You know that stellar customer experiences are the key to winning customers’ hearts (and loyalty).
You also agree with the idea – in theory – but need help applying it in your everyday business life.
The unpleasant truth? Optimizing the customer experience can be daunting, brimming with challenges and unknowns.
Fret not – we’ve got you covered!
Today’s post dissects the concept of Customer Experience Optimization. The article covers everything from tackling the most demanding challenges to uncovering the optimization steps.
Let’s dive into it!
What Is Customer Experience Optimization?
Customer Experience Optimization refers to the continuous, ongoing process of leveraging your customer data to create quality and consistent customer interactions through the entire customer lifecycle across all channels.
Customer Experience Optimization is an all-encompassing, cross-functional process involving Marketing teams, the Customer Experience department, Operations departments, and even the CEO – as he is the ultimate owner of the experience delivered by his organization.
Why Is Customer Experience Optimization Important?
Although it may be commonly thought that the customer experience is limited to past actions (such as a purchase, a website visit, or a customer service interaction), the reality is different.
Customer experience goes beyond specific actions, encompassing every instance a customer interacts with your brand. This includes social media engagement, watching a video related to your brand, and completing a purchase.
In the age of instant, digital experiences, customer experience becomes the alignment of brand identity, communication, and behavior, to provide a relevant, valuable, and enjoyable experience across the complete customer journey.
Companies that aren’t treating experience optimization with the warranted importance and overly rely on acquiring new customers monthly end up hemorrhaging their budgets on Ads, neglecting the revenue brought by increased Customer Lifetime Value.
Add the spike in competitors with similar offers, consumers valuing the experience more than the product, and the ease with which a customer might replace you. You’ll see experience optimization through new lenses.
No longer a “nice-to-haves,” but now necessities, experience optimization strategies will make the difference between a powerful brand and a failed business.
There are two other main reasons why you need customer experience optimization in your business:
1. To meet the under-promise, over-deliver principle
Consumers today seek value and expect their interactions to enrich their lives. Apart from a few industries notorious for horrible customer service (cable industries, we’re looking at you), every retailer must deliver the expected value.
Moreover, we live in the age of technology empowering individuals. So consumers can now decide how online retailers lead their businesses: from the purchasing process to the delivery or simply browsing content.
At the same time, consider the “now” expectancy.
Consumers expect immediacy, personalization, authenticity, and convenience with every brand interaction. And you need to meet all these expectations to earn customers’ loyalty and increase the Average Order Value of their purchases.
In a nutshell, customer retention comes at a price: a memorable experience and a feeling of being cared for.
To earn customer loyalty (and the recurring revenue that comes with it), you must understand the customer journey, then tweak all customer touchpoints in a more customer-centric fashion.
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2. To create the buying habit
Retail and eComm businesses must build strong customer relationships, not just from the first purchase but throughout the customer journey.
Some companies will take a reactive approach, waiting for customers to raise issues about the experience before improving customer-brand interactions.
However, to reduce churn and rise to the challenge, you should look for improvement opportunities and take a proactive, customer-centric approach.
For instance, you can use heatmaps to analyze visitors’ behaviors on your website, then anticipate their moves by changing the website flow.
According to the most recent studies, a total of $1.6 trillion is lost in the US because of customers churning following a bad experience (Accenture).
Imagine the amount of money you can save and even earn if you understand the customer and his needs, then meet those needs rather than just focusing on making transactions.
3. To build a substantial following around your brand.
It’s no secret that brands with an army of supporters are those brands who survive even the hardest of times.
If you ever doubted that, look at how people showed up for their favorite brands during the pandemic. It’s not a stretch to say that some of the brands in the hospitality industry only survived because their patrons wanted to keep them alive.
This connection didn’t grow overnight. It was nurtured in time, with customer-centric brands doing everything possible to prove to customers how much they care and value their patronage.
If actions speak louder than words, optimizing the customer experience is how you reward customers for staying by you, no matter what.
It’s not about bribing customers with discount blasts; it’s about respecting them and creating convenient and relevant customer experiences.
When Customer Experience Optimization becomes Challenging
At this point, you might wonder: “if there are so many benefits to it, why can’t we find more companies that optimize the customer experience to reduce churn and thrive?”
That’s the million-dollar question; the answer can be found in the undeniable challenges posed by experience optimization strategies.
In this section, we’ll look at each challenge of customer experience optimization, aiming to prepare you for the moment you’ll encounter it on your own.
- Data silos within organizations
Building a business from the ground up resembles a game of Tetris you can’t win. Each department represents a brick, each team follows different KPIs and processes, and each employee has a different priority.
Unorganized departments are easy to spot from a mile away, and chaotic reporting hurts the entire organization.
To truly understand customers, their needs, and expectations, you need to gather unstructured data into a single platform used as a source of truth by the entire organization.
- Fostering a customer-centric culture
The undeniable truth is that experience optimization is only possible when the entire company is aligned around making the customer happy.
However, changing mentalities is highly challenging, as people naturally resist change.
Moreover, seeing the big picture is only possible if the C-level execs and the upper management teams stop focusing on short-term gains and immediate profits.
The change must come from the heads of organizations, as lower-level employees tend to focus on their departmental goals rather than the overall customer experience.
To create a culture meant to nurture customer relationships and optimize customer experiences, leaders should invest time and resources into creating a culture that puts the customer first.
- Ineffective tools and customer experience reports
Understanding the customer journey and identifying friction points require accurate tools to quickly analyze customer data and gain real-time insights based on customers’ feedback and behaviors.
You must use powerful platforms and tools to turn data into intelligence and inform your decisions to achieve it all.
This means you can’t rely on manual reporting or outdated tools that can no longer sort and make sense of your data.
- Implementing effective personalization strategies for all customers
The bigger the company, the more diverse your customer base becomes. The need for personalized customer experiences becomes more stringent.
Diversity in the customer base involves curated and personalized retention approaches, turning the customer journey from a straight line into a labyrinth.
Even if all your resources were allocated towards personalization strategies, your teams would still need help to create specific campaigns for each customer and his specific needs.
To overcome this hurdle, you must segment your customers into specific sub-groups, research exhaustively, then orchestrate holistic experiences for each group, prioritizing your highly valued customers.
How to Optimize the Customer Experience
There is a logic to optimizing the customer experience. It involves listening to your customers, analyzing their behaviors, empowering employees to provide excellent service, and creating an environment to put the customer first.
Let’s break down each step.
Step 1 – Talk to your customers.
In a world of fancy tools and advanced strategies, we must remember the simplest step in optimizing the customer experience: asking customers what they want.
In other words, gather customer feedback before you start doing anything else.
Steer away from making assumptions based on the latest trends and go to the source for understanding your customers.
You can send out NPS surveys to give customers a voice and use customer feedback as a source of truth regarding the required updates to improve customer experiences.
Listening to your customers benefits the entire organization:
- the sales & marketing teams understand what triggers the buying decision,
- the product team can identify the most attractive product benefits,
- the customer experience teams can pinpoint customers’ pain points, then help them ease their troubles.
Step 2 – Invest time in Journey Mapping
Review the natural path your customers follow during your relationship: social media feedback, customer service tickets, emails, or communications with the sales teams.
Afterward, compare these contact points with any qualitative or quantitative data you have on your customers.
With every stop along the way, this process allows you to get the whole picture of the road from website visitors to paying customers.
Once you see the road ahead and identify how every touchpoint impacts the customer (be it pleasant or unpleasant), you can improve the customer experience for every touchpoint of the customer journey.
Step 3 – Identify the buying trigger
You know the old adage: “people don’t buy mattresses; they buy a good night’s sleep.”
It’s still true, as customers only buy products when they have a problem or a desire and hope the product will somehow improve their lives. Your products have a job to do – what is it?
You can use the JTBD methodology and interview customers to understand the context around the purchase decision and the value customers expect from you.
After you understand the job, you can take all necessary steps to ensure the products fulfill that job, creating a more meaningful and personalized experience.
Step 4 – Use heatmaps and session recordings to analyze the website’s UX/UI.
Heatmaps provide valuable insights into your website’s user behavior and preferences, showing you where visitors are clicking, scrolling, or hovering their mouse. When you analyze this data, you identify which parts of your app, website, or app are used the most and which are ignored, allowing you to create a more straightforward journey.
The UX experience needs to be convenient and fast (as people are often impatient and can always move on to your competition). Heatmaps help identify roadblocks or stages where users get stuck and eliminate friction points altogether.
The better the UX, the higher your conversion rates will be.
Step 5 – Optimize for Mobile Usage
According to Statista, in 2022, about 59% of the global website traffic was generated by mobile devices (not taking tablets into account).
This stat reveals the reality that an optimized customer experience must consider every platform your customers use.
You must pay attention to optimizing the user journey on mobile devices.
Ensure each feature and functionality of your website is available and responsive for mobile devices. For example, suppose the customer must go out of their way to contact your customer experience teams. In that case, it means you’re neglecting mobile usage.
Your customers will stop visiting your website (even if they like the brand) if it’s not a convenient experience for them.
Step 6 – Be consistent across all channels.
Overall, optimizing the customer experience means providing a consistent experience across the website, social media, and even customer support interactions.
As with any relationship, we tend to keep close to people who are consistently good and kind and avoid people who send us mixed and unreliable signals.
The customer-brand relationship follows the same pattern.
Aim to deliver relevant, consistent, and convenient experiences across all touchpoints in the customer journey to create the best possible customer experience.
This will increase the customer satisfaction score and improve customer engagement, earning you a more positive brand reputation.
Customer Value Optimization as an approach to Customer Experience Optimization
Ultimately, the only reason a customer will stand by a brand is his perception of the brand. If the brand acts as if the customer is a source of profit alone, the customer will feel it and walk away.
Your optimization efforts don’t need to be overcomplicated.
The customer-centric approach to optimizing the customer experience starts with the onboarding stage, when you set expectations, and ends only after the customer receives and successfully uses the product.
In the Customer Value Optimization methodology, you’re helping the customers extract value from their purchased products.
This involves paying attention.
Optimizing your customer experience also requires the following:
- Learning who your customers are
- Understanding why and how they chose you
- Identifying their problems
- Solving them.
In a nutshell – showing up and giving them reasons to buy again. Maybe even tell their peers about you.
Wrap-Up
And there you have it.
An optimized customer experience means creating a consistent and convenient experience for all your customers. It involves a combination of data, best-in-class tools and platforms, and a genuine desire to help.
The latter is crucial in this process of creating happy customers.
You might make due, even without the data or tools.
However, the mindset must be present and strong to help you truly optimize how customers interact with your brand.
Good luck!
Frequently Asked Questions about Customer Experience Optimization
Customer Experience Optimization refers to the continuous, ongoing process of leveraging your customer data to create quality and consistent customer interactions through the entire customer lifecycle across all channels.
The Customer Experience is made out of three main components: emotional, physical, and psychological.
The Emotional aspect includes how customers feel about the experience, Physical factors include the visible elements of the experience (such as the store or website), and psychological factors include the cognitive processes that affect the customer’s perception of the experience.
Client Experience Optimization requires using data and feedback to identify pain points and improvement opportunities.
At the same time, brands must create a customer-centric culture, and implement strategies that improve the customer journey across all touch-points.
The four essential pillars of a successful customer experience are personalisation, convenience, empathy, and reliability.
Personalisation refers to creating tailored experiences for the individual customer, convenience requires updating how customers interact with you to make it as straightforwards as possible, empathy means understanding your customers, and reliability involves consistently delivering on your promises.
