How To Invest In Customer Experience | IDETA

Have you ever talked to a customer service employee and left frustrated? Or received an email from a brand and been disappointed? Yes, certainly!
Sometimes purchasing a good or a service can be difficult because some brands do not make it easy for customers to do so. Whereas they should, as it is in both own interests. What’s more after making a purchase, we can be faced with a poor help desk that will leave your problems unsolved and will talk you out of buying in this place again. These last few years, companies focused more and more on customer experience, seeing that they could benefit from this.
Now more than ever, pricing, product and customer experience are at the core of every brand strategy.
If you want to know more about customer experience, this article will guide you.

What Is Customer Experience

Customer experience is the sum of feelings that a customer experienced while buying on your app, websites or while asking for an information via email or on social media. All these interactions must be seen as opportunities for your brand to shine and make the customer or potential customer feel appreciated. The key is to collect all these opportunities points or to see where they are lacking to provide the best experience to your customers.
Customer Experience or CX is deeply connected with CRM (Customer Relationship Management). The more data you have on your customers, the more you can analyze them and create a personnalized connection between your brand and your customers in the long-run.

How To Rate A Customer Experience?

First you can check in your analytics if the purchasing process has been fully completed. It will give you an indication of what is working or not. Then you can also check if your customers are coming back to your website.
If not, you should look into why. Is it because of your products or is it because they had trouble to be delivered? In this case, there is something you can do to prevent your churn from increasing.
By improving the way you communicate on shipment and by sending delivery updates to your customers, this could have been avoided.
Especially in online retail where the information about the shipment is key, your brand should maintain a cohesive presence in its communication with the customers. In spite of the fact that the purchase has been done, there is still some work to do and confirm the order as well as reassure the customers about the delivery is one of them.
You can also implement a NPS (Net Promoter Score), Customer Effort Score or a Satisfaction score after the order has been received and even after the reimbursement period to get an overall idea.
Other possibility for you would be to send surveys to your data base and ask experience related questions to your customers and also get more information concerning their expectations.

Customer Journey

One of the most important tool for your customer experience, if not the most important one. A customer journey is meant to study the feelings of the buyer all along the purchasing process. The goal is to make sure to get rid of pain points and optimize the buying journey. When you are studying a customer journey, you also want to make sure that your brand brings a coherent customer experience throughout all the different channels. It is represented as a map where you will identify where the interactions with your customer take place and evaluate the feelings encountered.

Customers who lived a positive customer experience tend to come back and spend more. 49% of buyers made a purchase because they found the purchase experience positive. 86 % even state that they would be willing to pay a higher price for a better customer experience.

Customer Experience funnel

Before buying or becoming a customer, people will experience different phases. There are the three main stages:

• Discovery

The main goal here will be to spread awareness about your products or services. Your soon to be customer may not realize that he needs your solution or even that he or she has a problem that can be solved with what you have to offer.

• Engagement

During this phase, people realize that they have a problem that can be solved thanks to you and are actively searching for information. They are comparing several solutions to continue making their decision.

• Retention

This is the final stage in the decision making process. The customer is now ready to pay for the solution or to stay, depending on the business model you rely on.

Tools To Improve Customer Experience

Stay updated to new demands from customers and answer quickly. Even more true for Saas Companies where it is even more at stake and can play a real brand differentiator factor, even more than the price and the product in itself.

• Customer Journey Map
  As we saw earlier the customer journey mapping is the most important technic to implement when focusing on customer experience. You can do it by yourself on Google Slides or Canva or you can use a template.
• Hotjar
  Hotjar is a heatmap software that allows you to see where your users encounter difficulties on your website or app. It can be seen as a screenshot or recordings. It is particularly handy when you are working in a SaaS company.
• Userguiding
  With Userguiding you can implement in app guides to enlighten the users on your platform. You can also submit a NPS to your user and collect their feedback.
• Google Analytics: Thanks to Google Analytics, you can check the pages that are more visited, the exit pages...
• Ideta Chatbots
  Chatbots can remarkably optimize your customer experience. By being present 24/7 the chatbot can answer your customers’ questions at any moment. And linked with a CRM via an API system, you can even follow-up on these interactions and search way to improve it thanks to your customers feedback. It’s also a plus for customers that want to find questions themselves. Indeed today’s generation prefer talking to a robot rather than to a real person for some matters.
• Surveys will provide the best feedback, especially after a purchase. This is the opportunity to collect the data and make some improvements.

How to improve Customer Experience?

Well, sometimes a bad experience on a website can be due to technical difficulties. For instance, we now know that half of the traffic comes from mobile. So it is more than expected to browse easily on the mobile version of a brand; it is often not the case and companies that are customer centric are working on improving their load time and the mobile architecture of their website. The “mobile-first” design is also more and more trending.
As people’s taste tend to change very fast, companies must track every trend to keep up with their customers’ habits and expectations.
Looking into other sectors best practices is one way to go. Checking what other companies, even in different areas, can help you improve your customer experience strategy. Let’s take IKEA for example; you can go in any IKEA on this planet, the stores will have the same set up and you will find the same products. This is this cohesion that is searched for by many companies as it is a real challenge to apply with online platforms.

Conclusion

Companies understood what is at stake by investing on customer experience.
The need to understand it is more than crucial as companies communicate in various channels with their customers. It can be seen as an opportunity for them to deliver the right information at the right time but it is also a challenge to stay coherent and deliver the same level of service on every platforms (online and offline). Imagine building a CX strategy for your emails and not for your social media; this would be a loss of time and a missed opportunity to apply your customer knowledge throughout all your media.