customer visit experience

The Art of the Customer Visit: How to Plan One + Why You Should

When was the last time you visited a customer? On the surface, customer visits might seem extravagant and unnecessary.

Why not just get on a phone call or Zoom meeting? Or follow up with them via email? You could send them a survey or even dig into your product analytics to surface insights.

If I talk to another entrepreneur and say, "It's super crucial you physically visit your customers," they all look at me as if I just said the most obvious thing in the universe.

Visiting customers is like working out or eating healthy: everybody knows they should do it, but very few people do.

And we’re not excluding ourselves here: We launched Close in January of 2013, but our first customer visit was over a year later!

Some businesses put off visiting customers because it takes time, and it’s easy to put it off their long to-do list. Or, it may seem more urgent to focus on getting new customers to sign on rather than visiting existing customers.

If this sounds like you, let’s discuss the benefits of visiting your customers and how you can set up successful customer visits.

What are the Benefits of Visiting Your Customers in Person?

It’s true: COVID has permanently altered the way B2B sales work. Studies by McKinsey show that companies have reduced their in-person efforts as a go-to-market strategy by more than 50 percent since the pandemic started.

That said, many B2B buyers still prefer in-person contact during the customer journey.

And this is exactly where the opportunity lies—fewer companies are vying for your customer’s attention in person. This opens the playing field for your company to perform more customer visits.

And trust me—it’s worth the effort. Here's a quick rundown of the value we got from our first customer visits.

Motivate Your Team to Serve Customers Better

Seeing real people use your product is incredibly inspiring. It energizes you, recharges your batteries, and gives you a visceral sense of how your work actually impacts the lives of your users rather than just an intellectual understanding. It's like pouring gasoline on the fire that fuels your engine.

Everybody on your team—from the CEO to the intern—should visit a customer for this reason alone.

It differs from hearing customers tell you how much they love or think your product is great. You have to experience customer satisfaction happening in real-time. You need to see real human beings depending on what you build. You need to witness how your product helps them to operate better, to be better at what they are doing.

Your impact on other people's lives is a much stronger driver than any number on a spreadsheet can ever be. Do not underestimate how much this affects you. It's powerful.

Build Better Customer Relationships

Meeting someone in person adds another dimension to your relationship with your customer. You can do a lot of relationship-building via email, chat, phone, and Zoom, but nothing has the same effect as meeting someone in person. It creates a human bond between the two of you.

Jason Lemkin of SaaStr says he never lost a customer he had personally visited while he was CEO of EchoSign. Spending time with your customers transforms a transactional relationship into a partnership. It builds empathy on both sides, which ultimately leads to better business.

In-person customer visits are one of the best ways to build customer intimacy . They deepen the commitment on both sides. If one of the people we met needs help one day, we'll be more eager to support them. I'm pretty sure they'll be more forgiving if there's ever an issue with Close and more loyal to our product.

Get In-depth Product Feedback on the Customer Experience

Your customers are more than the sum of all their clicks on your product. Yes, you might be monitoring product usage and reading all the feedback people send you via email or even tell you on the phone. Still, you're missing a lot of crucial context if you can't see your customers using your product within their work environment.

• How exactly are they using your product?
• What's happening around them?
• What else is on their screen?
• What's competing for their attention?
• What's their workspace like?

When you visit your customers, you see the environment in which they use your software. You experience your product embedded into a user's workday and get a sense of the entire puzzle rather than just a single piece of it.

And it's little things, like...

• What kind of headsets /chairs/desks are they using?
• What other software/apps are they using during their day?
• Which little hacks did they come up with to make them more productive and efficient?
• What makes them smile, and what makes them frown when interacting with your web or mobile app ?

It just gives you a better picture of what's working and what's not.

Here’s a real example: during one customer visit, we saw the customer using a TV to display our reporting in Close . But at the time, our reporting page wasn’t optimized for full-screen display—it looked crappy.

I remembered that one of our engineers had worked on a quick fix that would make this look better, but we had never released it. I sent a message to the team, and within an hour, this feature was released by our VP of Engineering, Phil Freo . It looked fantastic, and our customers loved it.

While visiting customers, you can gather more in-depth feedback about how they use your product and where they would like to see improvements in the customer experience. Product managers can then use this information to build out improvements.

Find Opportunities to Upsell

Years ago, during one customer visit, we found the customer was on a basic plan that didn’t include a specific feature. Instead, they were using a third-party provider to get this feature for their sales team.

Talking with the founder, we faced some resistance to upgrading their plan. But we gained an internal champion during that customer visit by chatting with the sales team manager. We gave him everything he needed to make the transition happen, and they soon upgraded their plan to start using this feature again.

Visiting customers in Germany in 2015

This is the power of in-person visits—not only did the extra revenue help us, but the customer’s success with our product was significantly increased by upgrading their plan.

Create New Case Studies and Customer Stories

Using case studies and real-life examples of how your customers use your product is an excellent digital marketing strategy that will help build trust in your brand.

When planning customer visits, consider the customers you may want to interview for video testimonials or case studies on your website. Having these real customer stories also helps build better marketing alignment with your ideal customers and their needs.

All of these are examples of the kinds of benefits you can get from visiting your customers. You can't predict which benefits precisely you'll get—but you will always get value from a customer visit!

GET YOUR COPY OF TALK TO YOUR CUSTOMERS→

How to Plan a Client Visit That Boosts Customer Loyalty in 7 Steps

By now, you should be sufficiently motivated to visit your customers. But what do you say and do? How do you get the most value out of these visits? How do you prepare for them? How do you wrap them up? How do you get started when you visit their office?

1. Identify Which Customers to Visit

Whether you have 10 customers or 10,000, visiting everyone is probably not feasible. So, which customers should you visit?

To start, make a list of the customers who already have a good rapport with you—your partners, advocates, and best customers overall.

Next, include customers using your product or purchasing from you regularly. Learning how they use your products and services or why they keep returning to you will be great for your team.

Finally, include the customers who consistently give you critical feedback. These customers are already pushing your team to do better, and they will likely have super valuable insights to share with you when you visit in person.

2. Decide Who You’re Meeting With

Once you know which companies you’ll visit, decide which individuals you’ll need to meet with inside the company.

First, you set up a meeting with the founders or CEO. That's the person you'll be officially meeting. But it's not necessarily the person you'll spend most of the time with.

For SaaS companies, focus on the person managing the team using your product and the end-users. If you’re a service-based business, talk to the people mainly affected by using your services.

The Close team visiting customers in Ottawa, Canada, 2014

3. Spend Time Getting to Know the Business Beforehand

Just like when prospecting, spend time doing research before the meeting—whether on social media sites like LinkedIn, on the company’s website, or in B2B databases like Crunchbase.

When you walk into that client visit, you should know exactly who you’re talking to, what kind of business they are, which customers they serve, and how your product or service fits into that workflow.

4. Prepare and Share an Agenda

Having a clear agenda for your customer visit is essential to getting the most out of your time with them.

Start by setting out the agenda for your main meetings with the C-suite and the managers of the teams that use your product. Set up talking points, such as updates to your product pricing or upcoming feature launches. Also, leave room in the agenda for their team to add questions or comments. Leave a clear space for them to give you feedback.

Once your customer visit agenda is prepared, share it with their team. Let them have editing access so they can include their ideas. Make sure that expectations between you and your customers are aligned before you start asking them many questions. Create a setting that encourages them to discuss and share their concerns openly.

Also, make sure to discuss confidentiality. If you plan to report back to your team after your customer visit, explicitly ask them if they're fine with you sharing their business processes, revenue numbers, etc, with your team. (If not, that's fine too—you can still share the learnings, without actual specifics, with your team.)

That way, both teams will be ready to start when the day comes.

5. Learn About the Customer Experience in Real Time

So, the day of your customer visit has finally arrived! Start by talking, in general, in broad terms about their business and your business. Then, progress to more specific topics and product use cases.

Be both a student and a mentor. Learn as much as you can about your customers and look for opportunities to help them. Learn about their workflows and how your product fits into those workflows.

Here are some questions you might ask during a client visit:

• How often do you use our product?
• Which team members use our product the most? How often do they use it?
• Are there secondary users that only use our product occasionally? If so, for what? How often?
• What are your business goals?
• How do you implement our product in your daily workflow?
• What bugs have you encountered?
• What features are you missing from our product?
• What do you like most about our product?
• What do you hate about our product? Which limitations do you find particularly frustrating?
• Which metrics does your team track within our product? (Or which KPIs does our product impact for your team?)
• If our product ceased to exist tomorrow, what alternatives would you consider to replace us?
• Are there any industry trends or changes that could affect how you use our product in the future?

These questions and others like them will give you a clearer picture of how your customers use your product, and how it impacts their business.

6. Ask for and Give Referrals

Visiting customers is an excellent opportunity to get referrals . And refer them to others as well. Don't just limit referrals to potential customers—any reason to put them in touch with other people is fair game as long as you can see potential value for both parties.

Sometimes, we see companies serving the same audience with complementary services—that's potential for a co-marketing initiative. If you introduce two happy customers to each other, and they collaborate, and both get a ton of value out of it, you generate a lot of goodwill and, oftentimes, very vocal brand advocates.

If you have a partner program set up, try to see if the customer you’re visiting would be a good candidate for that program and help them understand how it works and the benefits they could get.

7. Create a Customer Visit Report for Your Team

If you do conduct a customer visit, make sure to document your learnings and take note of memorable moments. Then, you can share these insights with your team.

All the insights you gain during a customer visit must become organizational knowledge—otherwise, your customer visits are useless.

So, set up a structured customer visit report that your team can peruse and learn from, both now and in the future. Inside this document, note specific items that will be of interest to the different teams in your company—for example, product feedback that your product managers may want to look at, customer journey insights that the marketing team should keep in mind, or product knowledge gaps that the customer success team may need to address.

To ensure everyone in the company benefits from customer visits, we try to share some pictures or highlights from our customer visits in Slack. Then, during our weekly team meeting, a team member might give a quick 2-minute summary of their customer visit.

How Often Should You Plan Customer Visits?

There's no one-size-fits-all formula. It depends on your startup, but you should generally meet them more often than you're meeting them now.

Jason Lemkin recommends that every co-founder, CEO, and Customer Success Manager meet on-site with five customers monthly.

Seeing the environment in which your customers use your product, the atmosphere at their workplace, and talking with the people who use your product daily is always an insightful experience.

Customer visits have been a crucial market research method for traditional businesses for many decades—but they're even more crucial for startups and SMBs . Your most powerful asset when you're in a market with established, large companies is your ability to understand your customers better and focus on their needs better than a large corporation can.

Michael Seibel, Managing Director at Y Combinator, said : "If you look around the startup ecosystem, you can find too many founders who believe that famous investors + lots of employees = winning. I bet most of our VC-backed competitors feel this way, and you can use this to defeat them (they aren't talking to customers nearly enough).”

Want more insights on talking to your customers? Get my book and learn more about building customer intimacy.

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How to Conduct the Perfect Customer Visit

By Natsha Ness

Customers are the lifeblood of any organization. Whether you have the ability to meet with them face-to-face, or are required to so over Zoom due to our ever-changing reality, customer visits require intentionality. They also provide a golden opportunity to make your customers the North Star they should be – and improve literally everything about your organization as a result. Why a Customer Visit is Worth Its Weight … in Actual Gold

How do we know a customer visit is critical to success? In 2019, we conducted research into sales and marketing alignment, in partnership with DRIFT . In it, we found a significant correlation between the most aligned sales and marketing teams (which were also the most revenue-generating teams) and their focus, not only around customers-centric metrics, but also regular visits with customers.

Planning Customer Visits is Key

Sometimes customer visits are inexpensive (like when they happen on Zoom ). Still, just because you’re  remote doesn’t mean the interaction has to feel inexpensive. In fact, you can still invest in the same sorts of things you did on-site. Think about buying lunch with an UberEats code. Or sending your customers a box with a bunch of goodies for the meeting. In other words, think about how you can make the “visit” an experience.

If someone falls into your target account list, and is likely to have a strong lifetime value in your business, they’re worth visiting. But you have to first make sure there’s mutual agreement around the desired outcome of such a meeting. In other words, why are you getting together?

There could be plenty of possibilities, but three main reasons almost always necessitate a customer visit:

• You’re close to creating a proposal. If you’re about to put together a proposal, a customer visit will help you achieve the tight alignment you need to make sure what you’re offering is a good fit with what the customer needs. This will likely come after multiple discovery calls and deep dives. You’ve figured out which challenge you want to solve, and have had conversations with various people that lead you to believe it’s time to create an official proposal.
• You recently created a proposal. (My recommendation is to make the customer visit happen before the creation of the proposal, but it’s better to go after than not at all).
• Upsell. An often underutilized function of customer visits are to the folks who already invested with you, but of course, this can be leveraged to further the relationship and ensure it stays. It can also be used to uncover additional insights into other products or services that may fit additional, previously undiscovered, challenges. You can also work to prevent customer churn by conducting a customer visit.

Who should be involved in a client visit?

After the “why” comes the “who.” Who needs to attend your customer visit to achieve your desired outcome? There could be a wide variety of internal stakeholders that you want to include. You might have people from business development, marketing, analytics, general managers or directors and/or someone from the C-Suite. There should only be people there who have direct input into and/or influence over the subject matter at hand; no one extra. Once you figure out who should be there, think about each of their differing priorities. If you’re unsure of someone’s priorities, ask them in advance. This will help you show up prepared.

Then consider who should be there from your side. Again, don’t bring anyone who doesn’t have a clear role. There’s no dedicated team that should go to customer visits; it varies based on the goal and the customer. You should know what the customer cares about before you head there. This helps you decide whether you need your CEO present or whether the principal on the account is sufficient.

Before the Visit 

One of the best tips I can give you is to get all the skeletons out of the closet before you get in front of someone. For example, if your customer’s marketing leader beams about his 600 pieces of content, but the business development group complains they are out of date and impossible to find, do you want the first time the marketing leader hears that to be real-time, while you’re onsite? Trust me; you don’t. The whole meeting could go downhill fast. You can work through potential issues by asking if there will be multiple budget stakeholders in the room. If so, as it relates to this project, find out whether they will be contributing some of their budget to the meeting’s desired outcome. If so, what does that look like? These questions can help you spot any areas of potential friction before you’re ever in the room.

Preparation is Prince

The content of your meeting is king, but preparing properly to share that content is certainly a strong runner up. Make sure each attendee has a very specific role, and then prepare the right presentation. Consider the following question to guide your preparation:

• Are you sharing a slideshow? Audio? Video?
• What assets will you use before the meeting, during the meeting and after the meeting?
• How will you leverage small, breakout rooms to facilitate conversations vs. all-together, large group dynamics?
• Do you need slides, overheads, pens, markers, etc.? If so, it’s a good idea to send these ahead!
• Do you need a backup plan? For instance, what if your computers don’t work; do you have a hard copy of your presentation?

Then, it’s time to rehearse. Spend time with your team actually going through the presentation before heading to the customer. Talk about who will cover which slides, and how the flow will go. Make sure you’re bringing value to the customer and the tone of the meeting will be what they’re expecting. Finally, send over a message summarizing the purpose of getting together. I like to call this the DOGMA – Details Outlining Goals & Meeting Agenda. I tell them this is what we agreed to, and offer them a chance to come back and add to it or edit what I’ve sent.

During the Client Visit

Here are a few tips for the meeting itself:

• Watch for signs of misalignment. This often looks like one person repeatedly whispering to another, or in Zoom world, obviously Slacking. If someone is smiling during your presentation and you’re being serious, they’re probably talking about something else with someone on their computer. Even if you notice this, don’t mention it in front of the whole group. Instead, note it for later.
• What you can explore directly and immediately are the subtle expressions that indicate someone doesn’t buy into what’s being presented. If these things happen, try to draw it out so it can be addressed in the room. Don’t be afraid to just say, “Sally, it looks like you might have something to share.” If there are corporate politics involved and you can’t draw out the issue, try to have a conversation privately in person or via  a private Zoom chat. But stay in tune with all parties as much as you can by reading body language, tone of voice and so on.

Note: This insinuates that when on Zoom everyone has their camera on. Everyone should have their camera on.

• Record the meeting. Some people get weird about recordings, but having your meeting recorded can go a long way in helping you clarify issues later or capture something that even the best notetaker might miss. If you think someone might not like the idea, have a colleague dial into the meeting and record the call. You can say something like, “Peter couldn’t be here in person, but he wanted to call in.” It’s an easy, subtle way to get a recording to happen without making anyone feel uncomfortable. Enlist a dedicated note taker, but ask all attendees to take notes.
• Leverage a “Parking Lot.” If someone brings up an idea or thought that isn’t perfectly relevant to where you are in the agenda, jot it down in a “Parking Lot” that you can revisit at the end of the meeting – or afterward.
• Don’t leave the room without recapping what went on, with details and next steps. “This was our desired outcome and here are the five things we discussed. Numbers one through four have been hashed out, but we need to spend more time on number five so let’s set up a call ASAP to flesh that out more.” Make sure to spell out who owns what, and the agreed upon timeline so you set the expectation for accountability.

After the Visit

You had your meeting.  Now what? This is where you make or break the trust and credibility you worked so hard to create. I suggest sending a quick email to all involved parties, again reiterating what was discussed and the next steps. But take it a step further and get a handwritten thank-you note in the mail that same day. The content should be different – make it personal and send it out fast, and you’ll blow your customer’s socks off. Really.

After you’ve sent the customer a summary, create a customer visit report for your internal teams. A customer visit report should include:

• Action items
• Positive highlights
• Risks and opportunities
• Any other key observations and notes

Customer visit reports can also be given to clients, or sent in lieu of the email suggested above. After you’ve written up the most important information, it’s time to start taking action.

Take the lead by holding up your end of the bargain. Take care of any items for which you’re responsible, and set up any follow-up meetings that were discussed immediately. The power of a customer visit can quickly be deflated by distraction – and a lack of action – when it’s over.

How We Can Help Your Client Visit Planning

So, which customers or prospects deserve your time and attention onsite? Make a list, and get to scheduling. It’s the step you’ve been missing toward better alignment and better results too. Need support with any of these tactics? Shift Paradigm is a full-service partner for any organization that wants to stay agile in the current digital landscape. Our customer engagement services provide the complete package to keep your customers invested in your products and organization. Interested? Contact Shift Paradigm today!

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5 Ways to Create an Exceptional Customer Service Experience (& 4 Mistakes to Avoid)

Updated: April 25, 2022

Published: November 01, 2021

Your company's customer service team is no longer an added benefit that customers think about after they make a purchase. In fact, research shows that more than two thirds of businesses now prioritize customer experience as a distinguishing factor when competing in their industry.  

All too often, it’s the case that customers are left waiting on hold or are unable to find information for themselves  — even if they spend hours seeking an answer in a company’s knowledge base .

Most of us can agree on some generalities when it comes to what a bad customer experience is. But what can we say about a good customer service experience? Or even an exceptional one?

In this post, we'll describe what exceptional customer service looks like and how you can provide it at your business. hith a little effort and guidance, you’ll be able to stand out, differentiate, and maybe even pull some of your competitors’ disgruntled customers over to your side of the fence.

What is exceptional customer service?

Fundamentally speaking, the ideal customer service experience is one in which the customer reaches their ideal outcome with as little friction as possible. This is somewhat vague, but that’s by nature, as the ideal outcome can vary by industry, company, or product.

What you must consider is how you can go beyond good enough and really wow your customers. 

What Does an Exceptional Customer Service Experience Look Like?

Customer experience — or CX — refers to the sum of every interaction a customer has with a business, both pre- and post-sale. An ideal customer experience can take many forms, depending on the type of interaction and the method of communication.

However, here are some aspects of an exceptional customer service experience:

1. It makes your customers feel special.

Every interaction needs to revolve around the concept of individual value, mutual respect, and a shared vision for your future together as their brand of choice. Consider how you can let your customers know that:

• They are more than a transaction to your organization.
• Their time and money allow you to continue to pursue your mission.
• Their journey as a person is a part of your journey as a business.

2. It goes beyond their expectations. 

Setting expectations is an integral part of customer service. On the flip side of the coin is delivering on those expectations you set.

If you fail to deliver, you create a bad experience. If you deliver, you fulfill the agreement, which is what the customer expects (no more and no less). They may be satisfied but not  delighted . After all, why would your customers praise you for doing the job they paid you for?

However, if you go above and beyond what the customer expects, you pave the way for an exceptional experience from their perspective. This kind of customer delight has myriad benefits for your business.

3. It goes beyond what competitors deliver.

In some cases, you may think you're going above and beyond when you might simply be meeting the status quo set by your industry. Exceptional customer service doesn't exist in a vacuum. If your customers know what kind of experience your competitors offer, and it's equal or better than yours, you may not be delighting them the way you'd expect. 

For example, that free 30-day guarantee may not be as big a selling point as you'd think if everyone in your space offers one. This is doubly true if it is more difficult for the customer to actually take advantage of the guarantee than it is for them to do so with your competitors.

Always keep a pulse on how your competition is innovating their customer experience. 

4. It does all of this without friction or inconvenience.

Your customers want the process of doing business with you to be simple and easy. When they do come up with issues, they want the process of rectifying them to be simple, timely, and on a channel that feels comfortable to them.

Communicating with your customers to understand their needs and wants is a sure-fire way to find the friction points in your customer experience and eliminate them. Solving for the customer should be an ongoing process in your organization. 

Ways to Create an Exceptional Customer Service Experience

To help you establish some best practices that revolve around these basic principles, here are some helpful strategies for creating a great customer service experience.

1. Begin and end customer interactions with “thank you.”

The simplest solutions are often the most effective, and beginning and ending every customer interaction with a thank you is one of the best ways to improve customer service experience.

Starting every interaction with a thank you shows the customer that you appreciate that, out of all the places they could have chosen, they have chosen your business first.

Saying thank you after concluding your business — even if it doesn’t result in a transaction — is simply good manners, and it leaves the potential customer with a positive view of both your people and your business. Simple courtesy goes a long way toward inspiring a follow-up visit to make a purchase in the future, too.

2. Use digital resources to put people first.

Thanks to the advent of the smartphone, people are more connected digitally than at any prior period of history. This presents a unique opportunity for service providers, retailers, and restaurants to leverage this connectivity to provide superior CX via smartphones and other mobile devices.

Allowing customers to manage account services and features is also absolutely critical to creating a desirable CX, as sometimes customers have a basic question or problem they need to resolve that can easily be handled on a mobile app or direct chat .

The ability to place orders for products or services online independently is also an absolute godsend to customers who have very limited time to commit to your business. Avoid over-directing customers to your app for assistance too, as this is a surefire way to irritate and turn them off to your brand.

3. Employ effective social media strategies.

Social media provides more opportunities for creating personal connections than any other publicly available resource. Individuals can comment, share, and demonstrate interest in your business, brand, products, and services anywhere in the world at any time of day.

If you aren’t leveraging the personal touch social media adds to CX, you need to start right away. Using social media to make customers feel like insiders and close confidants with your brand is a high-level CX strategy.

4. Talk to your customers where they are.

Proactive post-transaction and post-visit follow up using customer contact information is vital to the success of your customer experience strategy. These calls and messages are opportunities to review the benefits of their potential or newly purchased product or services in case they have run into trouble or thought of new questions to ask since their visit.

More important to your CX strategy, it also demonstrates a tangible interest in their journey with your brand even after they have left your location or spent their money with you. Don’t let those opportunities pass you by.

5. Get feedback from customers and implement it. 

You don't have to guess when it comes to improving your customer service experience. Your customers will tell you if you actively obtain their feedback . Whether you conduct a survey via email or use an NPS scoring system , you can get a pulse on the satisfaction of your customer base and the areas where you're not keeping up with expectations.

Common Mistakes Brands Make Creating a Customer Service Experience

Here are some common mistakes to avoid as you improve the customer experience in your organization:

1. Going crazy with customer rewards programs.

Many customer reward programs have a tendency to over-reward potential clients and new business more than their existing customer base.

This isn’t a prudent use of resources. You must keep your reward system for new and existing customers proportionate. As much as you want to focus on attracting new customers, existing customers who have shared your journey so far need to be rewarded for their loyalty and support, too. More often than not, even minimal customer rewards programs and incentives far exceed the expectations that most customers possess when you first bring them on board.

Overall, it’s wisest not to overinvest your marketing and retention dollars into your rewards program. Instead, invest those resources in a customer loyalty or referral program to keep existing customers happy.

2. Making your customer’s path to adopting your brand a difficult one.

Determining your customer’s path to adopting your brand needs to be a point-by-point plan, not an open-ended discussion about the direction of hypothetical transactions.

You need to have a modular, adaptable plan for each customer that will guide them and their customer service representative every step of the way. Failure to have a solid plan, or a plan that is merely all talk or looks, is a recipe for CX disaster.

3. Forgetting that prime customer experience begins with employees.

Take care of your people, and they will take care of you.

Unhappy employees cannot and will not provide the individual buy-in necessary to make your customer experience strategies effective. You are looking to make true believers in your vision and your brand.

That means treating them in a way that exceeds their expectations for employer provisioning in terms of personal benefits, company perks, and individual incentives. The way you take care of your people matters to your customers.

A happy, satisfied employee is going to do more for you and the customer when their needs are met in abundance.

4. Making things complicated. 

The more convoluted it becomes for a customer to get service from you, the less satisfied they will be (and the harder it becomes to scale your operations).

Your customer service experience doesn’t have to be frustrating and awful. In fact, it can be delightful and can possibly shift detractors into being promoters if you’re tactful.

It just takes a little bit of thought and care. Answer customer inquiries and frustrations where they appear (and quickly). Give customers resources to figure things out on their own. Make sure your customer service staff is polite and happy (their happiness is a powerful change agent for angry customers).

In general, start investing your customer service experience and it won’t just be an expense, but it will be an investment in a real business differentiator.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in January 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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15 proven ways to ensure a positive customer experience

Successful businesses recognise the power of positive customer experiences. Satisfied customers become loyal and are more likely to recommend you and purchase from you again. A better customer experience can result in lower operational costs and significant growth for your business. But what’s the key to a successful customer experience strategy? We’ll explore that, and more, in this article.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience (also known as CX) goes beyond customer support calls and feedback. It relates to every interaction a person has at various touchpoints along their entire customer journey - and each of those touchpoints can provide a good or bad experience. It’s about ensuring you have a happy customer from their initial contact with your brand to their retention as a loyal, engaged and satisfied customer.

Customer experience Vs customer service

Customer service is only the tip of the iceberg of the entire customer experience . A customer’s first interaction with your brand could be a visit to your store, a call with you customer support team or a visit to your website or social channels for example.

Good customer service might include a friendly and helpful conversation in store, on the phone or over live chat. But good customer experience extends beyond that to the next touchpoints. That could be a follow up email with a special offer, an upgrade or added bonus with your purchase to encourage repeat custom. Customer experience is an ongoing sentiment, rather than a one-off transactional event.

Why is improving customer experience important?

Put simply, a good customer experience will boost your bottom line and contribute to business success. Happy and loyal customers will increase sales, reduce customer churn and generate new customer referrals. It’s far more cost effective to retain existing customers than acquire new customers. And a positive customer experience is the way to do that.

Your customers are everything, so it makes great business sense to meet, or exceed, their customer needs and strive for customer success.

How to improve customer experience

We’ve explained the theory, the ‘why’ improve customer experience. Now we’ll reveal the ‘how’. Here are 15 proven techniques to create better customer experiences.

1. Create superior omnichannel customer experiences

Wherever a customer connects with your business - in person, online, on the phone - they should receive a consistent, frictionless customer experience. Today’s customers use multiple channels and platforms for shopping and the touchpoint shouldn’t affect their experience. It’s important for your business to adopt the necessary technology and implement the required resources to ensure a seamless, unified customer experience .

2. Deliver standout customer service

Great customer service is at the core of positive customer experiences. People are more likely to buy from people, namely those that instil confidence and make a customer feel supported. This feelgood factor can be the differentiator between your business and the competition.

3. Train customer-facing teams effectively

The way your team members treat your people will make or break the customer relationship. It’s important to invest in hiring, training and supporting your customer success teams to equip them with the key skills and knowledge to deliver positive customer experiences whatever the customer feedback they’re dealing with. Optimize response times to reduce customer frustration and keep customers in the loop with how the support team will manage their issue.

4. Harness AI for enhanced interactions

Technology makes it easier to develop great customer experiences 24/7 and on multiple platforms. Chatbots enable always-on customer support and customer engagement online. Customer data can be used to deliver personalized user experiences (such as Amazon’s product recommendations for example). Natural language processing (NLP) helps to interpret customer comments in surveys and free-form text messages. AI and machine learning are created specifically for customer experience management and they enable businesses to deliver these at scale.

5. Develop self-service options for better experiences

Make it easy for people to provide customer feedback or find relevant information. You could implement NPS, CES and CSat surveys for quick and simple ratings of your product and/or service. Provide online guides and help (such as FAQs) so that users can answer a question or find a solution for themselves. Implement a chatbot to provide immediate, real time responses to customer enquiries. Automation makes it easier to serve relevant email or social media messages at specific points along the customer journey.

6. Use feedback to enhance customer satisfaction

Listen to feedback about customers’ experiences with you. Learn about customer expectations of your products or services. A Voice of the Customer program is an effective and efficient way of doing this. It will gather customer data, metrics and feedback and help you to analyse the information. These actionable insights enable you to identify and fix pain points, create the products that meet customer needs, attract new customers and increase customer retention. A simple example is Netflix and YouTube’s simple thumbs up/ down feedback mechanism which informs the company’s content strategy, so they provide more videos that customers like.

7. Take social proof seriously for improved experiences

Social media platforms are valuable customer feedback channels. You can gather insightful feedback back from your own and third party social media channels. Social listening tools make this easier by finding and delivering the social comments to your relevant team members so that you can take appropriate action. Plus, social media proof sells. People are more likely to act upon a word-of-mouth recommendation than a branded ad, and it’s your happy customers that are going to promote your business and its products.

8. Keep brand messaging crystal clear

Consistency is key and customers should receive cohesive brand messages at every touchpoint on their customer journey. A great customer experience is seamless and frictionless. Customers should recognise your brand by its messaging whether they’re online, in store, reading an email, engaging with a social post or chatbot, or having a conversation with one of your team members.

9. Engage customers throughout their life cycle

Customer retention and loyalty is powerful for your business. It’s important to invest in customer relationships ongoing, rather than focussing all your attention on new customer acquisition (a more expensive undertaking than customer retention). Lifelong customers spend more money with you - it’s as simple as that. Calculating the customer lifetime value (CLV) helps you to determine the appropriate budget for it. The formula to calculate the customer lifetime value is CLV = (annual revenue per customer x customer relationship in years) – customer acquisition cost (CAC).

10. Make customers integral to your company’s success

Put customers at the heart of everything you do. Listen to customer feedback so that you can deliver the products, services and overall customer experience that they demand. Create buyer personas to help team members understand your customers better. When you picture a person, it’s easier to tailor the brand messaging, user experience and customer touchpoint to suit them.

11. Optimize the customer journey for maximum impact

Use your personas to create a customer journey map. Picture the customer journey that your persona will take and optimize it to make it the best it can be. Can you streamline a process to make it quicker and easier for a customer to achieve a task? Identify pain points, such as returning goods or finding stuff online, and make the necessary changes. Use customer data to make it a personalized experience. Recommend products that relate to their recent purchases or searches, for example.

12. Implement customer loyalty programs for stronger relationships

Valuing loyal customers makes business sense as they’ll continue to spend money with you. Reward customer loyalty by serving relevant, personalized content to them. That might be special offers and promotions, product recommendations that relate to their previous interactions or dynamic online content. Respond to their feedback and create a dialogue rather than a one-way customer relationship. Make them feel valued and appreciated.

13. Utilize customer analytics for valuable insights

There are so many ways to gather customer data. Website metrics can indicate pain points in functionality (such as abandoned carts or bounce rates on pages). A Net Promoter Score (NPS) highlights the likelihood of a customer recommending your brand. Tracking customer interactions with a customer relationship management (CRM) tool; gathering digital metrics about online behavior; collecting survey responses - all of these provide customer data but are only useful if they’re analyzed and used.

14. Empower your team to go the extra mile

If you want to make sure your customers are happy, you need engaged team members to deliver the positive customer experience. Training and coaching to deliver exemplary customer support is one step, but trusting them to own the customer conversation is another. With adequate training and information, a customer support agent should be able to make the right decisions to deal with a customer call from start to finish rather than referring to someone else. That will result in a better response time and resolution to satisfy the customer, and a feeling of empowerment to motivate the team member.

15. Build a customer-centric culture

Many of the most successful global businesses have adopted customer-centric cultures for good reason. They know that positive customer experiences result in customer loyalty and retention. Listening to customers inform decision-making for better products/ services and strategies for future growth.

In a customer-centric culture , team members will refer constantly to customer data and feedback in their work. It enables them to prioritise tasks, innovate and optimize. It ensures that everybody is working together with the same aim of customer engagement and satisfaction.

A few key benefits of this approach:

• Your team members understand the customer, their needs and preferences
• Your team members use personas and customer data to inform decisions
• Your team members have a desire to continuously optimize the customer experience and journey.

Key takeaways to improve customer experiences

Every touchpoint along the customer journey can provide a good or bad experience. It’s important to monitor and analyze customer feedback on these experiences so that you can optimize them ongoing.

Positive customer experiences result in happy customers, loyal customers and returning customers. These customers not only provide value through spending with you, but they become advocates for your brand and word of mouth referrals. All of this is powerful and, ultimately, increases revenue and engenders growth for your business.

Key factors to remember are that customer experience goes beyond customer support and extends to omnichannel touchpoints with your brand. It’s about your internal company culture as well as your external messaging. It needs to inform business strategy, not just feedback channels. It’s a holistic approach for your business, putting the customer first. If you are looking for additional examples of improving customer experience, check out our article on the top 5 strategies for retail customer experience .

Our customer experience experts at Chattermill can support you to automate this process. Book a personalized demo today to see how our unified customer experience program would benefit your business.

Get started with our customer experience project checklist

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The Importance of Customer Visits: Tools & Tips

Table of contents, what are the benefits, who does it concern, and why, why is customer attraction important, what is a customer visit program, 1- planning visits, 2- provisioning excellent customer service during visits, 3- personalizing the customer visits, 4- and… share feedback after the visits, how to simplify the customer visit, customer visits: in summary.

Nowadays, with people being so connected, companies often or completely forget the importance of customer visits. A digital tool can show you statistics, but can it read the true interests or intentions of a client?

The answer to that is most likely… No, it doesn’t.

Usually, the more customers you gain or have to deal with, the more it’s essential to keep a close relationship with them.

And wouldn’t you like to be considered more than data or a click on an ad? I’m pretty sure you would!

Let’s unveil the importance of customer visits and how to plan it efficiently. 👇

Why are Customer Visits Important?

Customers are constantly being solicited by your sales team or your competitors.

In fact, they are likely to appreciate talking with a salesman who is not trying to sell goods, and instead, someone who is invested in hearing about their problems and preferences.

By meeting with them:

• It helps customers feel appreciated ;
• It creates a certain bond .

👉 Meeting clients in their environment shows you how they integrate your software into their workday. And by doing so, you’d be able to study their behavior and show them your support.

• It detects needs or problems that would not have been obvious on the telephone or by e-mail;
• Company workers will feel more motivated as they will get honest and personal feedback on their product or service.

You must keep in mind that you are not the only one soliciting customers. It’s a competitive market, so getting as much personal information as possible will keep you ahead of the game.

And eventually, seeing their smile and satisfaction in person can be quite a reward. 🏆

You might want to bring your whole team such as the marketing and analytics members to the meeting, but remember: the goal here is not to sell, but to listen and be understanding.

Therefore, it should only concern the most profitable customers.

Here is how to do it:

• Refer to your CRM tools to highlight via the sales dashboard (or cross tables) those who have ordered the most often or with the best average basket;
• Profile your customers . For instance, by using a progression metric, which assumes that the most interesting customers are those who have the best potential (good contact, several exchanges to date), but who have not yet made many purchases.

In a logic of cost reduction, there’s a strategy to take into account: the optimization of b2b sales funnel .

👉 You organize your customer visits by geographical area , and link them to lose as little time as possible between each appointment.

This method can only boost your notoriety amongst customers and build customer loyalty. Once it is done properly, your efficiency to read and better understand the customer is increased.

💡 Our tip: Check out our lead generation in digital marketing and lead conversion to know how to best generate and convert lead into customer !

• The Best B2B Sales Lead Generation Strategies
• The 7 Fundamental Steps of a B2B Sales Cycle

Customer attraction is vital for:

• business growth ,
• brand development ,
• and maintaining a competitive edge .

In fact, it ensures a steady revenue stream and promotes brand awareness through word-of-mouth, enhancing the company’s reputation. ☝️

Also, effective customer attraction strategies enable businesses to:

• lead in competitive markets ,
• drive innovation ,
• and secure long-term viability .

In essence, attracting customers is foundational to not only immediate financial health, but also to the sustained success and adaptability of a business in a dynamic market environment.

Customer visits provide an opportunity for interaction between the parties involved to reach a settlement.

Discussions may include:

• advertising,
• and 'team' approaches to visits.

Strategizing is very essential and should not be omitted! It gives you a true insight into a customer’s perspective.

Customer visits can be divided into four classes:

• Customer visits with the senior management team: owners, presidents, general managers, and so forth;
• Customer visits with the sales managers;
• Customer visits with a team of two or more people;
• Customer visits with an individual: a member of the sales management team, or a salesperson, for instance.

4 Strategic Steps for Effective Customer Visits

Preparation is key: it helps with your confidence and organization.

Scheduling the Visit

The first step is to make an appointment with the person or people in charge:

• Ask them when they will be available and set a time and date;
• Make sure that each party is aware of what the meeting will be about beforehand;
• Speak to them about confidentiality, and that everything you report back to your team will be done with their consent.

Preparing Your Approach

On your end, if you haven’t already, keep studying your customer :

• See what has changed in the use of the product from now up until the day of the meeting;
• Study their company! You could visit their website to learn more about their products, services, and their world.
• Build a client portfolio , or a persona.

Organizing Your Team

At the same time:

• Make sure each attendee on your team knows their role;
• Review and reread your files as well as the history of exchanges and purchases, if applicable, to have all the keys in hand;
• Do not forget to have a backup plan ! It shows your professionalism in case something goes wrong.

Pay attention to CAC customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value calculation to balance your fee.

Once every concerned individual is informed about the meeting, this is where you get into the gist of things.

Start with light conversations before getting to the purpose of the meeting.

💡 Our tip: Make them feel comfortable , as you do not want to seem too keen to get down to business.

Keep in mind that this is a mutual agreement . That way, the customer, or client, won’t run away.

Topics to Come Up With

• pay attention to them,
• try to find the best solution to their problem;
• ask open-ended questions,
• allow the customer to take the lead and talk;
• Focus on who uses your products or services the most. And if so, how often and what are the main reasons?
• Once you have determined their necessity for said products and services, ask them what they would like to be changed . Are there any bugs?

Good Practices

• Above all, take notes! Whether the information seems useful to you, this data might be useful later or will speak to one of your colleagues.
• Don’t leave the room without summarizing what was said and mentioning the next steps you will take to ensure their needs are met.

Many benefits can come out of this! 🧐

• Guide to Business Negotiation: Clinch Deals in 6 Steps

Personalizing customer visits and interviews is a powerful strategy to:

• enhance the customer experience ,
• increase engagement ,
• and ultimately drive sales and loyalty .

Data-Driven Personalization

First, you should use your collected data and analyzes to come up with customized greetings and recommended products or services.

👉 Using CRM systems or AI automates data management and allows for personalized recommendations.

Customized Offers

Secondly, you could create personalized offers and loyalty programs that offer exclusive deals based on customer history and preferences. Ultimately, you could adjust the physical or digital environment to suit individual customer preferences, enhancing their overall experience.

By personalizing the visit, you will enhance satisfaction and encourage loyalty! 🤝

In one word: debrief .

Review what happened:

• What did you learn?
• Were some of your questions answered?
• Did you reach your goals?
• What was the most helpful?

Following-up

Then follow up with the customer and your team !

💡 Our tip: Send the customer a thank-you note , so they can know you appreciate the time spent together and the feedback they have given you.

It doesn’t need to stop there, as keeping a close relationship and giving your customer or client the best experience is not a daily process. It’s a constant and ongoing contact with them , which is why your next steps should involve:

• Making a new appointment;
• Drawing up a diagnosis or a commercial proposal ;
• Preparing for the negotiation based on the customer's specific requests:
• Identifying trends in the marketplace : If a number of your customer visits reveal the same concern, this may be an area that you need to focus on;
• Communicating important elements to the relevant teams, e.g., the after-sales team.

There are interesting tools for note-taking and customer visit reports, as it allows you to create any business document, tailored to your image.

👉 Your documents are unified and 100% dematerialized , which is best for consistency. Also, centralization benefits the whole company, especially the sales representatives in the field, who no longer lose any of their work.

Depending on the different email scenarios configured:

• The managers receive a summary and the customer a recap by email;
• If the visit is successful, you can even have the customer digitally sign an order in the same breath!

By using flexible and customizable software, your sales representatives have all the necessary tools at their disposal on their smartphone or tablet:

• Customer files are updated in real-time ;
• Connection to your ERP ;
• Generation of sales documents (quotations, order forms, invoices);
• Access to order history , stocks , and your catalog .

Have you tested any digital tools for your customer relations? 🤔

• Which is the best CRM for me?

💡 Here is one last piece of advice: Always look to the future , but do not forget that customer satisfaction is crucial to a company’s success.

Nothing beats a face-to-face meeting as hidden gems can be said. And to take advantage of this meeting, help yourself with the appropriate tools .

Take the time to know who you are catering to, as customers buy when they feel loyalty and consideration .

Great relationships lead to great opportunities !

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Customer experience — what it is, why it’s important, and how to deliver it

At pretty much some point every day you’re a customer of something, somewhere. And, like most customers, you expect a great experience at every stop along your journey with a brand. It’s what businesses these days call the customer experience (CX). But, as a decision-maker for your company, you also know that delivering a positive, smooth, and dependable customer experience at scale is not without its challenges. And, thanks to a rapidly evolving business landscape where technology progresses at an astonishing pace, it’s easy to feel uncertain about the precise components of a customer experience, let alone how to effectively deliver it.

In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about customer experience — what it is, why it’s important, how it differs from customer service, what good and bad customer experiences look like, and the strategies you’ll need to provide amazing CX and future-proof your business’s growth. Specifically, this post will cover:

• What customer experience is
• What customer experience management is

Why customer experience matters

• What good customer experience looks like
• What poor customer experience looks like

Creating a customer experience strategy

How to measure and analyze customer experience, what is customer experience.

Customer experience, or CX, is essentially every interaction a consumer has with a brand — across all channels and departments — and their perception of that experience.

For today’s customers, their experience matters as much as your offerings. In fact, 86% of consumers say they’re willing to pay more to receive a superior customer experience. And 64% are more likely to recommend your brand if they have a great experience , leading to increased referral business and higher return on investment.

Customer experience has become a critical component of modern marketing and sales, as businesses focus on meeting high consumer standards and improving overall lifetime value. More than 40% of data analytics is geared toward optimizing the customer experience, and with good reason. Marketers need as much information as possible to ensure they’re maximizing their ROI every step of the way.

The most important thing to recognize is that customer experience is a relationship that’s built over time through a series of interactions that take place across organizational initiatives and departments. Customer experience is a consumer’s opinion of how these interactions are carried out and whether they consider them positive, from introduction to the sales cycle all the way through to customer support.

Customer experience is far more than a mere checklist of actions to be implemented. It goes beyond the surface level and delves into the realm of feelings, emotions, and impressions. It recognizes that every touchpoint along a customer’s journey, has the power to shape perception and sentiment. Whether it's a website visit, a phone call with customer support, or an in-store experience, each interaction has the potential to leave customers feeling positively about your company or, conversely, create a negative impression. Understanding this holistic view of customer experience allows businesses to analyze and optimize each touchpoint, ensuring that customers consistently feel valued, understood, and satisfied throughout their entire journey.

What is customer experience management?

Customer experience management (CXM) is the process of analyzing, measuring, and improving the overall customer experience across various touchpoints, including interactions with both new and existing customers. It demonstrates a dedicated investment in understanding and meeting customer needs and expectations and aims to continually add value and foster long-term relationships, ensuring your customers remain satisfied and loyal.

CXM often capitalizes on technology to monitor and personalize interactions with a customer as they move along their journey. After all, with so many components of the customer journey impacting how a consumer perceives, interacts with, and appreciates your brand, marketers would be hard-pressed to manage the process without the right technological tools.

The experience begins the minute the customer sets eyes on a brand. Marketers must consider those first impressions and how to clearly establish calls to action that are engaging and pertinent. Nurturing programs through marketing automation and customer success platforms can help further entice on-the-fence consumers to take action with personalized messaging and promotions that grab their interest.

Once a prospect converts to a customer, CXM ensures they’re aware of value-added services, products, and ongoing support. Customer experience platforms regularly provide updates, engagement messaging, and marketing campaigns specifically designed to keep consumers’ interest for the long term. Combined with reliable, high-quality products and services, excellent customer support, and engaging marketing materials, CXM helps businesses gauge their successes and spot issues before they arise, crafting touchpoints that engage and optimize along the way.

In a crowded and highly competitive landscape where products and services may appear similar, the quality of the customer experience becomes the crucial factor that sets businesses apart and influences customers' choices. It impacts key metrics such as net new sales, customer retention, and lifetime value.

The importance of customer experience lies in fulfilling customers' desire for a personal connection with the companies they engage with. By delivering a tailored, seamless, and frictionless experience at every touchpoint, businesses can meet this consumer expectation. Such personalized interactions inspire trust, loyalty, and emotional connection.

Customers who have a lackluster or downright negative experience with a brand are far less likely to become repeat customers. In fact, 95% of consumers take to social media or review websites to tell others about such negative experiences. The good news, though, is that 87% of customers are also likely to share with others if they have a positive experience.

CX doesn’t just affect referrals and recommendations. It also impacts brand loyalty, as 66% of customers say good CX makes them loyal to a brand — more than pricing and branding combined. When customers feel like a brand knows them and is invested in them, they’re more likely to continue interacting with the brand, which increases customer lifetime value. This, in turn, can drive down marketing costs and drive up ROI, vital components of a profitable business model.

It’s interesting to note that while customer experience spans a variety of departments — including product development, sales, marketing, and support, to name a few — 25% of organizations are set to integrate their customer experience approach with marketing and sales into a single function by 2023. This unified strategy may help drive interactions and experiences with a brand into a more streamlined operation while increasing opportunities for personalized communication and curated content.

What does good customer experience look like?

Creating a good customer experience is primarily about simplifying the process for customers to do business with you. It involves removing barriers and making interactions as effortless as possible.

Good customer experience is less about leaving a grand impression and more about being consistently reliable. The focus should be on facilitating easy resolution of customer goals and providing a seamless experience. To achieve this, it is essential to examine and optimize the entire customer journey. Identifying areas for improvement and determining how to make each touchpoint positive can significantly enhance the overall customer experience.

For new customers, this may look like easy checkout processes for ecommerce sites or providing convenient access to representatives for inquiries, especially for significant purchases or products or services with a long sales cycle. When it comes to return customers, making the return process as simple and hassle-free as possible is essential. While striving to make every purchase satisfactory, recognizing the inevitability of returns and accommodating customers' needs during such instances is crucial for securing loyalty and encouraging repeat business.

What does poor customer experience look like?

Companies lose $136.8 billion in sales due to avoidable churn each year, often losing

customers because of a bad experience. At the heart of a poor customer experience is a failure to grasp the unique needs of customers. It’s frequently the result of taking a generalized approach to marketing and sales. If you don’t make the effort to personalize your communications and make the buying process as simple as possible, customers will very likely feel as though you don’t value them.

Keep in mind, CX goes beyond customer service. Consider the entire customer journey and look for pitfalls where users or buyers could become discouraged, frustrated, or inconvenienced — and then identify ways to improve and become more efficient.

Poor customer experience can start with marketing content and extend to sales and product onboarding. Brands should make sure that all their information is available and accessible on every device. Consumers make nearly 73% of their purchases from a mobile device. If landing pages and website content are not mobile-friendly and designed responsively, consumers are likely to get impatient and move on to a competitor.

Marketing should be consistent and keep up with customers’ desires. That means no irrelevant product recommendations or non-existent customer service. And if automation is used, there should also be the option to connect with a real person.

That’s just the start. Other examples of tactics and processes that can lead to a bad CX include:

• Inaccurate or impersonal marketing outreach
• Disappointing products or services
• Poor customer support experiences
• Inadequate customer feedback programs
• Difficulty purchasing a product or service
• Questions about personal security online

Customer experience vs. customer service

It’s a common mistake to confuse customer service and customer experience. One is a component of the other. As part of delivering a positive and engaging customer experience, a brand must provide high-quality customer service at specific touchpoints along the journey.

By definition, customer service is providing prospects and consumers with assistance and advocacy when it comes to products and services. This can be anything from live support agents to online resources like frequently asked questions. High-quality customer service provides timely responses and user access and keeps interactions positive and helpful.

Customer experience takes those support efforts and amplifies them, providing reasons for a visitor to become a customer or remain one. Support teams can also use the other elements of the customer’s experience with your company to understand their journey and provide meaningful information to streamline the support process itself. All of this can be managed through dedicated systems that make cross-departmental communication — essential for CX management — viable and effective.

A CX strategy, short for customer experience strategy, is a comprehensive action plan aimed at ensuring positive experiences for customers at every interaction point. It involves using competitive insights to understand customer needs and expectations, and it encompasses all departments within an organization, extending beyond traditionally customer-facing departments. By aligning efforts across the entire organization, a well-developed CX strategy supports customer acquisition and retention.

Here are some recommendations to guide your general strategy for enhancing customer experience:

• Create feedback loops. Establish mechanisms for gathering and analyzing customer feedback to understand needs, preferences, and pain points. Having a customer experience management system in place can provide critical data points that are necessary for building a robust strategy.
• Create a harmonious omnichannel experience. A consistent and integrated experience across multiple channels and touchpoints encourages ongoing engagement with your brand. Start by establishing all the pivotal touchpoints that a potential customer encounters during the customer acquisition process. Consider their expectations for a fulfilling experience and compare that to the existing processes in a company.
• Offer self-service options. Provide customers with convenient self-service options, such as knowledge bases, FAQs, and interactive tools. Self-service options put the power in their hands, allowing them to take control of their own customer experience. Rather than relying on assistance from customer support agents or representatives, customers can explore and resolve their queries or issues on their own terms.
• Provide personalization. Tailor experiences based on individual customer preferences and behaviors, delivering relevant content, recommendations, and offers. Personalization demonstrates that your organization understands and values each customer as an individual and increases the likelihood of winning their repeat business.
• Use AI effectively. Artificial intelligence technologies, such as chatbots or virtual assistants, can automate routine tasks, provide real-time assistance, and enhance efficiency. AI can analyze virtually endless amounts of customer data, like purchase history, browsing behavior, or past interactions, to produce opportune insights. These insights can be used to personalize recommendations, anticipate customer needs, and deliver targeted marketing campaigns.
• Offer proactive experiences. Anticipate customer needs and actively reach out with targeted information, proactive support, or personalized recommendations before customers even ask. Proactive experiences contribute to a customer-centric approach, which makes customers feel supported and well-cared for throughout their journey.
• Use quality data and analytics. Gather and analyze meaningful customer data to gain insights, identify trends, and make data-driven. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems can provide insights into interactions ranging from filed cases to email correspondence. Marketing automation tools can demonstrate which email messages resonate with your target audience and which do not with statistics on open, read, and click rates. And customer profiles can be developed from purchasing behaviors and key demographics to further segment target lists into personalized subgroups that may be more responsive to messaging than others.

Once a strategy is in place, marketers need to know whether their customer experience programs are effective. By measuring their CX programs, you can track progress, identify areas for improvement, and determine the ROI of specific campaigns. There are various approaches and techniques that help you gain a holistic understanding of customer experience. Here are some recommended methods:

• Customer satisfaction surveys. By using well-designed survey questions, you can directly gather feedback from customers about their experience. This helps businesses gauge satisfaction levels, identify areas for improvement, and better understand customer perceptions.
• Use measurable data. Utilize quantifiable data, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer retention rates, or average response times, to track and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) related to customer experience. These metrics provide tangible insights into customer satisfaction, retention, and overall experience.
• Perform comparative tests. Conduct A/B testing or comparative experiments to evaluate different aspects of the customer experience. By comparing two or more variations of a process, user interface, or customer journey, you can identify which approach yields better outcomes and make informed decisions based on the results.
• Consult customer-facing staff. Frontline employees who interact directly with customers often possess valuable insights about customer experiences. Regularly consulting customer-facing staff, such as sales representatives or support agents, can provide qualitative feedback and firsthand accounts of customer interactions that help identify pain points and areas of improvement.
• Look at customer churn rate. Analyzing the rate at which customers stop using the product or service can indicate dissatisfaction or subpar experiences. Tracking churn rate and understanding the reasons behind customer attrition helps organizations identify areas that require attention and implement appropriate measures to turn the wheel toward customer retention.
• Analyze support tickets. Examining support tickets or customer service interactions provides important data on common issues, trends, and customer pain points. Analyzing support ticket data helps companies identify recurring problems, optimize support processes, and proactively address customer concerns.
• Use customer forums. Monitoring customer forums, online communities, or social media platforms where customers discuss experiences can provide insights into their opinions, sentiments, and challenges. Engaging with customers in these forums provides valuable feedback to help organizations address concerns and build stronger relationships.

Improve customer experience with a robust platform of tools.

CX is integral to business success and becoming the deciding factor when it comes to purchase decisions — especially now with customers going online freely and frequently to share their feedback — good or bad — and look for alternative products and services.

Marketers and operational teams should prioritize customer experience, as it includes all of the interactions that an individual has with a brand, not just their customer support requests. A misguided email campaign or faulty service call could be just the trigger to cause a customer to leave a brand. By improving customer experience through personalization, analysis, and cross-departmental collaboration, companies are better poised for success, retention, and ROI.

When you’re ready to optimize CX at your organization, start by analyzing your customer journey and noting any points of friction or areas for improvement. Next, you need to find the right tool to help your business provide exceptional customer experience.

Adobe Experience Platform makes real-time customer interactions possible. It gives you the ability to analyze customer experience data that really matters, train AI and machine learning models, and connect all your CX technology to a single source of truth.

With Adobe Experience Platform, marketers can create true, comprehensive customer profiles that drive relevant experiences for every person, from messaging and promotions to sales and support. Everything is tracked and available in one place, making information sharing among teams a breeze while centralizing the metrics needed to determine success.

To learn more about creating a customer experience that really makes a difference, watch the Adobe Experience Platform story .

See what Adobe Experience Cloud can do for you. Request a demo today.

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/ai-customer-experience

https://business.adobe.com/blog/how-to/cx-strategies

https://business.adobe.com/blog/the-latest/creating-amazing-digital-experiences

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• Questions & Answers
• The 25 Most Important Customer Experience Questions Answered

This is a great customer experience summary from Christopher Koch at SAP.

Yes, we’ve done the work so you don’t have to. Our eyes still glowing red from the pain of poring over the arcane verbosity of dozens of academic research papers (though a few interesting books helped ease the inflammation; some are noted below), we’ve compiled a list of what we think are the most important questions to ask about the customer experience and, based on our research, come up with the clearest, simplest, and most complete answers to those questions. Please let us know if you agree.

Q. What is customer experience and why does it matter?

Many experts like to say that customer experience is any interaction that customers have with a company. But some interactions matter more than others. The ones that matter the most have a measurable impact on the answers to these two questions: What do your customers think about you? What do your customers do based on their perception of you?

Q. Why these two questions?

Because customer loyalty is the closest thing to a holy grail in customer experience and these two questions represent the two components of customer loyalty: “attitudinal loyalty,” which means having a favourable mental impression of a company, and “behavioural loyalty,” which means that they don’t just like you, they buy from you – and keep buying from you. Research shows that attitudinal loyalty plays the biggest role in customer loyalty. If customers have a positive emotional outlook towards the customer experience, especially when measured against a competitor, they are more likely to buy from you and become loyal (repeat purchases). Research shows that customers’ evaluations of their experiences mirror the emotions they display during the interactions they have with companies as well as the feelings they experience after the encounter. If those emotions are negative, you can kiss sales and loyalty goodbye.

Q. Isn’t customer experience just another name for customer service?

No. Customer service is just one slice of the customer experience. Customers only contact customer service when they have a problem. As authors Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine put it in their excellent book Outside In, “Equating customer service with customer experience is like saying that a safety net is a trapeze act … If the performer has to use the net then something is wrong with the show.”

Q. So what should be my goals for improving customer experience?

You want them to like you, really like you. A positive attitude toward your company and its products or services has direct ties to customer loyalty and satisfaction. So any efforts that you make to improve customer experience should be considered in terms of how they make customers more satisfied and more loyal. If they are more satisfied with the experience you offer leading up to the sale than competitors, they are more likely to buy from you. If they feel more loyal, they are more likely to buy from you repeatedly.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that satisfaction does not necessarily lead to loyalty. For example, a customer could be satisfied with her experience with you but if a competitor offers something comparable or better she may buy from them next time. Customer experience efforts should drive towards making you customers’ preferred choice. (This distinction between satisfaction and preference is what has helped Frederick Reichheld make millions with his Net Promoter Score methodology.)

Q. But what if my company only sells to a customer once or infrequently? Why should I care about experience and loyalty?

Because even a single positive experience can be expressed in other ways besides repeat purchases. For example, happy customers can give you positive recommendations on websites or in social media or by recommending you to others via word of mouth.

Q. How do I know whether my customer experience needs improvement?

You can’t necessarily trust your customers to tell you. Few will take the time to complain or fill out a survey (especially online); they’ll simply go to a competitor, or worse, social media to complain. Better to ask these questions:

• Is our market share slipping?
• Is it costing more to acquire new customers?
• Are we losing existing customers more rapidly (churn)?
• Are we getting fewer recommendations and favourable reviews online and in social media?
• How much pain would our customers have to go through to switch to a competitor (switching costs)

Getting the answers to these questions will not only help determine the current quality of the customer experience but will also form the basis of a business case to do something about it.

Q. How much do my actual products and services factor into customer experience?

Less and less, unfortunately. You know the drill: product cycles are getting shorter and automation and globalisation have made it much easier for competitors to crank out “good enough” substitutes.

But even for highly complex products and for services, the quality of the customer experience often matters more. Research has found that in some cases, customers would rather buy an inferior (though good enough) product that comes with a superior relationship than a better product that does not.

Q. What are the most important components of the customer experience?

It’s not so much the individual components themselves, such as a Web site or a call centre (though those are certainly important); it’s more about whether the individual touch points contribute to creating a positive impression in customers’ minds. Here are the building blocks for creating that impression:

Trust. This is the foundation of a positive customer experience. If customers don’t feel that they can trust the interaction points (say a Web site) or the company behind them, they will be less likely to purchase.

Research says that trust consists of two main components:

• Confidence. Customers must believe that the company has the ability to provide a quality product or service
• Benevolence. Customers must believe that the company is willing to consider customers’ self-interest above their own
• Low effort and sacrifice. Customers want their interactions with companies to be free from delays and extra effort

Another issue is the tradeoff between what customers want and what companies are actually capable of providing. In their book The Experience Economy, authors B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore call this “customer sacrifice.” If the gap between what the customer wants and what the company offers is too great – for example, a cable TV customer has to subscribe to 10 extra channels she doesn’t want to get the one she does want – the experience generates negative emotions.

Positive emotion. Emotion shows up again and again in the research as being the most important factor in the customer relationship. Positive emotions are necessary to build satisfaction and long-term loyalty while negative emotions can destroy in a few moments relationships that companies have invested years in building.

Personalisation. Though this is a relatively new and controversial area, research shows that personalising the customer experience in the right ways creates positive emotion and leads to more satisfaction and loyalty.

Q. How good does my customer experience need to be?

In any relationship with a company, customers expect – or at least hope – that their interactions will require as little effort as possible to get what they want. This means that companies have to make the experience smooth, reliable, and efficient. If, for example, customers are shuttled among three different departments (all asking for their customer numbers) before they can accomplish a typical transaction, then the experience generates a negative emotion (frustration is the one that researchers agree is most common) and leads to reduced sales and loyalty.

However, some researchers believe that customers’ perceived effort isn’t just about what they have to do, it’s also tied into how they feel. In their book The Effortless Experience, authors Mathew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick Delisi found that only 35% of customers’ perceived effort had to do with exertion; 65% had to do with their emotional reactions during and after the encounter. So easy must go hand in hand with enjoyable.

Q. How do I determine how much I can or should spend to improve customer experience?

If, through competitive analysis and surveys of customers, it’s clear that your customer experience lags behind your competitors then improving customer experience should be considered part of the cost of doing business. Customers can research you and your competitors much more easily now through the web and social media. The holes in your experience will be revealed, causing negative emotion and an exodus to competitors.

Of course, a grocery chain doesn’t have the same profit margins as a luxury hotel chain. However, even companies with limited budgets can try experimenting with small pilots to see how changes in the customer experience impact sales, satisfaction, and loyalty. The percentages of extra revenue, improved loyalty, and increased profits gained from the pilots can help determine the budget for customer experience improvements.

Q. Where should I begin to improve the customer experience?

Removing the bumps in the road that cause customers to expend extra effort is the best place to start. Research by the Corporate Executive Board outlined in the book The Effortless Experience found that moving customers from rating the experience “below expectations” to “meets expectations” gave companies as much economic value as customers who said their expectations were exceeded. So just fixing the existing potholes in the experience will go a long way.

To do this, companies need to look outside by surveying customers about their experiences. Companies also need to look inside by surveying employees (and partners and external providers), about the frustrations they encounter in trying to accomplish their roles in the customer experience.

Q. What role should employees play?

Employee emotions are as important as customer emotions in the customer experience. Employees and managers who feel unable to do their jobs as they perceive they should be done – and feel powerless to change the situation – become unhappy and less able and willing to put out the effort it takes to keep customers happy. Rather than speak up about problems, they simply focus on doing what they are told, what research company Forrester calls a “culture of compliance.”

Yet let’s not be too hard on employees and managers here. An individual employee or manager may not be able to tell where the bumps in the road are. Employees may be happy and feeling confident about their contributions while being completely unaware that they are in fact causing problems further down the line because they are isolated from the rest of the experience process and can’t see the negative impacts.

Q. So how do I identify where the problems are in the customer experience?

Most companies begin by mapping out the customer experience both in terms of how customers interact with the company and the internal processes designed to make the experience flow smoothly. You also have to capture all the processes that happen outside your company, with partners and outsourcers. Having a holistic view can reveal where failures are occurring and form the basis of the case for change.

To create the map, you need your most knowledgeable process participants; ideally, those who have unbroken visibility out to what customers experience, as well as to the internal processes and experiences of employees and managers. Where the line of sight is broken, bring in people who can fill in the gaps. This is best done as a group exercise using the proverbial whiteboard and sticky notes, so that everyone has the opportunity to comment and contribute to determining where the problems are and debunking myths about where people might have thought the problems were, but weren’t.

Of course, this all presumes that the different areas involved in the customer experience in your company are even speaking to one another, much less willing to collaborate on fixing problems. Old habits, old grudges – and old silos – die hard. There should be a high-level executive leading the customer experience change effort, one who is a charismatic convincer (and decider), and who has a direct mandate from the CEO to get everyone to play nice with each other.

Q. What is the role of digital in improving the customer experience?

Digital channels and processes play the most important roles in pursuing the goals of speed and convenience and reducing customer effort. Of course, fixing existing problems with the digital experience (not just for customers but also for employees) is easier said than done because it is expensive and time-consuming. Many of the systems that customer service representatives use in call centres, for example, are as old as a greying dad – even a few grandfathers.

Why we are still on hold

And this is the rub. It’s one thing to identify potholes in the customer experience, it’s quite another to fix them. The reason that customers must be put on hold and transferred to different departments and asked for their identification information again and again is usually that the systems that serve these departments were developed in the mainframe era when the concept of integration – and more importantly, the technology to accomplish it – simply did not exist.

Customisation has created a nightmare

To make matters worse, companies have layered customisation on top of customisation over the years to make these systems more able to talk to one another and to company networks, databases, and the internet. They’ve made huge investments just to attain the level of mediocrity we all endure today.

New technologies will help – eventually

The good news is that technology has finally caught up with the customer experience problem. Cloud technologies make application integration easier and in-memory databases have the power to hold massive amounts of information from multiple systems together in real time; that would have seemed like science fiction to mainframe developers of the sixties and seventies.

However, we are still in the early wave of the transformation. Companies remain cautious about discarding old systems that work well in favour of new technologies that are less proven. And though companies have a lot of freedom to make changes in their website experiences, the best Web site is only as good as the data behind it. Customer experience executives would do well to make the CIO their best friend right now.

In the meantime, companies do what they have always done. They pave the potholes in the customer experience with people. People fill the experience potholes – and pay the price.

Companies use people to try to ameliorate the long hold times and the call transfers that stem from having to navigate among different archaic systems and process workarounds. It’s an extremely difficult job and it’s why call centre turnover rates are so high.

Q. What is “emotional labour?”

Most people who work directly with customers these days have been trained to suffer. Researchers have even developed a term for it: “emotional labour.” Studies have shown that employees expend a lot of mental energy in the customer experience, such as having to express happiness when they don’t feel it and having to suppress anger and other inappropriate behaviours when customers treat them abusively.

The toll of this emotional labor can become so high that employees can suffer from researchers call “emotional exhaustion,” which expresses itself in burnout, feelings of low accomplishment, and a kind of emotional numbness in which employees are no longer able to summon the positive attitude and empathy that are so necessary to a successful customer experience.

Q. So does that mean I should be looking for a certain type of person to fill roles in the customer experience?

For those who interact directly with customers, yes. Research says that extroverts do better in customer experience roles because they are more naturally inclined to want to interact with others. But these extroverts should also have the ability to do three things: Regulate inner emotions Tolerate ambiguity Enjoy helping others In combination, these factors give employees extra endurance when it comes to dealing with people and more ability to suppress inappropriate behaviour (even when customers deserve it).

Q. How should I train employees to act during the customer experience?

Even the best employees can burn out if they are forced to adopt what researchers call “surface acting,” in which employees have to put on the proverbial smile and feign emotions that they aren’t feeling during an encounter with customers. Part of the stress is that customers can sometimes detect the falseness of employees’ emotions, which research says causes customers to react negatively.

Instead, companies should focus on training employees to offer two things:

1. Treat customers with empathy. This means hearing customers out and treating them with dignity and respect at every point in the interaction and acting to defuse emotional tension – without having to put on false emotions such as a painted on smile.

2. Offer customers justice. Employees need to get on the same wavelength as the customer to determine what would constitute a just outcome for the experience in the customer’s mind and then weigh that against the limits the company has set on the experience and come to a mutually agreed upon resolution.

In part, this depends on the degree to which employees are allowed to exercise their own independence and judgment. But it also depends on the preset outcomes that the company builds around the experience. For example, are customer service representatives given the freedom to send a replacement product for one that is one month – or one year – past warranty? Companies need to constantly revisit these outcomes to maintain a good balance between giving employees the power to give customers experiences that lead to positive emotions while not breaking the bank.

Q. To what extent should I try to replace the human customer experience with a digital one?

There’s clear evidence that digital contributes a lot to make the experience easy and fast, especially in transactional types of relationships such as buying a book on Amazon, which customers like. Digital is also great for information-intensive experiences, such as complex products and services that require customers to do a lot of research before buying. And of course, digital experiences are much cheaper for companies, though most surveys show that companies do a poor job of managing them — especially when it comes to coordinating across digital and human channels.  Indeed, a good customer experience can rarely be completely online or offline. Increasingly, it’s the coordination of the two that matters most.

Digital may be great for easy, but we still need humans for when things become hard – such as when that product that was so easy to order online breaks offline. Research shows that customers place a high value on the quality of the relationship they have with companies. In that regard, there is no replacement for human-to-human interaction – at least not until virtual reality hits the mainstream (which could be sooner than you think). Until then, careful placement of a pleasurable human interaction into the customer experience when competitors are trying to pave everything over with digital can have a major impact.

An example is ING, the Dutch bank that entered the U.S. market in the nineties with an online experience only – no branches. But in 2001, the company decided to create a human experience, not with a traditional bank branch but with a café in New York City. Instead of serving up deposit slips, employees serve coffee, treats (sales of which help defray the costs of running the offices), and financial planning advice. The original café was a big hit and ING (whose U.S. online business was purchased by Capital One for $9 billion in 2012) began building cafes in major metro areas around the country. Capital One has continued the expansion plan while other banks have been shutting down branches or imitating the approach.

Q. What if I don’t have the resources for a “delight-the-customer” approach to customer experience?

Companies that invest in delighting the customer without first making sure they are at least meeting the expectations of the vast majority of customers are probably wasting their money. Getting a free gift card for a restaurant is meaningless if the food and service aren’t so hot to begin with.  Plus, giving stuff away or sending your employees out on time-consuming missions to bring smiles to customers’ faces is expensive – 10-20% more, according to executives surveyed by authors Mathew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick Delisi in The Effortless Experience.

The first priorities should be to drive down customer effort and sacrifice.

However, delighting the customer does not necessarily need to be focused on going above and beyond the call of duty. There are less expensive ways to do it (see the “customer experience as theatre” examples below).

Q. Okay, let’s say customers say the experience is easy and fast. Is that really enough to build loyalty over the long term?

Given the current sorry state of the customer experience in most industries, yes. But let’s assume for a moment that you are the world’s master of easy, fast, reliable, and convenient. What happens when a competitor catches up? What’s next?

Some researchers argue that there are two other ways to differentiate your customer experience that are harder for competitors to match:

Customer experience as theatre Personalisation

Q. What is customer experience as theatre?

Author B. Joseph Pine II says that Best Buy’s Geek Squad has taken the classic military motif of the uniform a step farther by adding a dose of humour and humility. The Geek Squad purposely dresses its employees in an outfit that still gets nerds hung from their underwear in gym lockers around the world: white button-down shirts, thin, clip-on black ties, black pants, and white socks.

Each employee also gets a titanium badge designed to look just like a policeman’s badge. The geek squad drives Volkswagen Beetles painted black and white to look like extremely awkward and ineffective police cars. It is the nerd as the anti-hero hero, here to save the day for you and your computer.

Theatre need not cost much.

Through this minimalist and, Pine is careful to point out, inexpensive, bit of theatre, the Geek Squad, which Best Buy bought when it was a tiny startup, has grown exponentially and become a household brand name. Is it because of the name and the uniforms, or is it simply because the Squad offers better service and is tied to Best Buy, which has long been a household brand? Impossible to tell, but once again, the clip-ons haven’t hurt.

Pine, who is the co-author, with James H. Gilmore, of The Experience Economy, believes that any company, with enough creativity and a good employee screening and training program, can create the same kind of differentiated experience. “Whenever employees are in front of your customers, those employees are acting,” says Pine. “They need to act in a way that engages the audience. And it does not require any expenditure. It requires that you direct your workers to act, that you give them roles to play and you help them characterise those goals on the business stage.”

Though he acknowledges that he has nothing beyond anecdotal evidence to back up his theory, Pine argues that performance is a way to stand apart in a crowded field and create customer preference rather than mere satisfaction.

Q. What about personalisation? Can that create a differentiated customer experience?

Personalisation is controversial but holds promise because it can be another form of easy. Though we usually think of customisation as adding more, it can also mean simplifying the experience by removing everything except what the customer truly wants. This is particularly true on the web, where websites and e-commerce portals overstuffed with offers and information can trip that magic switch of frustration that kills sales and loyalty.

Sweeping away the noise and personalising a Web site to a customer’s tastes – we will look back on Amazon’s recommendation engine as the stone-age prototype for this sort of thing – can reduce customer effort and sacrifice. Research has shown that offering relevant information and simplifying the experience results in more customer trust and satisfaction and more sales.

More importantly, as databases become ever-more fast and powerful, we can add a powerful new aspect to the digital customer experience: learning. At the core of recommendation engines like Amazon’s and Netflix is machine learning – the ability to memorise your actions and preferences and use algorithms to serve up personalised offers.

However, personalisation treads on the same dangerous turf as efforts to “delight” the customer. It can be complex and expensive. And if it only leads to satisfaction rather than a positive preference for the brand, that money may be wasted. Indeed, one research study found that for customers that were already satisfied with their experience, personalisation had limited benefits. Only in instances where the customer had a high degree of trust in the company but low levels of satisfaction did personalisation make a significant difference. Therefore, it’s best to start with a pilot project to see if personalisation will make a difference before investing too much.

Q. Personalisation also raises issues of privacy, right?

In order to make recommendations and personalise web pages, companies need to gather information. And as we’ve all learned, various companies and governments have stepped all over people’s privacy in order to gather data about them.

Businesses need to build a customer experience model that helps individuals understand the data that companies want to collect about them, the methods the companies will use to make behavioural predictions, and the trustworthiness they can expect from those predictions.

Here are five ways to use Big Data to be cool, not creepy.

Articulate “What’s in it for me?” Research has found that the majority of consumers in the United States and the United Kingdom are willing to have trusted retailers use some of their personal data in order to present personalised and targeted products, services, recommendations, and offers. But the value has to be crystal clear, no matter who’s tracking the data. For example, insurance provider Progressive and Tesla Motors have convinced car owners to have devices installed in their vehicles that track where and how they drive. In exchange, customers potentially get lower car insurance rates (an average 10% to 15% reduction on premiums) or improved service, such as supercharger stations near their most frequent routes.

Be transparent about the data relationship. Slapping a dense data use policy written in legalese on the corporate Web site does little to enlighten customers. Instead, companies should think about the customer data transaction – what information the customer is giving them, how they’re using it, and what the result will be – and try to describe it as simply as possible.

Let customers learn about each other. In 2011, Procter & Gamble created a “Mean Stinks” campaign for Secret deodorant that encouraged girl-to-girl anti-bullying posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The pages let participants send apologies to those they had bullied; view videos; and share tips, tools, and challenges with their peers. Besides helping girls, it drove a 16% market share increase in the Secret deodorant line.

Experiment and build trust. Building a Big Data strategy that improves customer experience takes time and continual tweaking. Google’s Autocomplete isn’t always on point. Amazon’s suggestions sometimes go astray. But as customers build up a history of experience with a brand, they see that data is used for their benefit more often than not. They develop a trust in the exchange of data for value. They see where it came from. And they forgive the missteps.

Make the distinction between little data and Big Data. “I steer companies to really focus on leveraging the data that customers give them in the normal process of doing business first and think about the third-party stuff later,” says Elea McDonnell Feit, assistant professor of Marketing at Drexel University. “At least 80% of the value you can generate from customer data comes from using the information customers reveal about themselves directly to you.”

Q. Do some customers deserve more personalisation than others?

Given that personalisation can be complex and expensive, it could pay to segment customers into those most likely to respond to personalisation.  Some companies have created composite personas of customers to do more broad-brush personalisation that doesn’t cost as much as one-to-one efforts. For example, you could create a set of categories across the customer base based on past purchase history and other data and create separate customer experiences for each category.

Q. How do I determine the ROI of customer experience improvements?

Unfortunately for customers (and in the long run, companies, too), there’s really only one measure that matters: switching costs. If there are no viable alternatives in the market, or if switching to a competitor would cost more than the product or service itself or involve so much customer effort that it doesn’t seem worth it, customer experience becomes less important to revenues. Research shows that customers who perceive high switching costs are more likely to stick with a company that provides a less-than-stellar (but acceptable – again anger and conflict trump all other factors) experience, thereby reducing the potential returns from investing in improving that experience.

But even companies with high switching costs or lack of competition neglect customer experience at their peril. Cable companies, for example, are feeling the pain today as disruptive pay-per-view entertainment options such as Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime lure away cable customers who have long wished for an alternative but have had no other choices – until now.

Loyalty over time matters.

But let’s assume that you are in a competitive industry. The most important impact that a good customer experience has is in customer loyalty. Because it costs more to acquire new customers than to maintain relationships with existing customers, most experts point to loyalty as the decisive metric. More specifically, they cite lifetime customer value – usually computed as the revenue from each customer over the length of the relationship.

Author Frederick F. Reichheld puts a finer point on the metric in his book The Loyalty Effect, saying that companies should measure the lifetime profit per customer minus the cost of acquiring them in the first place. The problem here is that few companies even measure revenue per customer over time, much less take it to Reichheld’s ideal level. And not all researchers agree with Reichheld that profits matter more than revenues.

Three other metrics to consider

In their book Outside In, authors Manning and Bodine modelled three areas where companies can benefit from improved customer experience that is slightly easier to measure: 1. More incremental purchases from existing customers 2. Higher retained revenue as a result of reduced churn 3. New sales driven by word of mouth They found that in the hotel and wireless industries, small improvements in customer loyalty led to major gains – in the billions – in revenue because competition in those industries is so intense and switching costs are so low. However, even in less volatile industries where switching costs are higher, such as health insurance, Manning and Bodine saw opportunities to gain revenue in the tens of millions by improving the customer experience.

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Neil ran his first SAP transformation programme in his early twenties. He spent the next 21 years working both client side and for various consultancies running numerous SAP programmes. After successfully completing over 15 full lifecycles he took a senior leadership/board position and his work moved onto creating the same success for others.

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10 ways to improve customer experience (cx).

11 min read Businesses are increasingly recognizing the power of customer experience when it comes to growing loyalty, lowering operational costs and securing long-term growth. But how exactly do you make your CX better?

Improving customer experience (CX) – the business case

Why should you improve customer experience ? Why does CX matter?

Improving your customer experience (CX) could have a major impact on your bottom line. In fact, a moderate increase in customer experience generates an average revenue increase of $823 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues, according to the Temkin Group .

An investment in CX can also reduce operational costs such as the cost to serve, according to Harvard Business Review . Unhappy customers are expensive, after all.

Free guide: Reimagining omnichannel CX in the age of AI

1. Empower your employees

This may seem backwards, but companies that win at CX start with their employees .

There’s an important connection between empowered employees and happy customers. Think about it – you’ve been speaking to a customer service agent for 10 minutes and you ask for a discount. The agent wants to resolve your issue, but they need to approve it with their manager. You’re already tired and just want to be finished with the conversation. It would be much easier if the agent could use their judgment, approve the discount (or take other appropriate action) and solve your issue on the spot.

Take action :

Find out what’s blocking your employees from delivering a great customer experience. Use an employee pulse survey to uncover any common pain points in the employee experience , and use those insights to review systematic processes such as contact center protocols and CRM software.

Consider your company culture , too. Are leaders, managers and employees all on the same page, with clearly understood shared values that support good customer experiences ? Can you do more to build a customer-centric culture in your organization?

Learn about our Employee Pulse survey software

2. Value employee ideas

Employees who are on the frontlines interacting with customers are in a unique position. They’re the rubber meets the road when it comes to delivering on your brand promises, and they’re equally pivotal when it comes to perceiving and communicating customer expectations, mood and perceptions.

So when that crucial connection suffers, so does your understanding of your customers, and their perception of you. Employees who feel valued are more engaged at work and more willing to help customers.

According to our 2020 employee engagement trends research, employees are two times as likely to be actively disengaged if they think their manager ignores them, so it’s important to let them know they’re valued by listening to their opinions and ideas.

As well as running regular pulse surveys to collect employee experience data, consider setting up an employee suggestion box to create a channel for ad hoc feedback. Giving employees a voice can offer valuable insight.

Even more importantly, take action on the feedback your employees provide. Making a clear connection between what they give you and what you’re able to do as a result will underline how important they are to you.

3. Use tech to create breakthrough customer experiences

AI and machine learning are tailor-made for CX experiences. From chatbots that are there for customers 24/7, to natural language processing that allows you to understand what people mean in free-form text messages, the latest digital technology has made time-to-insights faster and new levels of personalization and service both scalable and affordable.

The value of these technologies are reflected by the increasing numbers of big businesses using them. For example, Dominos lets customers order pizza through the Domino’s Facebook Messenger chatbot, and eBay helps customers search the entire eBay marketplace for the best deals out there just like a personal shopper. There’s no doubt AI and related tech can make life easier for your customers and allow you to get creative with your products.

Take action:

Explore the possibilities with AI and machine learning tools designed for experience management. Take a look at our listening tools and see how digital technology powers contact center performance.

4. Embrace an omnichannel mindset

Gone are the days of sitting down at a desktop computer to connect with a brand. With more than 50% of web traffic coming from mobile devices, multi-device digital journeys are now the standard.

But it’s not just about maintaining a consistent journey across different devices. Today’s CX leaders understand that customers use a range of offline and online channels to connect with brands, often switching multiple times, and that every part of the journey – however meandering and unpredictable – needs to be seamlessly joined-up and consistent.

Embracing omnichannel is one of the most important shifts you’ll make in your business thinking, and it’s one that goes hand in hand with prioritizing CX.

Find out how to develop an omnichannel approach

5. Personalize, personalize, personalize!

Customers today want personalized interactions . In fact, research by Epsilon found that 80% of consumers were more likely to make a purchase when brands offered CX, and 81% of consumers want brands to understand them better and know when and when not to approach them, according to Accenture .

Personalization, where the experience adapts based on what you know about the customer, makes customer journeys smoother and strengthens the bond between brand and customer. If you’ve ever received a marketing email filled with recommendations and vouchers based on your purchase history, or been able to set up which content you see on a website from your user profile, you’ve experienced the power of personalization.

Here are some ways you can use personalization:

• Use data to personalize survey questions
• Use geolocation technology to personalize based on location
• Offer recommendations based on past purchases
• Personally follow-up with survey responses
• Adapt your website to offer dynamic content based on user preferences

6. Adopt a top-down approach

The best customer-centric organizations start at the top. CX and company leaders should model the importance of customer-centricity and set an example employees can follow with confidence.

Take Walt Disney, for example, who used to walk around Disneyland Park, observing and fine-tuning the experience by stepping into his customer’s shoes. Today, the Disney brand is customer-focused because the leaders model it.

Leadership exemplars are part of developing a customer-first culture. Starting from the top, values and behaviors need to be consistently adopted and acted on at every level of the organization, from C-suite to shop floor.

Use our tips to understand the value and impact of a customer-centric culture and allocate resources to make the customer a priority. Here are 7 ways to make your organization more customer-centric

7. Use customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping visually illustrates customers’ processes, needs, and perceptions throughout their interaction and relationship with your brand.

By cross-referencing journey maps with core metrics, you can get a better understanding of your CX and where there are issues and opportunities. You can use journey maps to improve customer experience now, envision your future customer experience , or drive organizational change.

Learn how to plan, execute and improve your customer journey maps with our ultimate guide to customer journey mapping

8. Include open-text feedback in surveys

Customer experiences are especially powerful when they are expressed in a customer’s own words. By hearing directly from customers, for example through open-text responses on surveys, you can understand the thoughts and sentiments behind their actions and make more informed CX decisions as a result.

But although in an ideal world you’d have a 1:1 conversation with every customer, asking everyone what they think of your brand and listening to their answers would simply take forever. Until recently, businesses have been limited in how much natural language feedback they can process and use.

Fortunately, technology has provided a way to take open-text feedback from customer surveys and analyze it at scale, so that you can massively increase your capacity to listen. Tools like Qualtrics iQ use natural language processing to sift large volumes of written feedback and identify the big-picture patterns you need to know about. It can even make future predictions based on your data.

9. Improve your customer service

Customer service is the backbone of a great customer experience, and can be a powerful differentiator in the eyes of your customers. People don’t just buy from you because your product meets their needs – they buy because they feel confident they’ll get support when they need it. The data show that time and again, customers who experience great service buy more and stay loyal to brands for longer. For instance, American Express found that customers were willing to pay 17% more with a business that offered great customer service.

Delivering great customer service relies on a few different things. Your employees need to be hired, trained, coached, and supported with a view to growing customer service skills and behaviors. Your business culture needs to promote delivering on quality, not just on speed and efficiency. And the infrastructure your business runs on, including CRM tools and experience management platform , needs to be flexible, scalable, and easy to use.

Some ways to improve your customer service include:

• Offering multiple channels for support – part of your omnichannel approach
• Optimizing wait and response times – which could mean a strategy that mixes digital and in-person support
• Closing the loop with customers – turning every experience into a positive outcome
• Using benchmark metrics like CSAT , CES , and NPS to make sure you are continually improving

10. Implement Voice of the Customer programs

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is feedback about customers’ experiences with you and their expectations of your products or services. It focuses on customer needs , expectations , understanding, and product improvement.

Creating a program for capturing feedback and acting on those insights will help you understand your customer’s needs, create better products, and attract and retain customers. This is crucial for the success of any CX program.

A VoC program needs to be closely aligned to your organizational goals and what business outcomes you want to achieve from listening to customers.

Find out more about planning and executing a VoC program

Related resources

Ai & customer experience 13 min read, customer experience transformation 15 min read, customer lifecycle management 18 min read, customer experience automation 11 min read, customer centricity 16 min read, customer data platforms 14 min read, customer experience insights 12 min read, request demo.

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How to improve customer experience: 11 ways

Home » Blog » How to improve customer experience: 11 ways

Customer experiences are a fundamental part of daily life. Whether online or offline, knowingly or unknowingly, people engage with businesses, buy goods and services, and then reflect on the quality of those experiences. 

While a good customer experience (CX) fits seamlessly into a person’s day, great CX makes it that much better. It leaves customers with a fond memory and positive feeling—one that they wouldn’t mind returning to over and over.

This article will help you refine and optimize your CX, lifting those interactions up to give your customers more than a mere transaction. We’ll show you how to take targeted actions based on solid data and, more importantly, gain direct feedback from the most crucial people—your customers.

• 1.1 Customer experience vs customer service
• 1.2.1 Signs that your customers are having a bad experience
• 1.2.2 How negative customer experiences affect your brand
• 2.1.1 Top tip: create a customer profile that suits your business
• 2.2 2. Set clear expectations and goals for your CX
• 2.3 3. Capture customer feedback at every stage of the journey
• 2.4 4. Gather and act on employee feedback
• 2.5 5. Personalize your CX
• 2.6 6. Create an omnichannel customer experience
• 2.7 7. Put a focus on UX/UI design
• 2.8 8. Audit and optimize the customer experience
• 2.9 9. Use the right tool to streamline the process
• 2.10 10. Measure the ROI of your customer experience initiatives
• 2.11 11. Identify new areas for growth and improvement
• 3 Improve your CX with WEVO

Why improve customer experience?

CX is a broad concept, as it involves every detail of how customers perceive and interact with your brand. This typically covers three key stages: discovery, engagement, and delivery. Each stage can make or break the experience and either strengthen or weaken loyalty to your brand. 

The good news is: you’re in control of your brand’s customer experience. It’s worth taking an active role in delivering great CX, as it not only benefits your customers, but also your business and brand. Here’s how:

• It builds customer loyalty. Positive experiences create emotional connections, making customers more likely to make repeat purchases, stay subscribed, or resist offers from your competitors.
• It strengthens your reputation. Reputation is all about repetition. Consistently meeting and exceeding customer expectations, providing stellar customer service and building seamless interactions will strengthen and solidify your place in the market.
• It can boost your revenue. When customers feel that everything about your brand is right for them—product, service, and everything in between—they’re more likely to spend and come back for more. 
• It gives you a competitive edge. Especially in industries where products and services are similar, doubling down on exceptional customer experiences can be a key differentiator.

Customer experience vs customer service

Customer service and customer experience are related, but aren’t the same. Here’s what you should know about their differences and overlap:

• Customer service refers to the proactive and reactive support delivered by your customer service team. This includes assisting customers with issues, answering questions, or providing advice. Customer service also includes handling returns, answering queries over the phone, and resolving complaints via email. 
• Customer experience spans the entire customer journey. It includes customer services, but expands beyond and encompasses every interaction—direct and indirect—from the moment they first hear about your company, through the buying process, to the ongoing relationship they have with your brand. 

Here’s why it matters to know the difference:

• Scope of influence: Customer service is about fixing problems. Customer experience is about making the whole journey better and preventing problems from occurring in the first place.
• Impact duration: Customer service resolves issues as they occur in the short term. Customer experience addresses how customers feel about your brand in the long run.
• Emotional connection: Great customer service can fix a problem and relieve frustration, but great customer experience makes your customers want to come back and tell their friends about you.

Knowing the difference can help you create a customer-centric culture where positive customer experiences are the norm, not the exception. 

What is a bad customer experience?

With so many touchpoints across the customer journey, it’s helpful to have a close, honest look at everything that could fall below par—so you know what to fix. 

Here’s what customers find annoying:

• Slow response times: Even if responses are helpful, delays can frustrate customers. 
• Inconsistent information: Customers expect reliable information across all channels. If your website says one thing and a customer service rep says another, you’ll quickly lose trust and credibility. The same goes for missing or hard-to-find information. We all know a company that doesn’t have their phone number on their contact page—don’t be like them.
• Difficult navigation: Show that you care about your customers’ time with a UI that works for them. A slow or confusing website or app that’s hard to navigate will drive customers away before they even reach checkout. 
• Lack of personalization: Today’s customers expect personalization. Your competitor is doing it, so why aren’t you? A personal touch goes a long way, whether that’s personalized recommendations or a birthday discount.
• Limited customer input: Make sure your digital door is always open and that customers can voice their ideas—and get a timely response.

Signs that your customers are having a bad experience

The issues above won’t always be easy to recognize. If people aren’t actively reaching out with complaints, that doesn’t mean everything is going great. While returns, unsubscribes and negative reviews are clear indicators, some signs are often overlooked. These include:

• High drop-off rates
• Low repeat business 
• Customer service overload
• Customers not using all available features
• Low engagement rates 

Consider every way a customer might interact with your brand, and then picture what a poor customer experience at each stage could look like. Identifying unhappy customers first will make it easier to build a positive CX that leads to satisfied, loyal customers.

How negative customer experiences affect your brand

A bad customer experience is more than an inconvenience—if the problems aren’t addressed quickly enough, they can lead to major issues. It can:

• Damage your brand: It might feel unfair, but just one bad experience can turn a customer away for good—and they’ll likely tell others about it, too. When it comes to CX, there are no test runs.
• Reduce sales: Unhappy customers are less likely to purchase again. Simple as that.
• Increase costs: More complaints mean that more time and resources are spent on customer service rather than areas of your business that fuel growth.
• Lower employee morale: Constantly dealing with unhappy customers is not a fun job. With a consistently bad CX, productivity will drop and staff turnover will skyrocket.

11 ways to improve customer experience and strengthen loyalty

Designing great end-to-end experiences isn’t easy—let alone keeping them consistently great. 

But it’s necessary to stay competitive in today’s business environment, and with the right systems in place, it’s totally doable. We’ll walk you through 11 essential steps to level-up your CX.

1. Research and understand your customers

Enough with the guesswork. Start tracking behavioral analytics, then act on them. Use CX research to understand who your customers are and how they behave across different scenarios. 

Look at differences between segments, and determine whether you can redefine new segments based on this data. 

Top tip: create a customer profile that suits your business

We all know buyer personas, but real buyers change slightly based on every interaction they have with your business, coupled with real-world events. 

So let’s build the buyer persona 2.0: dynamic customer profiles that update in real-time based on actual customer interactions. 

This is not science fiction; if you build a solid database and keep it up to date, machine learning can give you the insights needed to become the most proactive player on the market. When building these profiles, use metrics such as:

• Demographics
• Purchase history
• Interaction data

2. Set clear expectations and goals for your CX

Think strategically about the kind of journey you want to create for your customers. Here are a few considerations to guide you:

• What does your own ideal customer experience look like? 
• What does your current CX look like, honestly? 
• Are your core values felt by customers? If not, how can they be? 

Here are a few examples of actionable and transformative CX goals:

• Redefine customer service: Rather than just speeding up responses, aim to make them more helpful and proactive. For instance, if a customer’s order is delayed, let them know before they reach out to you.
• Customize your UI: Research how different customer segments interact with your digital platforms, then tailor your UI and UX to their preferences.
• Create opportunities for connection: Invite and facilitate customer input into product development or service enhancements.
• Diversify customer support: Introduce support options that cater to varying customer preferences, like self-service tools or community forums. 

3. Capture customer feedback at every stage of the journey

To improve your CX, you need to understand the entire journey from your customer’s perspective. Here’s how to gather valuable feedback at every stage:

• Awareness stage: When customers first engage with your brand, whether through ads, social media, or word of mouth, ask how they found you and what caught their attention. 
• Consideration stage: While potential customers evaluate your offering, share targeted surveys or feedback forms on product pages. You can also use a live chat tool to ask if they need more information, or if something specific is holding them back from making a purchase. Just make sure it doesn’t interrupt the buying journey—you want to push them forward, not away.
• Purchase stage: Put feedback mechanisms in place to capture customers’ immediate thoughts on the buying process. A simple post-purchase pop-up often does the trick. Struggling to get responses? Incentivize them with a discount code for their next purchase. It’s a win–win.
• Retention stage: Long-term feedback is critical, but most companies neglect previous customers and let contact fade away. Not you! Regular check-ins via email or through loyalty programs can help you understand ongoing satisfaction and discover why customers return—or why they don’t.
• Advocacy stage: When customers become brand advocates, don’t just celebrate the win—ask what motivated this loyalty, so you can replicate the result.

4. Gather and act on employee feedback

Employees have firsthand insights into where your customer experience might be falling short. After all, they’re the ones who have to clean up the mess. 

Unfortunately, that often happens in silence, as it feels like “part of the job.” Here’s how to make employee insights a strategic asset in building a better CX and customer success team:

• Set up regular checkpoints: Ensure routine channels and opportunities for employees to share their observations and ideas, like regular meetings, suggestion boxes, or dedicated feedback sessions. 
• Empower front-line staff: Encourage those who directly interact with customers to report their experiences. Give them a framework to do so, if needed, and let them know why this input is needed—so they don’t fear being criticised for dealing with an unhappy customer. 
• Act on their feedback: Simply collecting feedback isn’t enough. Implement changes where possible to show that you’re acting on their input. Is something going to take a while? Then let them know and explain why certain suggestions aren’t being actioned immediately and what they can do in the meantime.

5. Personalize your CX

As we’ve said, people like (and expect) personalization. But they’re also savvy to the tricks brands use to make an experience feel personalized, when it really isn’t. Here’s how to elevate your personalization strategy to go beyond surface-level tricks:

• Predictive personalization: Instead of simply reacting to customer actions, try to be one step ahead. Capitalize on customer analytics trends with AI and machine learning, to more effectively track behavior patterns and predict what customers want next.
• Context-aware interactions: Build your actions and offers based on the customer’s current context—like their location, the time of day, or recent interactions with your brand. Just never send anything that feels creepy, out of place, or poorly timed. 
• Hyper-personalized journeys: Segment your customers more finely than traditional personas allow. Work with psychographic data that includes customer values, attitudes, and lifestyles—so you can engage customers on a deeper and more resonant level.  
• Smart follow-ups: Don’t just remind customers that you exist with generic retargeting emails. Rather, help them move forward in their journey. For example, if a customer browsed a product but didn’t purchase, send them a review or testimonial video of that product in action, rather than a standard follow-up message.

6. Create an omnichannel customer experience

The key to all of this is consistency across the entire customer experience. If every step of the customer journey is right except the very last, that closing experience is what your customers will remember. 

So every interaction and every channel should be aligned and equally memorable. Here’s how to make sure your CX is exceptional all round:

• Ensure all customer interactions are interconnected for a given individual. Use a system that shares customer interaction history across all channels, such as a CRM, so your team always knows the full story. It shouldn’t be your customers’ job to repeat themselves.
• Centralize your customer data into a single, accessible database. This ensures every touchpoint is enriched by the same up-to-date customer information, enabling consistent and informed interactions.
• Make sure that support is never siloed. Whether a customer reaches out via phone, email, or live chat, the quality and tone of service should be consistent. 

7. Put a focus on UX/UI design

Great design isn’t just about looks—it helps customers find what they need and enjoy your brand’s digital experience. 

When designing your website or app, make sure it’s intuitive and a pleasure to use. That goes beyond a clear information structure or easy navigation. Make sure it’s accessible for people of various ages, capabilities and levels of tech-savviness. Your website is there to inform them, not to impress them. 

Discover how WEVO can help refine your UX/UI design through targeted customer feedback.

8. Audit and optimize the customer experience

A great customer experience isn’t built in a day. In fact, you should be working on it every day for, well, as long as your brand exists. That means regularly checking and refining your customer journey, and not only when something is wrong. 

Just because it works well once, doesn’t mean it always will—so always be on the lookout for CX optimization opportunities. Preferences change; when your competitors innovate, your customers will expect you to keep up. 

9. Use the right tool to streamline the process

Building a great experience for end customers means building a great experience for the employees working on it. If it’s chaos behind the scenes, it will most likely be on stage as well, sooner or later. 

That’s why it’s important to invest in tools that transform how you manage and enhance different parts of the customer experience. Here are a few to consider:

• WEVO: For deep customer insights and real-time feedback on design elements.
• Google Analytics: To monitor website traffic and user behavior.
• Zendesk: For managing customer interactions at scale across channels.
• Hotjar: For visual heat maps of where users click most often on your site.
• Trello or Asana: For tracking and management of CX projects.

10. Measure the ROI of your customer experience initiatives

Why not just invest more in marketing and product development, and hope it overshadows any flaws in your customer experience?

At some point, something in the CX will break beyond repair. That’s why it’s better to invest in your customer experience directly, and then measure its impact and return on investment. Here are key metrics to focus on:

• Customer retention rates: How effectively are you retaining customers?
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): How happy are customers with their interactions?
• Net promoter score (NPS): Are your customers willing to recommend you?
• Customer effort score (CES): How easy is it for customers to interact with your brand?
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): How long are your customers with you and how much do they spend over that time?

11. Identify new areas for growth and improvement

Consumer preferences are ever-changing, so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to evolve and optimize your customer experience—especially as new and innovative tools are developed. 

The key is to continuously work on your CX, rather than treating it as an after-thought for less busy times. This way you can stay agile and responsive, and position your brand to become the most customer-centric in the market. 

Improve your CX with WEVO

Every part of the customer experience is important—and with the right tool, you’re in control of all of them. 

WEVO leverages AI and human specialists to help you create experiences that customers want to repeat, over and over again. 

We’ll help you design a CX that empowers users to get where they need to be. Want to know more? See how we can become part of your optimal CX strategy. Ask us anything, here.

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More to explore.

Introducing Custom Screeners & Advanced Filtering in WEVO Pro: Precision in User Experience Feedback

Contents1 What Are Custom Screeners and Advanced Filtering?2 Key Benefits:3 How to Utilize This Feature:4 Example Use Case:5 Conclusion: At WEVO, we’re always looking for

Contents1 Why improve customer experience?1.1 Customer experience vs customer service1.2 What is a bad customer experience?1.2.1 Signs that your customers are having a bad experience1.2.2

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The Customer Experience Center: Successful Customer Visits

How to Have Successful Customer Visits to Your Customer Experience Center

In my first blog on Customer Experience Centers (CECs), I  shared best practices and key strategic elements  in the various customer experience centers we visited last summer. My second blog focused on some of the more tactical elements that we saw involved in the  design of these centers and preparations for customer visits , e.g., layout, physical props, and the all-important effort that goes into communicating your story. Now we’ll bring it all together with an overview of the best practices for executing the actual customer visit itself, starting with the intake process and ending with critical follow-up steps.

Intake Process: Registration, Research, and Planning

One of the first themes that emerged as we learned about best practices at customer engagement centers was the need for a well-thought-out registration or intake process for  every visit  (whether a new customer or a return visit). These processes vary from center to center, but typically involved several common elements:

• Coordinate information sharing: Executing a successful customer visit requires close collaboration between sales reps and technical folks to clarify the objective of the initial meeting and any follow-up interactions (e.g., whether a second visit should involve a broader range of participants, or narrow and focus on specific technical challenges). Large firms in particular may want to consider implementing a CRM system to track who has interacted with whom and record any relevant market research or account plants that have been developed.
• Do your homework:  If a sales rep generates a first visit, they will be an essential, but not sole, source of information about the underlying customer problem or situation. Additional research is advisable to help provide context, whether it’s about competitive pressures, regulatory hurdles, or internal politics. For relatively local customers, it may be helpful to start with a shorter meeting between a limited number of participants so that the host company can “right-size” the itinerary for the formal visit. There are no rote or “one-size-fits-all” customer visits – each should be tailored to the client and situation at hand.
• Give yourself plenty of time:  The time allotted to accommodate a customer visit (from conception to execution) varied widely among the centers we visited – anywhere from an hour to 3 months – but a lead time of four to six weeks to prepare for a visit was considered optimal.

Who’s in the Room? (Or Sales vs. Tech)

The goal of a customer experience center is to generate revenue. But who “owns” the visit? The business-facing sales rep who identifies the clients’ problem and brings them to the center? Or the technical staff who will be the ones likely to solve the clients’ problem?

Letting sales staff run the show risks leaving the customer unsatisfied – as one company said,

“Sales reps want customer tech shows in which they can participate;  customers  want to hear new tech ideas from engineers.”

But leaving the entire visit to technical staff has its drawbacks as well, and at least one firm we visited has a “no drop-off” rule to prevent sales staff from doing just that. In general, CEC personnel must actively work together to strike the delicate balance between the business drivers associated with the relationship and the technical orientation that is often the foundation for the visit.

In my previous blog , I talked about the importance of thoughtfully developing the story you want to tell your customers about your company.  How  you tell the story is likewise important and worthy of thoughtful development. This requires not only planning and preparation, but also the ability to pivot in the moment and adapt as the conversation develops. Being able to pivot means being skilled at listening. While active listening is hard work, it’s essential to one of the goals of a customer visit – to elicit. Not ask, not survey, but elicit. From the Latin  ēlicitus , or “drawn out.”

CEC guides frequently mentioned that customers don’t come in with a clearly articulated problem. Part of the challenge inherent in elicitation is helping to identify and define the problem. How can the customer be helped to discover the problem that needs to be solved? When (or where) is the moment that the problem takes form? And while the problem is taking shape, how can the “wild” or “out there” ideas – that might just turn into something with a little more coaxing – be maintained for future consideration? Skilled guides excel at leading the customer through this thought process to arrive at an outcome that everyone understands and is excited about.

So – What’s A Successful Customer Visit?

One of the measures of success for a customer visit was described to us as creating a shared experience, a moment that may later be referred to as, “Do you remember when we…?” between you and your customer. That’s a great accolade, but undoubtedly the greatest measure of success is the opportunity to innovate – new ideas, new products, new processes – that results from improved communications, deeper understanding of customer problems and company capabilities, and the trust needed to execute. There’s a lot of work and individual skill that goes into achieving this outcome, but if you take the time to prepare a thoughtful, personalized experience for your customer, it just might pay off.

Find out how Newry can help your organization move smarter to move faster. Get traction in your market.

Amy Fritz has been a member of the Newry team since 2006, offering her expertise and insight on varied subjects including green building, wireless communications, architectural glass, and medical diagnostics systems. In addition to her consulting work, Amy has been deeply involved in the firm’s marketing and knowledge management functions. She enjoys continuously tackling interesting and diverse tasks, and loves her work at Newry because every day is a new challenge.

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Understanding Customer Experience

• Andre Schwager
• Chris Meyer

Anyone who has signed up for cell phone service, attempted to claim a rebate, or navigated a call center has probably suffered from a company’s apparent indifference to what should be its first concern: the customer experiences that culminate in either satisfaction or disappointment and defection.

Customer experience is the subjective response customers have to direct or indirect contact with a company. It encompasses every aspect of an offering: customer care, advertising, packaging, features, ease of use, reliability. Customer experience is shaped by customers’ expectations, which largely reflect previous experiences. Few CEOs would argue against the significance of customer experience or against measuring and analyzing it. But many don’t appreciate how those activities differ from CRM or just how illuminating the data can be. For instance, the majority of the companies in a recent survey believed they have been providing “superior” experiences to customers, but most customers disagreed.

The authors describe a customer experience management (CEM) process that involves three kinds of monitoring: past patterns (evaluating completed transactions), present patterns (tracking current relationships), and potential patterns (conducting inquiries in the hope of unveiling future opportunities). Data are collected at or about touch points through such methods as surveys, interviews, focus groups, and online forums. Companies need to involve every function in the effort, not just a single customer-facing group.

The authors go on to illustrate how a cross-functional CEM system is created. With such a system, companies can discover which customers are prospects for growth and which require immediate intervention.

Companies that systematically monitor customer experience can take important steps to improve it—and their bottom line.

Anyone who has signed up recently for cell phone service has faced a stern test in trying to figure out the cost of carry-forward minutes versus free calls within a network and how it compares with the cost of such services as push-to-talk, roaming, and messaging. Many, too, have fallen for a rebate offer only to discover that the form they must fill out rivals a home mortgage application in its detail. And then there are automated telephone systems, in which harried consumers navigate a mazelike menu in search of a real-life human being. So little confidence do consumers have in these electronic surrogates that a few weeks after the website www.gethuman.com showed how to reach a live person quickly at 10 major consumer sites, instructions for more than 400 additional companies had poured in.

• AS Andre Schwager is a former president of Seagate Enterprise Management Software and a founder of Satmetrix Systems, a customer experience software company based in Foster City, California. (Contact him at [email protected] .)
• CM Chris Meyer is the chairman of the Strategic Alignment Group, Inc., a member of the Band of Angels deal committee, and adviser/board member for several early-stage companies.

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Getting the Most Out of Customer Visits

How to observe and capture how key business personas make decisions.

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There are valuable insights to gain when visiting customers and observing how people do their jobs. Often, the result of observing customers is the creation of personas for whom offerings can be designed. But there is much more value to looking at personas in context: there is the specific context of the persona: the decisions that person has to make, the criteria upon which he makes the decisions, and the types of information that must be taken into consideration—but there is also the Common Context for that role and related roles to round out the picture. Here are some tips and techniques on how best to approach and maximize the value of visiting and studying customers and creating personas in context.

NETTING IT OUT

There are valuable insights to gain when visiting customers and observing how people do their jobs. If you study the behavior of the people in the roles for whom you are targeting solutions, and the contexts in which they do their jobs, you’ll be more successful in developing useful solutions. A seasoned observer (even one who is not a subject matter expert in the field or the industry) can gain a full understanding of what the people in that role need to accomplish, the decisions they have to make, and the information upon which they rely to make good decisions. A perceptive User Experience practitioner will also observe the interactions among different roles as people work together to achieve the best results for their customers and their company.

Here are some tips and techniques on how best to approach and maximize the value of visiting and studying customers. What’s in it for the customers being studied? You’ll provide them with valuable feedback that will help them reinforce their core competencies and improve their practices. As a result, they will value their relationship with your company even more.

A Persona in Context

(Click on image to enlarge.)

© 2012 Patricia Seybold Group Inc.

1. This illustration highlights the dispatcher as he makes one of the many decisions that he faces every day: what vehicle and driver team to assign to a job. The cloud bubbles indicate factors that impact his decision. The Common Context is all the information that is used by the various roles represented. Those pieces of information upon which the dispatcher will base his decision are highlighted in bold.

ENGAGING WITH CUSTOMERS IN THEIR CONTEXT

User experience best practices.

We have discussed the importance of including user experience (UX) methods and practices throughout product development projects 1 as well as customer co-design initiatives. And we have provided details on how to optimize telephone and in-person individual and group interviews. 2

Now let’s look at the additional insights that you can obtain by visiting B2B customers as they are doing their jobs.

Understanding the Organization and its Goals

Even if you provide offerings for a single role within an organization, you still need to understand how the entire organization runs. For example, if you are offering a reservation system targeted for a restaurant host/hostess, you need to understand whether the number of reservations impact how many servers and line cooks need to be available; if reservations are required; if parties of a specific size can only reserve at certain hours; and how, ideally, the restaurant would want to tie the reservation system into any point of sale system or back-office database.

Things that you should try to find out before approaching an organization about a customer visit include:

• The overarching goals that your proposed offering can help achieve. (E.g., improved performance, reduced paperwork, fewer human errors, increased revenue potential, etc.).
• The critical roles of the people who would be using the proposed solution, and how they fit in the organization.

Arranging the Customer Visit. Arranging a customer visit isn’t as simple as making a phone call. To gain access to the people and information that you want, you need someone reasonably high up in the organization to grant the right permissions and make sure everyone will be available. Typically, the best way to find the right person is to go through your sales organization. The account rep will know who is in charge and have the authority. It can sometimes be difficult to get the sales person on board; sales reps are very protective of their accounts and don’t want to rock the boat. You therefore need someone with clout at your end to make it clear that these customer visits are a priority, and members of the sales team are expected to provide access to the customer.

Once you are in contact with the right person at the organization, you should spell out what you hope to accomplish during the visit, what access and information you would ideally like to have, and what value you can offer the company in return.

What You Want to Accomplish. Explain the purpose of the visit: “We are working on a next-generation solution for emergency room registration personnel that will more easily allow them to capture a patient’s information and communicate that information to the ER medical staff as well as flow the information into any back-end systems. We would like to spend time with some registrars, duty nurses, and accounts payable clerks to understand exactly what they need and how we can help.” Be specific about what you are asking for. For example ...

***ENDNOTES***

1) See " How to Think About Your Customer Experience and User Experience Design Strategy ," by Ronni Marshak and Patricia Seybold, June 23, 2011, http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/psgp06-23-11cc

2) See " Tips for Interviewing Customers, Partners, and Stakeholders ," by Ronni Marshak, January 22, 2009, http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/htt01-22-09cc

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25 most popular customer experience questions

Your customers expect a perfect experience with your brand or company. This means that customer experience at every touch point with your organization (offer, sale, delivery, service) must be at the highest level.

Researches show that as many as 73% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience. At the same time, only 43% of customers are satisfied with the way they are served today and with their experience with companies and brands.* There is still a lot to do, and there is a lot to fight for.

* A survey conducted in the USA by PwC, Future of Customer Experience Survey 2017/18.

There are many ways to measure customer experience and satisfaction on the market. We have gathered the most popular for you. We present the 25 top questions about experience and customer satisfaction.

1. How would you feel about recommending us to friends or family?

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5

The NPS (Net Promoter Score) methodology and questions have recently become very popular. This is not a typical question about customer satisfaction. NPS question allows you to measure customer loyalty to your company or brand. The collected answers are mapped into three groups of promoters (5), neutral (4), and detectors (1 – 2 – 3). Based on the collected responses, the score is calculated with the formula NPS = % Promoters – % Detectors.

You can read more about NPS in the article The One Number You Need to Grow, HBR 2003.

2. What can we do better?

A must-use question if you conduct an NPS survey. The score alone is not enough. Try to learn what went wrong and what you should improve or do differently. This is a good starting point for further actions.

3. What are we doing really well?

Solving problems is extremely important, but it is equally important to know why your customers give you good rates. Find out what are you doing really well and what your customers like about your company. Thanks to this you will be able to develop and improve your strengths. This is also valuable knowledge for your marketing and PR teams. Thanks to this you will be able to show your achievements or strengths.

4. How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request? Please answer on a scale from 1 (very little effort) to 5 (very high-level effort).

The CES (Customer Effort Score) is another methodology for testing customer experience. The creators of the methodology assumed that customers do not expect that someone will try to impress them, but that they will be professionally served. Based on the collected responses, the CES score is calculated = total sum of points from all surveys / number of responses

You can read more about CES in the article Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers, HBR 2010.

5. How did this effort compare to your expectations?

The received score is always worth deepening. Thanks to this you will gain additional knowledge about what “eats” your customers and you will be able to plan corrective actions.

6. To what extent do you agree with the following statement? [Company] made it easy to handle my issue.

Answering the same question over and over again may be boring, so it is good to change something. This is the CES (Customer Effort Score) question, but it is asked in a different way.

7. Overall, how easy was it to get the help you wanted today?

Easy Neither Difficult

Another modification of the CES question. In this version, the rating scale has been simplified to only three answer choices. Thanks to this the answer to the question is very simple and fast. Here we also have a different approach to calculate the score. Net Easy Score or NES = % Easy – % Difficult.

8. Overall, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with our company?

The question about customer satisfaction is easy to implement and analyze. Most often this kind of question is built with the five-point Likert scale, sometimes also with a seven-point scale.

9. Overall, how satisfied are you with the customer service experience that you received from us?

A question about customer satisfaction ideal for support and helpdesk departments. You should ask this type of question right after the customer’s contact with your service department. This way, the customer will be able to refer to his / her experience.

10. How would you rate the quality of your most recent service interaction?

Another version of the question about the customer experience with the service or helpdesk department.

11. How easy is our website to navigate?

Do you run an e-shop or sell online services? You need to take care of your users. Check if the navigation is clear and all important information easy to find.

12. How did we do today?

Good, I’m happy Bad, I’m not happy

Sometimes the most simple question is the best one. You can replace descriptive answer options with icons. It will make the answers more spontaneous, and it is what really matters. To measure the real feelings and emotions of the customer.

13. Did we answer your question today?

Yes, I’m satisfied No, I’m not happy

Another variant of the question “How did we do today?”, adapted to the specifics of customer service departments.

14. Did we meet your expectations?

Exceeded expectations Met expectations Did not meet expectations

A similar approach as in the case of the CES question. You ask whether the customer’s expectations have been met.

15. How did [Agent’s Name] do today?

Make the question more personal. Ask about customer experience with a specific consultant. It is good to build a bonus system for your service department based on the obtained scores. This way, your team will be better motivated for better customer service.

16. Were you able to find the information you were looking for on our website?

Your customers visit your website for a specific purpose. They are looking for specific information, products, or services. If they do not find them, they may not come back. Unfortunately, most customers will not tell you about their problems but will go to the competition. This simple question can help you identify the problem and if you solve it efficiently, perhaps keep the customer.

17. How responsive have we been to your questions or concerns about our products?

Many factors affect customer satisfaction. However, most often it is at the moment of customer’s contact with your company that his experience is built. Find out if you were able to efficiently serve the customer and answer his questions.

18. How likely are you to buy again from us?

Satisfied customers will come back to you to make a purchase again. Unhappy people will look for an alternative offer. Research shows that 82% of dissatisfied customers are leaving due to a poor experience.

19. Is there anything that almost prevented you from using our product or service?

It is said that a loyal customer is worth its weight in gold. It takes time to build customer loyalty, unfortunately, you can lose it quickly. Take care of every detail that makes your customers return to you.

20. What should we do to WOW you?

The dream of many business owners and marketing managers is to achieve the WOW effect. Who would not want his brand or products to be loved by customers? Remember, take care of the basics first. Only then you can think about how to amaze a customer. There will be no use of a welcome drink if the hotel rooms are not clean and the registration process is in working.

21. How would you rate your overall experience with [Facility]?

A question about the total customer experience related to your facility. It is worth starting from this and then asking for details.

22. How easy was it to schedule an appointment with our [Facility]?

In the case of health clinics and medical facilities, one of the key elements is the possibility of easy contact and making an appointment with a doctor. Registration is often the first point of contact of the patient with your facility, so it is worth doing it well.

23. How was your stay at [Hotel]?

General satisfaction question from the stay in the hotel.

24. Please rate your experience at [Hotel] on the following:

Overall service received Speed of check-in process Overall cleanliness of guest room Overall dining experience at breakfast Overall room service experience

Excellent Very Good Good Fair Poor Not Available

The hotel guest experience consists of many factors, such as the efficiency of the registration process, the cleanliness of the hotel and rooms, breakfast, or service. It is good to build a survey so that you can immediately gain knowledge of which processes work and which need to be fixed. Just try not to overdo it with the number of questions. Nobody likes long surveys.

25. During your stay did you experience any problems?

Was the guest’s stay pleasant or maybe there were problems or unexpected events?

Yes, there were to be 25 questions. A small gift at the end, and two additional questions. Are you looking for customer insights inspirations. Check our 25 most popular employee engagement questions .

26. How helpful is this article?

Useful question if your application or service has an online help system or if you run an online blog.

27. How did you like this blog?

You run a blog. This question will help you measure the satisfaction of your readers.

15 Best Practices for Asking About Customer Experience

1. Prioritize Open-Ended Questions

Open-ended questions are a gateway to understanding the nuances of customer experience. They invite customers to share their stories and provide valuable insights that closed questions might miss. By asking your customers to elaborate on their customer journey, you can uncover specific customer pain points and customer expectations that quantitative data may not reveal. These responses are rich in detail, offering a deeper dive into the customer’s perspective and can significantly impact how you improve customer service.

2. Keep Questions Neutral

Neutral questions ensure that the customer feedback survey is unbiased and that the data collected reflects genuine customer sentiment. This approach helps in accurately measuring customer satisfaction and customer effort score without leading the respondent towards a particular answer. By maintaining neutrality, you respect the customer’s experience and encourage honesty, which is extremely important for customer experience improvements.

3. Use Simple and Clear Language

To gather customer feedback effectively, it’s essential to use language that is easily understandable, avoiding industry jargon that might confuse the target audience. Clear language ensures that customers can provide feedback without misinterpretation, which is crucial for service quality assessment and customer experience surveys. Simple language helps in collecting customer feedback efficiently, leading to more accurate customer data.

4. Ask One Question at a Time

Asking one question at a time helps to keep customers focused and ensures that each query is answered thoughtfully. This practice avoids overwhelming the respondent, which can often lead to poor customer service experiences during the survey process. It also ensures that each aspect of the customer service experience is explored thoroughly, which is vital for customer experience survey accuracy.

5. Ensure Questions Are Relevant to the Customer

Relevance is key in designing customer survey questions. When customers see that the questions relate directly to their experiences, they are more likely to engage and provide meaningful feedback. Relevant questions can lead to discovering how much effort customers feel they are exerting and can influence lifetime customer value by addressing issues that matter most to them.

6. Avoid Leading or Loaded Questions

Leading or loaded questions can skew customer feedback and compromise the integrity of your customer satisfaction score. It’s important to frame questions that allow customers to provide an honest appraisal of their customer service experience without feeling swayed to respond positively or negatively. This ensures that the feedback is genuine and can be used to make informed customer experience improvements.

7. Follow a Logical Sequence

A logical sequence in customer experience survey questions helps customers to follow the flow of the survey without confusion. It mirrors the customer journey, making it easier for respondents to recall their experiences and provide accurate feedback. This structured approach can enhance the customer experience of the survey itself, making it more likely that customers will complete it.

8. Be Mindful of the Customer’s Time

Time is of the essence, and customers appreciate when businesses respect this. Keeping surveys concise and to the point shows that you value the customer’s time, which can positively affect their willingness to participate and their overall service experience. Time-efficient surveys tend to have higher completion rates, which is beneficial for businesses looking to improve customer experience.

9. Include Rating Scales for Quantitative Feedback

Rating scales provide a quantifiable measure of customer satisfaction, customer effort, and service quality. They allow customers to express the degree of their satisfaction quickly and can be a key metric in assessing customer loyalty. Including a Likert scale for questions can help in benchmarking and tracking customer experience improvements over time.

10. Offer Anonymity When Appropriate

Anonymity can be a powerful tool in encouraging candid responses, especially when dealing with sensitive topics. It reassures customers that their feedback is valued without any repercussions, which can lead to more honest and critical insights. This can be particularly effective in identifying customer pain points and areas where customer expectations are not being met.

11. Tailor Questions to the Customer Journey Stage

Understanding where a customer is in their customer lifecycle can help tailor questions that are most relevant to their experiences. Segment customers based on their journey stage to ask targeted questions that yield more specific and actionable feedback. This customization can lead to a superior customer experience as it shows that a company is actively listening and adapting to their customers’ needs.

12. Use a Mix of Question Types

A mix of open-ended and closed-ended questions can provide a balanced view of the customer experience. While open-ended questions explore the qualitative aspects, closed-ended questions offer quantitative data that can be easily measured and compared. This combination can provide a comprehensive understanding of both the customer sentiment and the customer satisfaction score.

13. Regularly Update and Refresh Questions

The market and customer expectations are always evolving, and so should your survey questions. Regular updates to your customer feedback survey ensure that you’re capturing the most relevant information and staying ahead of any shifts in customer perception or service quality. This practice also prevents survey fatigue and keeps questions aligned with current product or service offerings.

14. Allow for Additional Comments

Providing a section for additional comments in customer surveys can reveal unexpected insights that structured questions might miss. It gives customers the freedom to share their thoughts in their own words, which can be invaluable in understanding the customer’s mind and enhancing the customer service experience.

15. Test and Refine Questions Regularly

Testing and refining survey questions is crucial for maintaining the effectiveness of your customer experience surveys. It’s a process that helps in fine-tuning the way you ask your customers for feedback, ensuring that the questions remain relevant and that the survey continues to meet its objectives. Regular testing can lead to better customer data quality and help in making informed decisions to improve customer experience.

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The 28 Best Customer Experience Examples in 2024

The focus of retail businesses has shifted in recent years from traditional “customer service” to learning how to create memorable customer experiences. Increasingly, the emphasis is on expanding omnichannel interactions across platforms, mobile devices, online checkouts, brick-and-mortar locations, and anywhere else customers and businesses interact.  ‌

eCommerce’s trajectory brought about new and improved ways of conducting business and enhancing the omnichannel experience . Statistics have a funny way of showing retailers and marketers the right way, proving what we already know. That a good customer experience is mandatory for the nurture of brand-consumer relationships; brand loyalty may be hard to come by, but it is totally worth it as dedicated customers spend 67% more than recent customers. Similarly, a 5% increase in customer retention can boost a brand’s revenue by 75%, making the importance of a good customer experience all the more clear. 

Table of Contents

• > Why customer experience is so important for retailers
• > Memorable customer experience examples of renowned brands (7)
• > Best customer service experience examples (6)
• > Digital customer experience examples (7)
• > Personalized customer experience examples ​(8)

Why customer experience is so important for retailers

Customer eXperience (CX) is critical to retailers since according to HubSpot Research, 93% of customers who love the service they receive will become valuable repeat customers. These same customers will also share your brand with others. We should also consider that 86% of customers are willing to pay more  for a better customer experience. Last but not least, 59% of American consumers say that once they’re loyal to a brand, they’re loyal for life. This demonstrates that when it comes to customer loyalty longevity, Americans lead the world, boasting the highest percentage of lifelong loyalty globally.

This , in plain words , means that when customers are given a simple and delightful purchasing experience, they’re much more likely to come back. Just as important, they’re much more likely to share a positive review of your business online and with their friends. That kind of word-of-mouth marketing is invaluable, expanding your audience and the hype around your brand while boosting sales.

Memorable customer experience examples of renowned brands

To further showcase why a good customer experience is vital for any business, we handpicked for you some of the best strategies, implemented by industry giants. Discover how famous brands ensure their audiences’ loyalty and put them to the test. Let’s see the 28 best customer experience examples:

Example #1: Disney’s seamless Magic Band system provides an omnichannel customer experience

Why we liked it:

• Customers receive electronic wristbands — Magic Bands — in the mail after purchasing their tickets to Disney World. This adds a fun surprise right from the beginning of their customer journey.
• The wristbands seamlessly act as a digital storage space, hotel room key, payment method, and more, giving both convenience and an all-important “VIP” feeling while at Disney parks.
• Disney builds brand loyalty and fosters repeat customers by setting itself apart from the moment of purchase, providing an innovative and unique CX that makes customers feel truly valued and personalized across their journey.

Example #2: Amazon’s delivery stations appear seemingly everywhere

• Since its inception, Amazon has built its business on knowing what its customer wants: fast delivery and minimal effort.
• Amazon is opening more than a thousand parcel-delivery stations across the suburban United States. This further narrows the gap between its fulfillment centers and shipping points.
• Amazon knows that same-day and even two-hour delivery is its unique selling point and is not afraid to invest time and money into it. Even with its massive current success, it’s constantly working to sharpen its shipping standards. 

Example #3: McDonald’s proactively pushing the right CX buttons‌

• Not content to sit on its laurels when it started receiving bad press some years ago, McDonald’s has dramatically overhauled and prioritized its customer service experience from top to bottom, such as introducing the “ MyMcDonald’s ” loyalty platform to reward their frequent customers. 
• According to Chris Kempczinski, CEO , the company aims to minimize friction across all its service channels, emphasizing immersion and personalization at every level.
• The company’s goal is to create seamless customer transitions between its in-store dining, takeaway, and delivery services, aided by its newly introduced global mobile app (GMA).

Example #4: Zara’s mobile app keeps business flowing in hard time‌s

• Leave it to fashion giant Zara to set a customer experience example by transforming the retail landscape with ‘Store Mode,’ the mobile app that unites window shopping with digital shopping.
• The app displays only those products that are available at the customer’s local Zara store, making it easy for at-home customers to view items available to them.
• The incorporation of GPS and QR technology helps customers quickly find and pay for their items once they’re in the store, providing a delightful omnichannel experience . This simplifies the buying process and makes it more likely that satisfied customers will promote Zara’s ease of use to their friends. 

Example #5: Volvo’s artificial intelligence, safety, and personalization team up

• Volvo understands that nothing is more central to customer experience in the automotive industry than safety.
• Volvo’s engineers have created a new operating system that links their cars on the road, warning each other about changing road conditions and accidents.
• It’s a smooth way to raise customers’ confidence in Volvo’s brand without compromising an inch on aesthetics or drivability.

Example #6: Starbucks thrives with eco-friendly personalization

• Starbucks knows that its customers are conscious of the environment, desiring products that are both high quality and sustainable.
• To satisfy their expectations, Starbucks is rolling out nationwide oat milk options to complement its existing non-dairy menu.
• The company’s focus on putting its customers first and becoming a gathering place for its community has led it to expect a net growth of 3% by FY22.

Example #7‌: Apple becomes a town square

• Apple’s Senior Retail Vice President says the emerging store layouts are a part of Apple’s effort to not just sell people things but to become a central community hub replete with comfortable seating, eateries, and play areas for kids, prompting face-to-face interactions.
• Apple’s focus on community building also manifests in offering on-site programming and education classes to youth.
• The company is so committed to turning itself into an “experience” for Apple Customers that its employees no longer refer to their stores as “stores”. Instead, they’re becoming a kind of “town square” , a living and vibrant part of the community. 

Best customer service experience examples

Example #8: magic castle hotel’s popsicle hotline.

• When the customers of Los Angeles-based Magic Castle Hotel spend time by the pool on a sunny day, they will notice a fun surprise: a red phone with a direct hotline to the hotel’s “instant popsicle” service. Just dial the number and within moments an employee delivers a popsicle straight to your hand. 
• The phone is bright red to catch your attention and make you curious about who’s at the other end. You can tell some thought went into this particular customer experience example. It knows what people want (a cold treat on a hot day), pleases kids and adults, and offers a unique and fun experience for your customers to post on their social media pages. ‌

Example #9: Zappos is a customer service company that happens to sell shoes

• Zappos willingly makes an important trade-off: returns are more than three times higher on Zappos than for other Brick & Mortar stores, thanks to Zappos’ zealous return policy.
• The company’s 365-day return policy and 2-way shipping mean that it indeed handles a lot of returns, but it gives online customers the confidence they need to shop with them.
• This is a customer experience example that shows how a short-term sacrifice can dramatically build customer loyalty and repeat business, paying off in the long term.

Example #10: Taco Bell maximizes its drive-thru experience

• Taco Bell didn’t let the closure of indoor dining slow it down — it adapted to the times with a futuristic drive-through and looked for ways to continue satisfying its customers.
• The company introduced fast indoor pickup shelves, expanded its drive-thru lanes, and streamlined its kitchen equipment to expedite food processing and delivery.
• Taco Bell’s customers have always been interested in a faster and more convenient experience. Rather than letting the global health crisis slow them down, Taco Bell looked for ways to make the most of the resources it already had.

Example #11: Whole Foods turns its customers into mini-chefs

• Whole Foods ‘ health-conscious customers can now take advantage of an online educational program teaching them how to prepare new recipes using Whole Foods ingredients.
• The program cleverly maximizes the customer experience by giving Whole Foods customers the tools and knowledge to do their own convenient meal prep.
• By making a measurable improvement in its customers’ lives, Whole Foods is building brand loyalty that will likely be well rewarded when its customers need to purchase new ingredients in the future.

Example #12: Ugg aims to help its customers stay home comfortably

• The pandemic threatened to take a bite out of in-store shopping, the heart, and soul of the retail sector. But Ugg’s ready-to-wear line is crafted specifically to fulfill the needs of its stay-at-home customers, maintaining contact with their brand even while physically separated.
• The ready-to-wear line refocuses the Ugg shopping experience toward stay-at-home essentials, like soft robes, sandals, and other fashionable in-door clothing items to help its quarantined customers stay warm and comfortable. 
• It’s a thoughtful customer experience example that prioritizes producing value for customers wherever they are, even if they never leave the house.

Example #13: DoorDash sees an opening and takes it

• DoorDash introduced DoorMart, a service that expands DoorDash’s offerings across the convenience store market. It allows customers to make individual purchases of single items like a toothbrush or deodorant instead of needing to leave the house during quarantine. 
• DoorMart is a customer experience example that seeks to make customers’ lives easier and more economic amid the pandemic.
• The fast and efficient nature of the service makes first-time customers more likely to become repeat customers. It sparks word-of-mouth, and users of DoorMart will surely be more likely to take advantage of DoorDash’s other services. 

Digital customer experience examples

Example #14: retail chain ralph lauren sends you to the dressing room with the help of snapchat.

• Snapchat users with a love for Ralph Lauren now get the best of both worlds. They can use their Snapchat avatars to try on Ralph Lauren outfits virtually and buy them through the app.
• This customer experience example is a brilliant union of opposites, bringing digital users a virtual storefront and making it fun and easy to buy.
• New Ralph Lauren customers will be attracted by the sheer novelty of using their Snapchat avatars to demo the latest outfits, promoting brand awareness and ultimately conversions. 

Example #15: Ritz-Carlton empowers its employees with $2000 of customer service discretion‌

• Ritz-Carlton grants its employees an unusually generous discretionary spending account of $2,000 to quickly deal with customer experience obstacles.
• It empowers its employees to take initiative and problem-solve to ensure each guest receives personalized service.
• It enhances the seamlessness and immersion of spending time at a Ritz-Carlton Hotel when staff can resolve all your complaints on the spot.

Example #16: JetBlue CEO leaves no time lost

• Customers waiting in line in JetBlue terminals have been met with a surprise: the CEO himself handing out drinks and donuts to anyone interested.
• It’s a small but nice gesture that relieves some of the stress of travel and sets JetBlue apart from its competitors.
• Even those who never fly can hear about the gesture secondhand. Elevating a brand’s reputation for delivering an excellent customer experience inevitably attracts more business.

Example #17: Netflix and all 33 million versions of it

• Netflix is a data-driven company, using complex internal algorithms to determine what its customers want and what new TV shows and movie licenses to acquire, offering a personalized, unique experience.
• They focus on their high-frequency users, knowing that those who watch at least 15 hours of content per week are 75% less likely to cancel their subscriptions than others.
• Netflix uses data to deliver a unique customer experience to each Netflix user so that no two people see exactly the same streaming recommendations. 

Example #18: Burberry augments reality to maintain a presence anywhere customers want‌

• Burberry ’s Augmented Reality (AR) tool is made in partnership with Google Search technology to take advantage of Google’s well-known data and geo-location advantages.
• Customers shopping online can now use the AR tool to measure in real-time the size of an item or outfit compared to other objects or outfits in their immediate surroundings.
• The tool enhances the personalization of luxury retail, allowing customers to effectively try on and gauge the look of Burberry’s product line from the privacy of their homes.

Example #19: Uber uses machine learning to put smiles on faces‌

• Knowing full well that many customers rely on its services to get to work on time, Uber uses A.I. and machine learning to document and categorize incident and reliability reports received from across the world.
• The company makes approximately 22,000 app tweaks per month to customize their app for each city that they operate in, based around three KPIs: availability, latency, and accuracy.
• Uber prioritizes eliminating problems early in the data pipeline, minimizing expenses by proactively eliminating barriers to a seamless customer experience.

Example #20: Lyft partners with Tinder to get customers dating again

• Ridesharing company Lyft knows that its customers, many of whom spent 2020 and 2021 in near isolation, will soon be looking once again for normal human-to-human interaction. With that in mind, it has paired with dating company Tinder to arrange the meeting.
• Here’s a customer experience example that shows a meeting of separate industries that nonetheless go together for their mutual benefit; Lyft intends to remove as many obstacles as it can for customers to use its services smoothly.
• Lyft will be using the data-driven nature of ridesharing to constantly improve the reliability and accuracy of its app. It knows just how to motivate its customers to interact with its main product.

Personalized customer experience examples

Example #21: taylor & hart turns data-driven crm into stellar cx.

• It’s easy to fall into the trap of collecting data for data’s sake and not take action — Taylor & Hart didn’t.
• By using a simple customer satisfaction survey, ranking on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely someone would be to recommend their brand, Taylor & Hart identified its “Net Promoter Score” (NPS) and funneled its marketing resources into improving it.
• The company used the NPS score of each customer to drive its CX initiatives and raise its revenue by two times .

Example #22: Silva Homes makes sure its customers aren’t forgotten‌

• A housing association by the name of Silva Homes has taken to personally making inspirational “check-up” calls to customers who sign up for the service. 
• Customer experience examples like this build brand loyalty, both among those who immediately benefited and those who hear about it in the news.
• Silva’s personalized service delivers a customer service experience that warms hearts, makes people feel appreciated, and helps puts its name out there.

Example #23: Magic Mind sends personalized videos to new customers‌

• Magic Mind , the producer of a well-known productivity drink, has developed the wholesome habit of sending a welcome video to all of its new customers. These videos explain details about the company’s brand and ways that the drink helps others.
• It’s an easy-to-do, quick, and simple customer experience example that stands out in a competitive marketplace, demonstrating the level of care and attention to detail that retail customers look for.
• With 76% of customers saying they trust information from ordinary people rather than “brands,” it’s an excellent idea to put a live and friendly face customers can identify and interact with.

Example #24: Hubspot reinvents the wheel for an enhanced B2B customer experience‌

• Taking one look at the traditional marketing and sales funnel, HubSpot boldly said “No” and created its own flywheel schema. With it, service, marketing, and sales all revolve proportionally around the customer.
• In an industry that often revolves around maxims and jargon, Hubspot develops itself as a thought leader by creating its own.
• This is a smart move for a company with so many B2B clientele who turn to it for expertise and assistance with some of the most sensitive areas of their business operations.

Example #25: Adidas rewards its most loyal customers‌

• After a difficult year, Adidas has refocused its 2021 efforts toward prioritizing the customer experience and growth.
• By 2025, Adidas plans to have bought into an efficient hybrid model, built around retail and eCommerce and powered by its own proprietary membership program. It aims to grow this program from its current 150 million members to 500 million.
• Adidas isn’t just focused on acquiring new customers but on retaining and enhancing the value of the ones it already has by personalizing their experience.

Example #26: Pura Vida: How to do personalized recommendations the right way

• When bracelet designer Pura Vida was looking for ways to expand its reach across the market, it partnered with Yotpo to introduce small customer review thumbnails across all of its product and SEO pages.
• The move helped customers see at a glance what others were saying about the product they were looking at or had just purchased, making them feel like part of a large community of shoppers enjoying Pura Vida’s bracelets.
• Immersing customers into your community as such is an excellent way to create a self-confident customer experience. It also encourages them to leave their own reviews for others.

Example #27: Stitch Fix is using A.I. to personalize customers’ entire wardrobes‌

• Clothing retail store Stitch Fix uses shared customer information to collect data on sizing preferences, price points, reasons for returns, customer ratings, and more to cross the subjectivity barrier and create outfits that are truly personalized to each customer.
• It’s not easy to find the right style using a subjective parameter like “good.” But, StitchFix uses a program called ‘Shop Your Looks’ to generate compatible outfits and find matching pairs.
• Using automation to make a memorable customer experience provides immediate feedback, a long-term payoff as marketing automation further penetrates the retail landscape.

Example #28: L’Oréal’s mobile-friendly A.I. knows your face better the more you use it

• L’Oréal’s A.I. products drive the customer experience both at home and in-store by utilizing face-scanning sensors to measure a customer’s skin and the surrounding environmental conditions that might affect it.
• The metrics allow L’Oréal to recommend a host of skincare products from its line that matches the customer’s needs exactly.
• The point of personalization is to give the customer exactly the product that they want at the right time. Incorporating data-driven A.I. and machine learning are important ways to ensure the customer experience provides just that.

Learn from the best and put it into practice 

There are many ways to accelerate positive customer experience interactions in your particular business; the exact means to do so will vary from one case to the next. Yet, that’s part of the beauty of it. No matter the current circumstance of your business, there’s always a way to do better and increase the value that you provide to customers. ‌

While you should take inspiration from the above-mentioned customer experience examples, pay attention to the one common motif in all their efforts: adaptability. The ability to assess the current environment and make decisions with the tools and resources you have on hand is key.  ‌

With more and more customers demanding omnichannel shopping experiences, it’s only a matter of analyzing data and finding the one concrete action you can take that would improve or even revolutionize the customer experience. So, it’s time to get started; there will be plenty of opportunities to provide seamless, streamlined, and efficient omnichannel shopping experiences for the rest of this year and throughout 2022. 

At ContactPigeon, we offer you the necessary tools to deliver meaningful engagements with your customers, anytime, anywhere. An award-winning platform, specially designed for eCommerce will surely aid you in building an engaging customer journey. Book a free 30-min consultation call and our skilled representatives will introduce you to a data-driven, omnichannel customer engagement platform that can deliver consistent business results. 

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Performance.

How to Conduct a Customer Experience Audit

Around 73% of consumers surveyed by PwC pointed to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions. Yet, less than half said companies are doing a good job of providing a top-notch customer experience.

Closing this gap can give your business a competitive edge.

If you want to improve your customer experience (CX), you’ll first need to measure it with a customer experience audit.

In this article, you’ll learn how to conduct a thorough audit. This will help you create a plan of action to improve your customer experience, encouraging them to buy from you (and keep coming back).

Table of contents

The benefits of a customer experience audit.

• Your customer experience audit: a basic checklist

Key takeaways

Customers want the best experience possible, and they don’t want to expend more effort searching for a better option. 

These are the two sides of the customer experience coin: on one hand, you have to do things that make customers happy. But it’s just as important to avoid the painful, high-friction experiences that come with CX functionality problems. 

But you can’t deliver that clean customer experience without first getting your hands dirty. That means taking a hard look at your customer touchpoints and what the data says about their performance in a customer experience audit (CX audit). 

It might not be easy, but a CX audit can yield benefits for your business, including:

• More customer insights. Customers know when they’re targeted with marketing that doesn’t match their needs, and doing it too often can be irritating (e.g., luxury vacation suggestions for people in a lower income bracket). You can improve their experience across the board with customer intelligence data . A CX audit will give you quantitative and qualitative data about what customers want, informing marketing, sales, customer support, and more.
• Higher satisfaction and conversions through reduced friction. An audit helps you spot the key points of customer friction you might not have noticed. Do 40% of your customers drop out when they see your complicated checkout cart? Knowing this will help you take steps to improve it.
• Higher customer retention. Shifting your mindset to focusing on keeping customers happy long-term will boost customer retention and prevent churn . Looking into touchpoints that existing customers encounter, as well as potential customers, can have a profound effect on your bottom line.

Empowered with new insights about your customer experience, you’ll be able to identify new ways to delight your customers and repair any points of high friction. 

But before you can do that, you have to ask yourself a very basic question: how do you conduct an audit that yields insights this powerful?

Top Tip: Learn how one company improved each touchpoint by asking customer journey questions and increased their conversion rate by 67% in our MITSEE case study 🐼

Your customer experience audit: A basic checklist

To conduct a CX audit, you’ll first need to map out the customer’s journey for each customer segment (including existing customers). Once you’ve done that, you can get into the details and define where each type of customer encounters your brand.

To diagnose any issues and make a prognosis for treatment, you’ll need to gather data and analyze it according to customer motivations. Only then can you make your plan to address the issues.

I’ll show you how to do all of that below.

Here is a brief list of checkpoints you can use to begin a customer experience audit that highlights key areas for improvement.

Step 1: Specifically map out your customer journey

Also known as the “customer lifecycle,” a customer journey map is the beginning-to-end tale of their experience with you.

In this step, you need to map out the various stages of the customer journey. Focus on high-level points, such as pre-sale points in the customer journey and post-sale points.

Pre-sale touchpoints are all about generating enthusiasm (e.g., social media and landing pages); post-sale touchpoints are about earning enthusiasm (e.g., thank-you and promotional emails). 

For example, for a student interested in a business course, the high-level journey might look like this:

• Student sees an ad for the course
• Student checks out the website
• Student signs up for the newsletter
• Student receives nurturing newsletter sequence for three months
• Student signs up for the course during a promotion weekend
• Student takes the course
• Student receives an email about an affiliate program
• Student shares her positive experience with friends

Once you’ve defined the stages of your customer journey for each customer segment, both pre-and post-sale, you have your map in its broadest sense. Now you’re ready to start collecting the data. 

Once you have the overview of your customer journey, it’s time to go granular with each touchpoint.

Step 2: Highlight every customer touchpoint in the journey

When it comes down to it, an audit of the customer experience is really an audit of a series of customer touchpoints. Those touchpoints are what determine and define a customer’s true digital experience with your business. Did you meet customer expectations, or are there key points of friction where you disappointed them?

Take the customer journeyroadmap you’ve defined in the previous section and track all of the touchpoints in which your customers interact with you along the way. 

Here are some common touchpoints to consider:

• Social media. A common customer touchpoint is the first time they encounter your brand on social media.
• Advertising. Also at the introduction stage, advertising such as Google or Facebook ads can be your first touchpoints.
• Referrals. When a customer of yours recommends the product/service to a friend, this creates a new touchpoint.
• Conversations. If a customer reaches out to your sales reps, this is a new touchpoint as well.
• Downloads. Product catalogs and shopping guides are common touchpoints to capture emails of new customers.
• Point of sale. The point of sale or shopping cart is one of the most crucial customer touchpoints because it’s the crux of the decision.
• Upsells or cross-sells. Asking a customer to add items to a cart or opt for a more expensive service can be a key driver of average order value (AOV).
• Shipping and thank you emails. Shipping notifications, order confirmations, and thank you emails are highlights of the post-purchase touchpoint experience.
• Customer support. When something goes wrong, a customer’s experience with your support team is a critical touchpoint.
• Cancellation . This might seem like the end of the road, but you may still be able to improve the CX here (such as by offering discounts or additional incentives to stay subscribed).

To make sure you’ve rounded up every touchpoint in your business, consider each stage of the buyer’s journey and map every point they might come into contact with your business. If you’re not sure, you can always ask some of your customers what steps they took to find you in a survey or series of interviews. I’ll talk more about that in a moment.

Once you’ve added these touchpoints to your customer journey roadmap, collect all the data you have on each stage and touchpoint.

Look for areas of high friction. For example, look at where your website viewers are bouncing off the page, where your email list is unsubscribing, and where your shoppers are abandoning their carts. I’ll discuss friction further in step four.

Often, the challenge here won’t be finding data. It will be making sense of the mountains of data available to you.

Top Tip: Customer experience audits are easier when you have a reliable customer data platform to kick-start the process 🐼

To avoid overwhelm, take a “one at a time” approach. For example, you might do one review of your data platforms at a time. A Google Analytics review is a good place to start. If you run another platform, such as Clickstream , check that out next. 

Or, you might choose to look at each touchpoint individually, putting in plans to optimize each as you go.

For each touchpoint in each stage in the customer journey, ask yourself the following questions:

• Where are customers dropping off most frequently? Check out your churn metrics and KPIs like bounce rates. This is your point of highest friction.
• What are you doing right in the highest-conversion touchpoints? An audit may show that you have a great checkout experience, for example. Ask yourself how you can incorporate those same lessons into a newsletter that isn’t performing as well.
• What are the key areas of friction you can improve upon immediately? Try to identify any simple solutions to key friction points (such as removing unnecessary form fields) and test to see if this improves performance. 
• Are there steps in the customer journey you can remove entirely? Not every touchpoint is a necessity. If some steps cause more friction than conversion, consider removing it altogether.

Step 3: Diagnose the impact of every customer touchpoint

Diagnosing your poor-performing customer touchpoints sounds easy. But without a frame of reference, it might feel like you have a haystack of data and you’re looking for a needle of insight.

Use the AIDA + post-sale funnel to inform your diagnosis of poor customer experiences. Here’s what AIDA means:

• Attention is the stage of the customer’s pre-sale focus. At this point, they’ve heard of you, but they’re not sure what to do next. A common example of a customer in the attention stage is a first-time website visitor or someone coming across your social media profile for the first time.
• Interest is still the pre-sale stage, but the customer has taken some further action. Maybe they’re browsing your products. 
• Desire is when the customer wants your product and is getting closer to conversion, even if they haven’t purchased yet (maybe they’ve subscribed to your newsletter). This is a “lead nurturing” stage. It’s critical that you minimize friction here as much as possible to direct customers to the point of conversion.
• Action is the inflection point when a visitor reaches the point of sale and becomes a customer. The checkout page, the delivery process, even the unboxing are all defining points in the customer experience.
• And don’t forget post-sale opportunities for customer retention. AIDA is a framework for how you meet customers—your touchpoints from now on are all about customer retention.

Through this lens, you should be able to sort your data and organize it effectively, gauging where in the funnel you’re going wrong. 

At some point, you’re losing opportunities to delight or avoid disappointment with your customers. Determine the motivation behind the issue (whether it’s an “attention” problem or a “desire” problem) to inform your response and improve the experience.

Consider conducting customer interviews to identify basic problems. Customers might not always tell you how to improve something, but they can certainly tell you what to improve.

Gather a large enough sample size of customer feedback until you can pinpoint patterns in what they tell you. Review client feedback, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and customer satisfaction surveys. 

Quantitative insights can be helpful, but the full gamut of qualitative customer responses will put your finger on the pulse of the customer experience.

Keep in mind that each tool has its specific strengths, as well.

• NPS is great for ecommerce post-sale diagnoses, as it measures how likely a customer is to recommend your product/service to others. In the AIDA framework, NPS scores will reflect on everything that comes after “Desire.” Did you ship your product out quickly enough? Did they like the product? Your NPS score can help you qualify these answers.
• Customer or client feedback will slant towards the types of questions you ask. Here you can identify earlier touchpoints (“where did you hear about us?”) or ask NPS-like questions (“how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?”). The chief advantage here is you can review individualized, write-in responses with insights that you might not have considered.

Step 4: Address your problems and reduce friction by building a roadmap

Diagnosis is half the battle. Once you know what to fix, improving the customer experience can be as simple as a quick edit in your content management system (such as removing a form field in your newsletter sign-up process). Or, for larger changes to embedded systems, it can mean hours of meetings between departments. 

So, how do you prioritize your next steps?

Build a roadmap based on the problems you’ve diagnosed. Create benchmarks and goals for improving friction on each of the specific touchpoints you identified and plot your timeline to address them. 

These benchmarks and timelines are unique to each business. Small issues for smaller companies may be resolved quickly. For larger companies with many departments to coordinate, or larger issues, more time may be needed.

Regardless, it’s a good idea to plot the issues and timelines on a roadmap so you don’t loose track.

For example, here are some of the most common friction points and how impactful they can be on your CX:

• Site performance. The earliest friction in the customer experience is something you’ll barely see, but it does happen. If a customer sees your product on social media and clicks to your website, and it’s too slow, you may have friction right off the bat. Don’t think it matters for conversions? Research from Deloitte suggests improvements in mobile site speed improved conversions by over 8% and average order values by over 9%. 
• Your checkout page. The checkout page has all sorts of opportunities to delight the customer. With these opportunities come potential areas of friction. Everything from poor product videos to lack of customer reviews can contribute to poor conversion rates here. 
• Post-purchase communication . Can customers view their order tracking ID? Do you email them and tell them their order is on the way, or do you just hope for the best? Post-purchase communication should be simple, effective, but not so heavy-handed that it makes customers wish they didn’t give you their email. Remember, the end of the customer journey is their lifetime value to your brand, not only their first purchase.

Finally, make customer experience management (such as your CX audit) a routine part of your marketing strategy. You never know when a new issue might pop up. The more quickly you fix it, the smoother your customer experience will be across all demographics.

Top Tip: To turn data that comes up in your customer experience audit into action, consider implementing A/B testing to improve key friction points 🐼

Of all the customer-centric initiatives you launch to improve your digital experience, a CX audit is the most foundational. 

Your customer experience audit will identify “kinks in the hose” that restore the flow of conversions to your business. Most importantly, it will help you identify the hidden problems you didn’t know were plaguing your business. 

Once you’ve mapped out the entire user experience, found key points of weakness, and actioned your improvements, your customers are more likely to thank you with purchases, loyalty, and advocacy.

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Why the customer experience matters

A company’s relationship with its customers is about much more than improving product ratings or decreasing wait times. Understanding the customer journey is about learning what customers experience from the moment they begin considering a purchase, and then working to make the journey toward buying a product or service as simple, clear, and efficient as possible. In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast , McKinsey principals Harald Fanderl and Nicolas Maechler talk with McKinsey’s Bill Javetski about what companies have to gain from focusing on the customer experience and how they can evaluate and enhance the purchasing journey.

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Podcast transcript.

Bill Javetski: Welcome to another episode of the McKinsey Podcast . Hello, I’m Bill Javetski, an executive editor with McKinsey Publishing. I think today’s topic is one that everyone will have their own stories to tell about. It’s customer experience. Think back for a moment to the last time you called your electric company or your cable company or you filed an insurance claim or ordered something online. Maybe you took a trip on an airline or by taxi. You’ll probably have a memory of how the whole experience felt. When you were done, did you like the experience? Did you hate it? What did you think of the company that provided it?

Well, companies are thinking a lot about how they treat their customers. So we’re going to talk about what it means to put a customer’s needs and wants at the center of a business strategy. My guests today are Harald Fanderl, a partner in McKinsey’s Munich office. Welcome, Harald.

Harald Fanderl: Hello, Bill.

Bill Javetski: We’re also joined by Nicolas Maechler, a partner in McKinsey’s Paris office. Welcome, Nicolas.

Nicolas Maechler: Hello, Bill.

Bill Javetski: The two of you have just been collaborating on a compendium of articles on customer experience. So, Harald, let me start with you. Customer experience seems to be a big business topic now. What exactly are we talking about when we talk about customer experience? Is it customer service or customer satisfaction or is it something else?

Harald Fanderl: When we talk about customer experience, Bill, it’s actually all of the above. It’s all about putting customer needs at the center of what a company needs to do, and then ensuring along all the touchpoints and even more so along all the relevant customer journeys that the customers have a flawless experience. When a customer is satisfied with a company, they are also lower in the cost to serve, but also have a higher potential to be more loyal customers for this company. And maybe they’ll even promote this company among their friends.

Bill Javetski: This idea of touchpoints and journeys, can you explain that a bit more?

Harald Fanderl: Happy to do so. At the center of what we are discussing at McKinsey, all around customer experience, is the concept of customer journeys. We used to discuss improvements of customer touchpoints, but we see when we also do analytical research that in order to satisfy customer needs, you typically need more than one customer touchpoint to satisfy a need. This could be to join a company, to pay a bill, or to change something in your address. As that is more than one touchpoint, it’s important that you as a company have the whole journey in sight. Then think about how you can improve this customer journey.

The complexity comes when you go deeper and understand that companies are often organized in silos for multiple customer journeys. Therefore, this cross-functional collaboration is crucial for putting the customer need in the center and then working together in multiple areas of the company, be it the more sales-driven guys, the marketing guys, the operational guys, and even support areas like IT and finance, to then jointly work and improve this customer journey along the various touchpoints.

Bill Javetski: If I’m hearing you, then a touchpoint is kind of an individual transaction? I call the call center and tell them I’m complaining that my electricity is off. This journey is the accumulation of all of my touchpoints, all of my contacts, with the company over a period of time? That sounds like a lot to digest for a customer and for a company as well. What is the difference between this idea of a touchpoint and a customer journey? Nicolas, can you illuminate us on that?

Nicolas Maechler: Sure. Basically, we go back to the customer need. When you want to interact with a company, there is something you want to achieve. Either you want a new product, you want to buy something, you want to complain about something that is broken, something is wrong, one of your bills is wrong. That’s the basic need. The different touchpoints you’re interacting with are just ways for you as a customer to fulfill that need or solve that problem. Going back there and understanding the combination of touchpoints that will actually deliver this satisfaction to you or fulfill this need for you, is what we do. We take a full end-to-end view of the customer need, and that’s what we believe is the right way of approaching customer experience.

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Bill Javetski: This journey, how long can it take?

Nicolas Maechler: Sometimes it’s very long. If you think about buying a car, in most countries today, you have car configurators online. So you go there, you have an ID, you look at one brand, and you configure your car. Then maybe a few weeks later, you pay a visit to the dealer, and you test drive that car. Maybe you hesitate again, and then you have a financing discussion later on. But if you don’t connect these elements, you don’t have the view of one single journey, which is, “I want a new car.” It can span over a period of a few days or sometimes a few weeks. It can go even to months when it doesn’t go right. If the company’s not solving the problem, it can go up to months. That’s usually not a good sign.

Harald Fanderl: Yeah, Nicolas, let me add an example from the energy space. When we looked at that example, we saw that they had actually up to 18 touchpoints with customers to organize a customer move from one house to the other. But they didn’t have the full view across all these touchpoints of what they wanted to achieve. They had 18 touchpoints. They had more than 60 people that worked on these moves in various departments, but there was no single person responsible to orchestrate these various teams and touchpoints to fulfill this need smoothly.

What we did here, with the clients, we put ourselves deeply into the shoes of the customer, did some focus groups and found out, of course, that this period of moving is a very stressful time. So energy is probably not at the top of your mind. Then we organized a cross-functional team with the marketing department, the operations team, IT, and the digital team. Based on the insights we got from the customer feedback, we found out that to smooth the process, we needed to figure out how long it takes to make this move happen.

On top of this, we thought about, “Do we need all these 18 touchpoints? Can we shorten this whole process significantly?” By collaborating cross-functionally and continuously, also involving customers for feedback, we were able to reduce that amount of time needed for this journey from six weeks to under one week, and also increase customer satisfaction by more than 30 percent.

Bill Javetski: If this involves the marketing department and the operations function and IT, it sounds like a very complicated process, from a company’s standpoint. What is driving this? Are customers demanding this kind of end-to-end service and end-to-end attention to what they’re seeking? Or is it coming from some other source?

Nicolas Maechler: Customers are relatively simple, right? They interact with you, and they want the service that they are expecting to be delivered. What creates the complexity is the company. Through the years, for many reasons, sometimes a new IT system, sometimes regulation, some legal requirements, and so on, add complexities little by little.

Because companies do not focus that much on these end-to-end customer journeys, you end up with an extremely cumbersome experience for customers, which is actually not optimized for the customer, but optimized for the company. What we are advocating now is this shift in perspective, so that the customer becomes the center of attention again.

Harald Fanderl: Nicolas, I think that’s spot on. Maybe let me also add, the demand of the customer is also increasing. That is another thing that you also observe in the marketplaces. Many industries get fully disrupted with new offers. If I only think of the Amazons or the Apples of this world, but also in the telco sector, there’s a lot, especially through the digital revolution that is happening in these sectors, where the customer demands are becoming higher and higher. They are experiencing a full breadth of experiences. Some really stellar and really efficient, and putting the customer in the center. And others in industries like insurance, like energy, and maybe also in the whole healthcare space, where you experience a big opportunity to put customer needs more in the center of what these companies are doing.

Nicolas Maechler: The reason why our clients are now turning to us more and more on this topic of customer experience is that indeed these companies, like Apple, Google, Amazon, Uber, are just raising the bar in terms of customer expectation. If you think about the B2C world, a lot of our clients face customers who have increasing demands.

If I can manage a taxi booking in a very easy way with Uber, why couldn’t I access all my bank accounts in an easy, integrated manner? Or why can’t I subscribe to a new telecom plan through the web as well or through my device? For instance, if I want to buy one for my kids. It’s percolating from these leading-edge companies to the regular B2C world. What I’ve found most interesting in the last 18 to 24 months is that even in the B2B world, this is also coming.

Bill Javetski: So customers are becoming more demanding and comparing different companies against each other when they base their decisions on where to purchase based on their experience.

Nicolas Maechler: Let me make a comment, Bill, about your question earlier in this conversation around the definition of customer experience. Customer experience is a perception. This is not an operational KPI as you usually have in your company. This is a perception driven by a very clear equation. It’s the observed performance that the customer has with its supplier, minus its expectation. A lot of companies want to make sure they do well on customer satisfaction by increasing the observed performance. That’s good. But don’t forget the expectations, because if your expectations are very high and you deliver something in terms of observed performance that is quite standout, people are going to be deceived. Think about all the marketing messages we are getting through advertising every day.

“I’m gonna be the best.” “You will see what you will see.” “We have the best network.” “We have the best this, the best that.” Through advertising, a lot of companies are raising expectations, while delivery is actually quite standard. We’ve found that sometimes lowering expectations can also be a way to deliver higher satisfaction.

To take a real example, one of my clients in the telco space delivering fiber to the home, was in the shops claiming the delivery would happen in the next 8 days. While actually, the back office was rather on average able to deliver around, let’s say, 12 to 15 days, which obviously created a negative perception versus the salesperson’s promise. If you revert the thing and say, “At the moment of the sale, it’s likely to be 12 to 15 days”—people usually already have a broadband connection at home, so it’s not the end of the day if you don’t have it in one week. The overall satisfaction that came out of this process, promising 15 and delivering on it, or sometimes even overdelivering, was far better than saying the contrary.

Bill Javetski: So it’s not necessarily that you attack this with performance gains, but in some ways, you are dealing in the perceptions of what your customers expect and working around those. It sounds like at times it could be a bit manipulative.

Nicolas Maechler: You call it manipulative, but it’s also just the truth, right? If you are unable to deliver on 12 days and your sales guy is just trying to push, push, push to get the sale, this is the manipulation. If you tell him the truth, maybe you’re going to lose the sale. But this is likely to be rather marginal versus having a bad experience in the first two to three weeks.

Bill Javetski: The companies that you mentioned, Apple, Amazon, Uber, these are companies that obviously use digitization to a vast degree. Is it only these newer players that are good at this? Or are there older-line players that are also good at putting customers at the center of their purpose and their strategy?

Nicolas Maechler: You can take a customer-centric approach from any starting point. It’s not limited to a few companies; it’s rather open to anyone. We would claim it’s a performance angle that was long overlooked. One hundred percent of companies focus on their financial performance. All of them focus on their commercial performance. Now there’s a lot of pressure to be good on your environmental performance. You need to be good on your social performance, the way you treat your employees, and so on. Who is actually looking and focusing on the customer performance? So I would argue this is something that is open and required for anyone.

Harald Fanderl: There is a leading European energy player who used to be in the bottom 25 percent in terms of customer satisfaction. The company embraced this whole topic and is now a leader in their country in terms of customer satisfaction. In the pharma healthcare sector there are now also some payers that really take this concept at the core. One of the clients we’ve been supporting managed an increase in one and a half years of more than 25 percent in terms of improvements in customer satisfaction, which went along with a fundamental change of the mind-set and behavior of 6,500 people by introducing the customer journey concept and by, in stages, working on one customer journey after the other.

Bill Javetski: I’d like to talk about what it takes inside a company to begin this kind of a transformation. But before we do that, I’d like to ask what the benefits are of taking a much more customer-centric approach.

Nicolas Maechler: Yes.

Bill Javetski: Does it migrate to the bottom line? Culturally, what can we look at, because companies often talk about strategy and financial benefits. But if you are going to devote a lot of attention to developing better customer relations, the question is going to become, “Well, what advantage will it give us?” Maybe you could explore that a little bit, Nicolas.

Nicolas Maechler: Yes. Indeed, it’s a fair question because we’ve been talking for a while now about improving customer satisfaction, as Harald was just saying. We’ve seen significant improvements in other areas of the business, which are more directly linked to the bottom line through a focus on customer satisfaction. And I’ll come back to that.

But, again, let’s not think, “Let’s hide a cost-reduction program at the back of a customer-centric sort of transformation.” We need to be true to this. So it’s really focusing on our customer satisfaction that has side benefits. I think we’ve seen a lower cost to serve attached to that.

Even without wanting cost actions, we end up doing some because we simplify processes. We improve the end to end. We accelerate digital migration. We avoid repeat interactions and so on. Let’s say 15 to 20 percent of cost reduction is quite often seen. Now, not only costs. It also drives revenues for sometimes obvious reasons like churn avoidance. So people canceling their services with a company. But also types of cross-selling, so adding to your portfolio of services you have with one company. Or even simply, as I’ve seen recently in a B2B case, winning more proposals.

Bill Javetski: Let me pose a situation. I’m a CEO of a company. Maybe it’s a retail company, maybe it’s a business-to-business company. I recognize that I am losing some competitiveness because others in my sector are more customer centric, but I haven’t given much thought to this in the past. How should I attack the problem of getting better at customer experience? What are the fundamentals building blocks of a strategy to improve the way that I treat customers?

Harald Fanderl: It all starts with a vision, really—an aspiration of what do I want to achieve typically that can be also stimulated by an external impulse where there’s a new entrant or, as we discussed earlier, maybe a new, a smaller player offering a more compelling proposition to your customers. Or that you even see in customer-satisfaction ratings that you have a real challenge. If you have a customer-satisfaction problem, it’s important to dig deep and understand why customers perceive us like this.

Customer Experience

Then come to a joint understanding, that’s often not so nice, but it’s a little painful problem that you accept. When you understand where you are in terms of customers and satisfaction, what is the expectation of your customers? Where are you in your current performance?

Then you go back and start looking at what are the most important customer journeys. Often the first step is to take one customer journey, think about how you can work on this customer journey from an internal perspective, and then play toward what would be the expectation from the customer side. Then you get an understanding of where you are, what the aspiration level can and should be.

In a cross-functional team, you start to organize by attributing one leader who most of the time is the guy who has the most touchpoints in this customer journey. You appoint him as the customer journey lead. Then start with him at the various departments that are engaged in the customer-touchpoint process, with many of the tools that we then bring to the table, to come to a continuous improvement all along this customer journey.

Nicolas Maechler: I’ve seen three major components that make a customer-experience transformation successful. First, you need a top-down push. You need the top management to be convinced, to understand and create this conviction or propagate this conviction across the organization. This is good, but that’s not enough.

The second element is the one that Harald was speaking about before, which is to look at the journeys, understand them, sometimes create them when they don’t really exist or they are not formalized, prioritize them, and then go through the main ones and transform them. You look at major cost items, what’s creating problems, and rework, rework, rework until you have an increase in customer satisfaction.

The third element, which, in our view, is absolutely crucial to make it last and to ensure a wide adoption around the companies is a feedback-loop system. Yes, there have been a lot of measures around customer satisfaction and even university debates about which measurement system or which indicator is the best.

The point is what you do with it. We believe putting in place a feedback-loop system that actually asks the closest to an event with the client. And typically, to the end of a journey, asking the customer for satisfaction measure or rating. But then feeding it back into the organization. Not only in the form of a dashboard for the management to look at, but for individual stakeholders. So individual field technicians, individual store sales reps. Individual call-center people about their own interaction with their clients, the people they just spoke to, feeding them back the positive, but also the negative ones, is actually very powerful because then they know what they’ve done right, what they’ve done wrong, and how they could improve. They also know the company is kind of taking care of this. It’s really important for the company.

Bill Javetski: That’s a very helpful exploration of a very complex business topic. You can find more of Harald’s and Nicolas’s insights on McKinsey.com and also in their compendium, called Customer experience: Creating value through transforming customer journeys. Thanks to both of them for participating in our podcast. Thanks, Harald.

Harald Fanderl: Thank you, Bill. It was a pleasure to be on this one.

Bill Javetski: Thank you, Nicolas.

Nicolas Maechler: You’re welcome.

Bill Javetski: I hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast. Thanks for listening.

Harald Fanderl is a principal in McKinsey’s Munich office, and Nicolas Maechler is a principal in the Paris office. Bill Javetski is a member of McKinsey Publishing and is based in the New Jersey office.

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Hurricane Ernesto strengthens and moves toward Bermuda after lashing Puerto Rico

Hurricane Ernesto was heading toward Bermuda on Thursday, after its winds knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people and dumped torrential rain on Puerto Rico.

The storm, which strengthened into a hurricane after passing by Puerto Rico on Wednesday, was last passing over open water about 570 miles south, southwest of Bermuda at a rate of about 14 mph. Its maximum sustained winds were blowing at 85 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center's 11 a.m. advisory.

"Satellite imagery indicates that Ernesto is gradually strengthening," the NHC said in a 2 a.m. ET update.

The National Hurricane Center and Bermuda Weather Service issued a hurricane warning early Thursday for Bermuda, meaning sustained winds of 64 knots, or about 74 mph, are expected in the island’s marine area within 36 hours.

HC Director Dr. Michael Brennan said in a video briefing Wednesday that when the center of Ernesto passes near or over Bermuda on Saturday, the hurricane is likely to be “at or near major hurricane intensity.”

The National Hurricane Center advisory said Ernesto is forecast to strengthen over the next day or two, and could become a major hurricane by Friday.

When it passes near or over Bermuda, it'll bring dangerous coastal conditions and between four to eight inches of rain with locally higher amounts up to 12 inches possible.

Bermuda Minister of National Security Michael Weeks has urged people to take the storm seriously and to prepare for its impact.

“As I have said before, it only takes one storm to cause significant damage and disrupt our way of life,” Weeks said Wednesday. “Now is not the time for complacency.”

Meanwhile, tropical storm warnings for Puerto Rico, its outlying islands of Vieques and Culebra, and the U.S. and British Virgin Islands were discontinued after the storm passed through the region.

“I know it was a long night listening to that wind howl,” U.S. Virgin Islands Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. said at a news conference.

No deaths related to the storm have been reported in Puerto Rico, but there were over 730,000 customers were left without electricity Wednesday, with some also losing water service, Gov. Pedro Pierluisi said. As of 11 a.m. Thursday, there are over 428,000 customers without power, according to Luma , or about 29% of its 1.4 million customers.

A little more than 10 inches of rain fell in the region of Barranquitas in Puerto Rico, the National Weather Service in San Juan said, and much of the island was still under flood watches as of late Wednesday.

Dramatic video posted to social media showed the moment sailors were rescued from a stranded tugboat off the island of Sint Maarten as it was blasted by high winds and heavy rain Tuesday.

In advance of Ernesto hitting Puerto Rico, President Joe Biden  issued an order authorizing the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to coordinate disaster relief efforts and supplement local disaster relief.

Swells from Ernesto are already affecting portions of the Caribbean islands and swells are expected to reach the east coast of the U.S. Thursday night and continue into the weekend — likely to cause life-threatening surf and rip current conditions, the NHC said.

Canada's Hurricane Centre said that while it was too soon to be certain, the current path of Ernesto puts it on course to affect the eastern provinces of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia at the end of the week.

Ernesto is the fifth named storm and third hurricane of what has already been an exceptionally busy hurricane season .

David Hodari is a London-based editor.