How to evaluate and improve your costumer experience

The goal of this article is that after reading it you can review you customer journey and evaluate properly their experience, identifying what can be improved and knowing the steps to do so.

Before discussing how to improve your customer experience (or CX), its importance and what tools you can use, let’s take a step back to the concept. We’ve got to fully understand what it means, so we can work on it.

“Customer experience is the impression your customers have of your brand as a whole throughout all aspects of the buyer’s journey. It results in their view of your brand and impacts factors related to your bottom line including revenue”

Providing a great customer experience is crucial because it builds customer loyalty and, when your CX machine is oiled enough, make consumers become brand advocates recommending your services and expanding your reach within the market through word-of-mouth, yes, this “ancient” practice is still one of the best ways to get to customers.

When analyzing the journey of your consumer there are two very important points that you’ve got to look out for: people and products. A successful journey relies on the satisfaction with the product/service itself aligned with an effective customer support team. If you have a great product, but people feel mistreated, the overall CX won’t be perceived as good as it could’ve been if the “human contact” part was better adjusted. On the other hand, it doesn’t matter if you have the best customer support team if your product/service doesn’t work properly.

Now that we understand what we should focus our attention and efforts on, let’s talk about how you can evaluate your CX.

The importance of customer satisfaction feedback

Customer satisfaction surveys can give you meaningful insights on your business. This opens the door for the people to express their impression on multiple aspects, from product to customer support, based on what’s most valuable to your company.

A great way to measure your CX is using the Net Promoter Score – NPS – system. This measures how likely your customers are to promote you to their social circle and what are their thoughts on multiple aspects of your products/services/company.

Based on the feedbacks you can better analyze what are the touch points that should be addressed or prioritized.

Identify the rate of and reasons for customer churn

The fact is that churn is unavoidable. The most important thing you’ve got to do it is to learn from it and identify the reason why it might be happening so you can take actions to prevent it.

It’s important to maintain a continuous track at how’s the buying process going and if the rate of abandoning a purchase is increasing or decreasing. Identifying at what point the decision to not proceed is mostly made and what are the causes will help to improve your CX and avoid a disruption in the sales process.

Your costumers will provide the best insights

Create a forum for your customers to request new products or features to make your offerings more useful and helpful for the problems they’re trying to solve. Giving customers the opportunity to proactively offer suggestions will give you a big picture of what’s expected and what, in their point of view, is considered valuable.

Obviously, it doesn’t mean that you’ve got to implement all the suggestions received, but it’s crucial to analyze if the same suggestions keep popping up, meaning, if among the insights there are trends among different customers you should pay attention to it.

Customer support ticket trends

One thing that we all know for sure, an unsatisfied consumer is much more like to speak up than a satisfied one. As bad as it seems, it actually represents a big opportunity to improve your business.

If there’s something going wrong with your product/service the tendency is that the costumer will try to fix the situation before abandoning the purchased item, after all, they invested their time and money to acquire it.

That’s the reason why your company should watch out for trends among the costumer support tickets. If the same problem/situation keeps being mentioned it means you’ve got address it as soon as possible, otherwise it could cause a rupture between your company and its audience.

Online CXM – Costumer Experience Management

Online or digital customer experience management refers to the experience your business creates online or through a mobile app. As more businesses take their companies online, it’s becoming increasingly important to build relationships through digital channels.

If you’re a SaaS company or launching a website or app, here are a few details to keep in mind when considering the customer experience:

• Mobile experience

If you’re online your customers can find you using a variety of devices. The most important thing is that the experience doesn’t change despite of the device used. Your website doesn’t necessarily need to have multiple versions, but it sure needs to be responsive, there’s nothing more disappointing than a company that has an amazing website on desktop, but it’s cut off and/or unresponsive on mobile.

Keep in mind that the experience should be pretty much the same whether they search for you from a mobile or a computer.

• Usability

It doesn’t matter how effective your product or service is if your customers can’t navigate their way around it. Websites and apps should be intuitive, making it clear to the user which steps they need to take to achieve their goals.

• User onboarding

In some cases customers need to be taught how to use the website or app. Not everyone is tech-savvy and many businesses provide onboarding to users who aren’t familiar with their products or services. Onboarding is the process of teaching new customers how to use your product or service.

Now that you know the most important touch points and process to analyze and keep track of the satisfaction of your customer experience, we give you some suggestions of tools that can help your business and make your job easier:

• HubSpot Service Software – is a platform that includes a variety of features used for customer experience management.
• Infobip – is an omnichannel communications platform that enables businesses to build personalized customer experiences on any channel including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Live Chat, SMS, and more.
• Tealeaf – is an analytics engine that monitors and evaluates online customer engagement and website interactions.
• Satmetrix – provides you with a summary of your overall customer experience.
• WalkMe – is a customer experience management solution for businesses that primarily interact with customers online.
• Khoros – is a customer experience management tool that helps businesses monitor their social media engagement.
• Podium – is a great option for small and midsized business’ looking to enhance customer experience.
• Whatfix – gives you more control over your customer-facing content and influences what information customers see and engage with.

As products and services change, the CX analysis is a never-ending process in a company, and you’ve got to keep up to always stay on top of any situations that may come in your way.

If you want to improve your CX and don’t know where to start, contact us and we’ll be happy to help.