Creating meaningful customer experiences to drive favorable business impact

As organizations have adopted agile business models during the pandemic, customer experience (CX) leaders have invested in solutions to deliver a superior CX across channels. These experience platforms need to understand the end-to-end customer journey and predict the next-best experiences, conversations, and actions. 

It’s no secret that a positive CX is crucial to the success of any business. An organization with happy customers has less churn and higher revenue than those with unhappy customers. Moreover, a satisfied customer becomes an advocate or a brand ambassador, and they promote the business through word-of-mouth marketing. They advocate and promote a business’s product or service with good ratings and reviews. How businesses think about CX profoundly impacts how the customers look at these businesses. Therefore, companies must improve their CX without fail if their current CX isn’t up to the mark.

The main touchpoints to consider when creating CX are people and products. Customers have plenty of available and immediate options for products and services. A wealth of information is available to customers looking to make independent purchases. Creating a niche in the fierce competition emphasizes businesses that offer a good CX. According to various business models, it is more costly to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. Additionally, existing customers provide more opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.  In order to ensure customer loyalty, businesses must prioritize offering meaningful customer experiences.

This article will explore the potential for businesses to measure their CX and determine what is and isn’t going well for them. 

How do you measure your current CX?

Organizations use various methods when measuring CX. Let’s look at the following general techniques that most organizations follow.

1.  Analyze survey results for customer satisfaction:
   Many tools can help customers experience purpose and satisfaction.  Besides offering a seamless experience, businesses must regularly use customer satisfaction surveys and feedback tools, such as those offered by HubSpot, Qualtrics, Bazaarvoice, and SurveyMonkey. These software systems offer essential metric reporting.
   
   Additionally, brands must measure their customers’ loyalty and net promoter score (NPS) to gauge the likelihood of a customer’s positive endorsement. Most importantly, businesses must follow up on customer feedback — whether positive or negative — to connect with customers, as this communication deepens the customer-company partnership and secures customer retention and loyalty
   
   
2. Identify the reasons for, and rate of, customer churn:
   As customers consider the dynamics of today’s markets, they realize that they have high bargaining power and ample choices.  As a result, customer churn has become an inevitable part of the business. But it’s essential for businesses to identify the reasons for these churns so that they can prevent them from happening again. Regular analysis of customers will determine if there is an increase or decrease in churn, reasons for churn, and actions to take in the future to prevent a similar situation.
   
   
3. Ask for customer feedback for product or feature requests:
   By creating a platform that allows customers to request new features or products, businesses incorporate customers’ advice and validate their feedback. Whether they create the platform on an email survey, social media, or community page, brands must allow customers the opportunity to offer suggestions in a proactive manner. This approach will make a business’s offerings more valuable and empower companies to resolve product/service issues seamlessly.  It’s important to note that it is not mandatory to incorporate all received feedback. However, repeated requests should be addressed and possibly followed.  
   
   
4. Analyze customer support ticket trends:
   Businesses must actively analyze the customer support tickets that their support representatives resolve. If several tickets show a repeating issue, review possible flaws and look for resolutions. This approach allows businesses to decrease the total number of tickets while providing customers with a streamlined and enjoyable experience.

What are various approaches to CX improvement?

Analyzing customer feedback, NPS, reasons for customer churn, and support ticket trends can only create an action plan to improve CX. Marketing tools offer several ways to address problems. A customer-journey map may be essential in understanding customer touchpoints and possible areas of improvement. When businesses make these changes, they can make each touchpoint an impactful experience for the customer. Let’s explore some options.

1. Optimize the customer-journey path to conversion:
   Optimization is a continuous process, and it is essential in improving the customer’s end-to-end experience. Especially with regard to conversion-path optimization, businesses need to address the most important elements of CX, including landing pages, calls to action, forms to collect information, and the touchpoints along the customer decision-making process, and a completed checkout process.
   
   The tricky part is that a customer’s first interaction might not be through a specific landing page that the brand is elevating. The customer might reach the business through social media, a blog, or an SEO keyword. The ideal conversion path would involve a landing page, a product page, a call to action, a thank-you page, and a thank-you email. the customer’s introduction via a landing page However, the customer journey will probably be less linear. Because each customer has a unique interaction with the brand, companies need to understand the complexity of the customer journey and harness their marketing power in response.
   
   In order to increase conversion and reduce friction in the customer experience, businesses must reduce the number of steps in the customer journey. They must analyze customer demographics and optimize the conversion path by conducting marketing research.
   
   
2. Transform customer data into actionable insights:
   Transforming customer data into actionable insights involves integrating and analyzing data from all sources to make optimized and informed business decisions. However, the amount of customer data collected by analytics software can be huge.
   
   To effectively use this data, it is necessary to understand what data means to the organization and what it offers. By understanding data, businesses will improve operations and efficiency. Beneficial data processes include data filtering, grouping, and segmenting. Businesses should also follow instructions to transform data into actionable insights. For example, the customer data platform (CDP) solutions gather customer data to analyze and create detailed customer journey analytics. It is also possible to query the data from the CDP and integrate it with business-intelligence tools (like Power BI or Tableau) to create dashboards. These dashboards can be available for different stakeholders, including business, sales, and marketing teams.  
   
   
3. Integrate your digital marketing ecosystems: 
   The customer interacts with a brand via multiple touchpoints. These may include social media, email, SMS, online portals, and smartphone apps. Perhaps the most damaging customer experience is a long wait time. Even worse is the discovery that the customer support team doesn’t have access to the information that the customer needs. Marketers must do their best to reconcile various digital ecosystems and use them to create the ideal customer experience. Therefore, businesses must invest in tools that integrate customer data from all sources and provide insights to the marketing team, making it easier to engage with customers and deliver a phenomenal experience.
   
   
4. Predict and create the next best customer experiences across touchpoints:
   The next best experience is an ideal next interaction or action that a customer or potential customer expects. It is a marketing team’s primary responsibility to deliver communications and help other channel interactions become excellent customer experiences.
   
   Delivering the next best user experience to each customer requires the proper data and tools. To optimize the customer experience, organizations must consider need-to-know information for customers as well as the customer’s end goals.
   
   It is essential that businesses do not reimagine every touchpoint and interaction. Instead, they should focus on transporting customers from one exchange to the next.
   
   With the help of machine learning algorithms, decision engines play a pivotal role in determining the next best action or next best offer.  They can help businesses consider what’s suitable for their brand. But to drive the most value, the next best experience strategy must center around customers’ needs and interests. Prioritizing these will require a single source of customer data. An impactful customer experience can be achieved through using the right tools, to orchestrate and optimize journeys and combining them with decision engines.

Conclusion:

Organizations need to move from a product-centric mindset to a customer-centric mindset. A customer-centric mindset is key to favorable customer relations. The business’s shift in focus from a product to a customer is an ongoing process that requires investment in people, process, and technology.  

A robust CX strategy helps businesses address customers’ needs. Moreover, a CX map can evaluate complex customer interactions. Experience maps highlight possible pain points, offering opportunities for companies to ensure the best possible CX when marketing their products and services.

The companies that exceed customer expectations and meet customer preferences as they deliver impactful experiences will be the ones that excel. The results will positively impact the NPS and ultimately increase an organization’s revenue.

At Virtusa, we take an engineering-led approach to improving the customer experience. By leveraging an organization’s existing investments and making the best use of available solutions, we deliver personalized and compelling experiences across channels. Our expertise allows businesses to improve CX and revenue.