Digital Transformation
Discover how businesses can enhance customer experience through personalization, efficient service, and leveraging technology. From defining CX to offering practical strategies, this guide explores how to build meaningful interactions that keep customers engaged and loyal.
Guide
15 minutes
Sep 27, 2024
When it comes to your customers, you can never do too much to keep them happy and engaged. That’s why businesses should never stop improving their customer experience.
From personalizing communication to leveraging technology and gathering meaningful feedback, read on to learn more ways to improve customer experience to create seamless, memorable experiences that will keep customers coming back.
Customer experience (CX) is the overall impression a customer has of a company based on the sum of their interactions. It’s a combination of every touchpoint a customer has with a brand, from marketing and sales to product usage and support, as well as post-purchase engagement.
Customer experience is often a combination of many things that affect a person’s relationship with a business, including:
You can go even deeper than these three overarching themes, including the six big pillars that make up a great customer experience for most businesses.
Customer experience and customer service are not the same thing, but they do have a lot in common. And, like we mentioned above in the definition of customer experience, customer service is a major aspect of the overall customer experience.
We defined customer experience above, so let’s do the same with customer service before explaining where they differ. Customer service is the support provided to customers during the sales process, especially in post-sale when customers have issues with the product or service.
The goal of customer service is to alleviate any pain points or process snags so everything can go smoothly, ensuring a positive experience. This can be providing problem resolutions, additional information, or proactive assistance.
Customer service is one of the major pillars of customer experience because it plays a pivotal role in shaping their perception of your brand.
The difference between customer experience and customer service lies in their differing scopes. Customer experience is broader, encompassing the entire journey a customer takes with you, including every single touchpoint, even those not associated with customer service, like advertising, social media posts, marketing materials, and your website.
Customer service focuses is a narrower scope and just one part of customer experience focused on direct interactions when customers (or prospective customers) need help, have questions, or require support.
The number one goal for most businesses is to grow. This means sell more, make more, expand, diversify, and much more, but none of it is possible if your customers are unhappy, unsatisfied, or non-existent. Customer experience drives business growth!
Customer experience matters because improving it can increase revenue by up to 15% and 73% of customers now say CX is the number one thing they consider when choosing which company to do business with.
Here are some important reasons businesses spend so much time tracking and looking for ways to improve customer experience:
To create a customer experience that is consistently positive across all major touchpoints, you need an organized, thorough, and actionable plan in place. This is called a customer experience framework.
To start building the framework, consider the relationship between you and your customers, all the touchpoints within the buying journey, your company’s overall mission and goals, and the extent of your technical abilities.
A typical customer experience framework involves a few key steps:
Customer experience is so widespread—found across multiple channels, all customer journey steps, and even just out in the wild—that examples of places businesses can improve their customer experience are everywhere. Here are some obvious (and not so obvious) examples of customer experiences in a typical business:
ProManage, a Chicago-based financial consulting company, struggled to communicate their expertise to consumers through their personal finance app. Lacking user-centric design, clear messaging, and proper market research, the app faced low user retention and risked failure.
ProManage sought help from Impact's managed marketing team who improved the app's adoption, increased client satisfaction, and generated more product demos. The collaboration was so successful that it evolved into a long-term partnership. Watch the case study video below to get the full story:
Elevating your customer experience is crucial for business success. While price and quality were once the main drivers, customer experience is now the key factor in influencing purchasing decisions. Let’s explore customer experience strategies that your brand could implement.
AI can enhance customer experience by providing fast, round-the-clock support. AI-driven tools like chatbots handle routine customer inquiries instantly. These chatbots learn from interactions to improve over time, offering more relevant solutions to customers.
AI also enables businesses to analyze customer data to predict preferences, offering tailored recommendations and promotions.
An omnichannel strategy improves customer experience by providing seamless interactions across multiple touchpoints, such as websites, social media, phone, email, in-person, and more. It ensures that customers can switch between channels without losing context, creating a consistent and cohesive experience.
By integrating data from various channels, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of customer preferences and behaviors, allowing for personalized communication and solutions. An omnichannel approach also reduces friction in the buying journey, enabling customers to interact with brands on their preferred platforms.
91% of consumers, ages 18-49, say they exclusively buy things online using their smartphones. A mobile-friendly site means having fast loading times, easy navigation, and a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes to make it easier for customers to find what they need quickly.
A mobile-friendly site means having fast loading times, easy navigation, and a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes to make it easier for customers to find what they need quickly.
Another way customers can find what they need quickly is through social shopping—which is when social media accounts link to an ecommerce site to allow users to directly buy products from social platforms.
Tracking metrics provides businesses with valuable insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and pain points. Plus, you can see with clear proof whether or not your current CX strategy is working based on how it’s affecting the relevant metrics.
By monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) such as customer satisfaction scores, response times, and Net Promoter Scores (NPS), companies can identify areas that need improvement.
Tracking trends over time enables companies to proactively address potential issues before they escalate. This continuous feedback loop ensures that the customer experience evolves in line with changing expectations, leading to higher satisfaction and loyalty.
When customers feel heard and valued, their trust and loyalty increase. Listening to your customers and understanding the needs and interests of your audience seems like an obvious way to improve customer experience, but too many businesses don’t do it.
By actively gathering feedback through surveys, social media, and direct interactions, businesses can identify customer needs, preferences, and issues. This insight helps you create more personalized products and services and to deliver clearer, more personalized marketing materials.
Mapping the customer journey reveals every touchpoint with your brand, from initial awareness to the selling process to post-sale interactions like support, cross-selling, and repeat business.
By visualizing and recording the entire journey, businesses can identify potential areas of friction and opportunities to improve. It also helps businesses anticipate customer needs at each stage, providing proactive support and timely solutions.
Tailoring interactions to individual preferences and behaviors significantly enhances customer experience because it gives people more relevant information. By using data to deliver better content, offers, and recommendations at each stage, businesses can create more meaningful connections.
Personalized touchpoints—whether through targeted emails, product suggestions, or customized support—make customers feel valued and understood. This approach reduces friction, increases engagement, and drives conversions by presenting the right information at the right time.
Nobody wants customer churn because it’s expensive, time-consuming, and a sign that your experience is not up to par with your competitors. But, when it does happen, you can use it as a learning experience to improve for the future.
Start by trying to find out why they left. This can be a “we’re sad to see you go” email with a simple survey, a questionnaire through a social media DM, a phone call, or whatever you deem appropriate. Give them many chances and channels to provide feedback.
Then, as uncomfortable as it may be, take the time to really understand where the rift between you and them was created. If you do, you can make sure no future customers run into those same problems.
Better engagement leads to an improved customer experience by fostering meaningful interactions. This not only keeps your business top of mind, having more time spent with people improves the customer’s perception of your brand, which leads to more sales and happier experiences.
When businesses actively engage with customers through tailored content and relevant offers, they build stronger relationships. And remember it doesn’t have to be a one-way street, prompt your audience to respond and interact!
Speaking of connecting with people, it doesn’t always have to be strictly business. Everybody involved in the buying process is human, which means emotions play a big role whether you know it or not.
Encourage your salespeople, customer service representatives, and creative marketers to tell stories when they interact with or write things intended for customers and prospects. Every decision made is affected in some way by emotion (71% of customers say they recommend brands based on emotional connection), so engaging with consumers on that level is a major ingredient for growth in business today.
Emotional connections with your customers are so valuable because emotionally connected customers are more loyal, making them 52% more valuable to you than customers rated “highly satisfied.”
Customer experience management refers to the tasks, processes, and strategies that businesses take to track, organize, and update their customer experience across all touchpoints. It’s important because of how fast technology moves today and how much it affects what you can offer your customers.
Without consistent management of your customer experience, you risk falling behind competitors or watching your overall customer experience deteriorate to the point that it begins to negatively affect sales and retention.
Customer experience is not something you can set and forget and it’s absolutely not something you can ignore entirely. Modern consumers demand a lot of you because competition in every industry has raised the bar over and over again, which means you have to, also.
If you think you need help, you’re not alone. Customer experience consulting with a respected MSP like Impact can bring you access to brilliant CX minds who’ve seen it all and can help you deliver the best experiences to your customers.
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