion cycle.
An UX audit is a great starting point to learn what is working and what isn’t (and why). It allows you to improve your product or services and design an experience your users want. You can use the website audit tool to detect technical, content, UX, and conversion errors and even write technical assignments for your team.
Combining the insights from a UX audit with customer feedback can create more actionable to-do’s that will improve the overall customer experience and increase brand value.
In most cases, UX audits happen in a controlled environment based on user feedback or how users interact with a brand. However, Airbnb’s story of resigning and launching a global check-in tool is rooted in identifying a point that many hosts experienced. This led to identifying a major gap in the host-to-customer communication, causing friction. Airbnb took this finding as an opportunity to create a global check-in tool for the platform that was empathy-informed.
Airbnb’s close observation of user behavior and aligning it with how users navigate the platform is a classic example of why auditing user behavior is important. Although Airbnb suddenly caught wind of this issue, this story inspires brands to keep reviewing the UX occasionally.
9. Create consistent brand messaging across all channels
Consistent brand messaging across all channels is important to improve customer experience. It not only differentiates your brand from your competitors, but it also communicates your value proposition effectively.
When it comes to improving customer experience, it’s important to have a similar approach in messaging across all channels. This keeps a consistent customer experience, making it easy for customers to transition from one channel to another.
Slack has consistent messaging across all channels. The brand indulges in regular communication shortcuts and terminologies that create an instant brand recall.
For example, their blog is called Several People are Typing — taking a queue from how it appears on the app when someone is typing a message. Also, a quick note: “You’re doing really well.” This is a well-thought-out approach to resonate with the brand’s core messaging.
A similar approach is seen in their social handles. For instance, Slack’s LinkedIn page mostly discusses professional communication but also has a similar quirk in its social messaging.
The entire brand messaging strategy of Slack is creating content that resonates with their target users and has a direct link with how users engage on their app.
10. Always have a clutter-free checkout process
Getting customers to purchase is the first; having a smooth checkout process is the second and most important chunk. A minor inconvenience in the checkout process may stop users from repeating the purchase or giving recommendations.
The entire process plays a pivotal role in the customer experience you’ve built. With everything done right, a minor hiccup is good enough to sabotage the experience you delivered throughout the navigation journey.
A checkout page should adhere to a few core principles:
- It should reflect the customer’s needs. The language should be straightforward. It is better to avoid jargon on your checkout page.
- The payment options should include digital payment methods or pay-on-delivery, Internet banking, and card payment options.
- Communicating the payment gateway security feature is essential so that users trust your brand. Implement multi-factor authentication systems to double-fold the security.
Clarity and security are two important factors contributing to a smooth checkout process. For instance, MOZ has a clean and seamless checkout process. It offers a free trial before charging you for its complete feature suite, and the same is mentioned on the payment page. MOZ’s checkout page works because:
- The payment information page clearly shows the value, which is zero, since this is a free trial. It also clearly mentions the amount for recurring payments for which you will authorize the app and from when.
- The page also highlights what you are paying for. The best part is it is clutter-free and visually appealing.
11. Implement Voice of Customers (VoC) programs
Voice of Customer (VoC) is a research methodology to know your customers better. It involves collecting customer feedback and analyzing how customers feel about your business, service, or product. Sentiment analysis, a powerful tool in VoC programs, allows you to delve into the emotional aspect of customer feedback and understand the nuances in their expressions.
VoC programs are a great way to improve customer experience. It sheds light on why customers make certain decisions and their perspectives. It reduces the gap between customer expectations and the experience that they have. VoC Programs include:
- Customer surveys
- Interviews & focus groups
- Website behavior
- Email, live chat, chatbots & customer support
- Customer success team
Without knowing how your customers feel about your brand, you cannot offer a seamless customer experience. Implement a VoC strategy to detect early warnings and brand crises, evaluate new ideas, increase user retention, and customize your products or services to meet customer needs.
For instance, YouTube asks for quick ratings after watching a video. These feedback surveys capture viewer preferences and understand metrics like video quality and user preferences. Not just the app, YouTube even has a feedback submission option for those accessing the app on TV.
YouTube implemented a quick survey option initially. When a user gives a rating for the video watches, it expands into a mini multi-choice survey asking the reason for the rating.
It is a very personal way to ask customer feedback and does not consume much time. This gives YouTube instant access to user preferences and also highlights if there is an issue in viewing the video.
Conclusion
Improving your customer experience starts with being proactive and implementing strategies bound to give results. Close the gap between customer expectations and experience with these tried and tested tactics to improve customer experience.
Implementing these strategies can help your business meet and exceed customer expectations, improving customer satisfaction, loyalty, and positive word-of-mouth referrals.