8 Ways to Improve your Customer Experience

Everything in the business world starts by defining objectives and the customer experience strategy is no different. Customer experience comes from the interactions between a business and a customer. Even one simple interaction is a step towards a business relationship. This is why you have to be aware of the variety of objectives that stand in front of you.

Business-to-customer interaction can take many forms, including service, awareness, advocacy, purchases, discovery, support, and cultivation. To start improving your customer experience, you should choose one or several of these forms of interaction, according to your business goals and objectives.

Now that you know which aspect of the interaction you want to improve, you have to define the principles. These principles are going to be your main customer experience strategy guidelines. If you need some inspiration, feel free to check out the top 10 top customer experience influencers and what do they have to say about this.

Do you want to wow your customers? Do you want them to feel embraced? Do you want to instill absolute trust? These are some of the questions that you should ask yourself. Let the answers be the mold of your customer experience strategy. Once you have your principles, organize training for your employees and make sure that everyone is on board with them.

You won’t be able to successfully improve the customer experience without taking your customers into consideration. After all, you are creating this experience for them, so it would be smart of you to ask them what they want. To streamline these efforts, you should consider using one of the software tools available on the market.

While Adobe Campaign is a great tool for marketers, I’ve found it’s “Customer Profiles” feature very powerful. You can use it to gain a complete view of your customers. When you have all the data about your customers, including past interactions and purchases, it becomes easy to identify trends and offer the experience they want and expect.

Have you ever wondered what makes experiences stick with us? According to this research, emotions are very powerful. In fact, 50% of any experience is based on an emotion. Some would argue that emotions are so powerful that they can shape attitudes and drive decisions.

If you want to truly improve your customer experience, you have to start making your customers emotionally attached to your brand. Remember those principles from the start of the article? Now would be a good time to use them.

If your goal is, let’s say, to make people feel happy, then you should start fine-tuning your brand image and train your employees to make the customers happy. You won't be able to achieve this immediately, as this is an ongoing strategy with long-term effects.

If you prefer more of a reactive approach, you should start listening to your customers and use this information to improve your customer experience. For instance, you can use post-purchase and post-interaction surveys to ask your customers for feedback.

You can always diversify your strategy to gather more valuable feedback. There are many ways to do so. You can make outbound calls, tap into the power of social media networks, send out emails, and so on.

Offering the same customer experience across all channels will only get you so far. If you really want to achieve greater success, you have to embrace the new rules – rules of a highly personalized experience. Thanks to the modern software tools, it’s not difficult to capture all kinds of information about your customers, including purchasing behavior, history with your business, and so on.

You can then use this information to build custom-tailored offers. This is a great way to show your customers that you care about them, and that you take the time to respond to their personal needs. After testing numerous options, I’ve found the Direct Mail feature of Adobe Campaign to be the most efficient in pushing customized offers.

As your ultimate effort towards building a more enjoyable customer experience, you should redesign your customer service. First, you have to identify all its elements. If your customers are using your website before they make a purchasing decision, then your website is also a part of it.

Everything customers rely on and use during the customer journey has to be simple to use. Make sure that you do everything on your part to minimize their effort. This includes the time they’ve spent, the number of steps they have to take, and so on. You want to do so across all channels to offer a consistent user experience for all your customers.

There is also another thing to consider about your customer journey – the pain points. If your customer hits a wall, they will more likely remember this than anything else. You don't want your brand to be associated with bad impressions. This is why you should adopt an ongoing strategy of identifying and removing paint points from the customer journey.

There is a chance that a certain pain point cannot be removed from the customer journey. If this is the case, you should at least make it a little bit easier for your customers. Fine-tuning your customer journey should always be your top priority if you want to control the customer experience.

I hope one of these ways has resonated with you. Please note that creating a better customer experience is an ongoing process that should be regularly assessed, simply because everything is prone to change.