By Grace Lau, Director of Growth Content, Dialpad
Outstanding customer experience: every brand wants to deliver it, but not every brand succeeds at it. Nonetheless, offering a stellar, customized experience to every customer is what makes specific companies stand out from the crowd and lead their industry.
But what, exactly, qualifies as a great customer experience, and why is it so vital for a business? Read this guide to discover more, and to learn some top tips on how to achieve customer experience improvement across your brand.
Personalized Customer Experience: A Definition
Whether spelt in full or by using the acronym CX, customer experience is a concept that you almost certainly have come across at some point. Can you say, though, with absolute certainty, that you know the exact meaning of this expression?
When we talk about “customer experience” we refer to all the emotions that a customer feels throughout their journey. A customer’s journey begins at the very early stage of “awareness”. Here, a potential customer is only just becoming acquainted with your brand’s products or services.
All going well, that potential customer then goes through several other stages of their journey that will eventually lead them to buy one of your products or services. The “all going well” part is, in a nutshell, the customer experience.
Every single interaction between your (potential) customer and your brand is part of the customer experience. This will determine how customers feel about your company, both in terms of product or service quality and in terms of how you treat them.
If you want to deliver an awesome, personalized experience to every single customer, you need to curate all the different stages of the buyer’s journey. In parallel, you must never lose sight of the ever-changing needs and expectations of your customers as they move from one stage to another.
Why is Exceptional Customer Experience so Important?
A personalized customer experience is the key to consistent business growth, increased profits, and a sharper competitive edge.
Let’s take a look at some figures. Recent research has highlighted how companies focusing on delivering exceptional customer experience can see consumers spend 140% more.
Similarly, over 70% of consumers have stated that the ultimate driver to a purchase decision comes from being offered a bespoke, outstanding experience throughout their journey.
What is even more striking is that 86% of consumers are willing to pay more if that means receiving an exceptional customer experience. How much more? Up to 17%.
How to Build a Foolproof Personalized Customer Experience Strategy
Now that you know exactly what customer experience entails and why it’s so crucial for businesses across all sectors, let’s discuss how you can enhance yours—and reap all the amazing benefits that we listed above.
Curate Every Touchpoint
The first step in your strategy should involve mapping out the customer’s journey. This is important as it helps you to split the journey into different stages, and focus on creating an exceptional experience that seamlessly leads potential customers from one stage to the next.
For reference, a typical customer journey includes five stages:
- Awareness: a potential customer is on the lookout for a product or service they need, and they come across a brand they never heard of before (yours).
- Consideration: the same customer reviews your offering and compares it to your competitors’.
- Purchase: the customer decides to buy a product or service from you instead of choosing one of your competitors.
- Retention: your customer is happy, and they keep coming back to your brand for more purchases.
- Advocacy: your customer is so happy that they write great reviews about you and recommend your brand to other people.
The right type of customer experience can lead someone from just being aware of your brand’s existence to becoming one of your brand’s most supportive advocates.
If you want this to happen, you need to focus on at least two aspects of the customer experience:
- Creating ad-hoc content for every different stage to engage your customer based on their ever-changing needs and expectations
- Offering proactive support services at every single touchpoint.
Collect Data Like a Pro
As more customers move through their journey, you are going to need to keep collecting data and information on them. This will help you to know their desires, challenges, and expectations, which in turn allows you to shape a fully-bespoke experience.
Begin by analyzing customer data by using website analytic tools to discover how they behave once they land on your website. In parallel, keep tracking all your social media followers and email subscribers to learn more about them.
Segment Your Customer Base
Now that you’ve collected enough information on your customers, your next step is to divide your customer base into segments. This is an essential part of your customer experience strategy, as it enables you to hyper-personalize the overall process.
You can segment your customers based on some of these popular criteria:
- Age
- Gender
- Geographic location
- Employment status
- Education level
- Online shopping habits
Stay Emotionally Connected to Your Customers
Once you’ve solved your customers’ most pressing pain points, your work isn’t over. An excellent customer experience, in fact, extends far beyond the shopping cart.
If you want your customers to become real advocates for your brand, you need to keep in touch with them long after they have bought an item from you. Good ways to do so include:
- Sending behavioral emails
- Offering special deals and promotions
- Engaging with them on social channels
Train Your Team on Delivering the Best
Your employees are the ones who interact with your customers across the different stages of their journey. So, they are also the ones who are responsible for delivering that smooth, meaningful, personalized customer experience that you have worked so hard to craft.
Make sure that you keep training your team on how to deliver on your brand’s promise. Ask them to provide feedback and suggestions on how to improve, and always make them feel valued and listened to.
Measure Your Progress and Performance Over Time
A great customer experience strategy is not a one-off effort. To make it a consistent aspect of your business, you need to measure how you progress and perform over a period of time.
This will help you to work out what’s working and what might need to be adjusted. There are many user-friendly analytics tools that you can use to unearth data about your customer experience. Use this insight to shape any future action, campaign, or strategy.
Deliver a Stellar Customer Experience
Creating, delivering, and maintaining an exceptional customer experience is one of the most crucial aspects that determines a brand’s success.
If you are serious about growing your business, increasing your revenues, and beating your competitors, then the top tips in this article can help.
About the Author
Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad, an AI-powered cloud communication platform for better and easier team collaboration. She has over 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy. Currently, she is responsible for leading branded and editorial content strategies, partnering with SEO and Ops teams to build and nurture content. She has written for DesignLike and ReputationX. Here is her LinkedIn.
