Customer experience is the impression that a business leaves on a customer and is a sum of their interactions. This can sway them to patronize a brand or cause them to avoid it. This happens at each stage of the customer journey and is delivered by both products or services and the people.
Why is great customer experience important?
Providing an excellent customer experience is crucial to the growth of a company. This leads consumers to become loyal to the brand and to promote it to their circle. On top of that, they share their positive experiences with others online, enabling a business to earn more purchasers.
To do that, enterprises turn towards customer experience management software.
What is a customer experience management platform?
It is a software that connects businesses with customers across all touchpoints. It smooths the flow of communication between consumers and sales and customer service agents to build a strong relationship. It also ensures consistent conversations, even if clients start speaking with an agent on Facebook Messenger and jump to email to continue. The way an enterprise handles this can impact the customer experience they offer.
To ensure that they maintain their excellent reputation among audiences, businesses can implement the following customer experience strategies.
3 Strategies to Improve Customer Experience
1. Improve site loading time
The average site loading time in 2018 was 15 seconds, 7 seconds faster than it did in 2017. Though it sounds like an improvement, it is still slow, according to Think with Google. In fact, mobile visitors abandon a site when it takes more than 3 seconds to load completely. Since over half of web traffic is generated on mobile, it is imperative that brands aim to reduce their site loading time to 3 seconds or less.
Why is it an important step? Doing so is a customer experience management strategy that can drive more traffic and bring additional income to the business.
If there is even a slight increase in your site loading time, the bounce increases exponentially. For example, Think with Google did a test that showed if the page load time reaches 5 seconds, the bounce goes up to 90%. If it hits 6 seconds, the bounce rises to 106%. If it takes 10 seconds, the bounce swells to 123%. Those are not good numbers if a business is hoping to increase its sales.
But how does one go about making a site load faster? The key is: less is more. It is not just Google that says this. Experts in customer experience also agree. When a business trims text, images, and videos on a page, the customer waiting time is reduced, thereby increasing the probability of them staying on the site and making a purchase.
2. Implement big data analytics
A critical aspect of customer experience management is understanding customer needs and wants and satisfying those. Going about that is now easy with the help of big data analytics.
What is big data though? This is information that a business gains or generates daily and can be structured and unstructured. This data can include social media data and business transactions. While there is nothing new about this, what is new is the method of analysis.
That is where big data analytics comes in.
Nowadays, there are tools that can analyze the information as they stream in. Take for example customer feedback gathered by a company. Traditionally, this requires hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars to complete. With big data platforms, analysis is done in real-time, allowing businesses to detect dissatisfaction and concerns. Thus, they can mitigate those immediately before they blow up into bigger issues.
Moreover, companies can use big data analytics to uncover the benefits of omni-channel customer engagement because customer experience is not limited to a single platform.
3. Include AI in the tech toolbox
Artificial intelligence used to evoke fear that sentient robots would take over the earth one day. Nowadays, it is seen as a helpful tool in business processes because of its ability to help people complete tasks faster and to reduce the burden on human shoulders, such as in customer service.
AI has other applications as well. It can help personalize content and it is the foundation of voice assistants.
Cisco shares that 28% of global businesses utilized artificial intelligence to boost personalization. They applied it to their CRM to make predictions regarding the customers’ purchases and other actions. However, it is important for the personalization to be relevant and valuable to the customer and for it not to be obtrusive.
Artificial intelligence can manifest the benefits of customer experience management as well. Since it is a technology behind chatbots, it has reduced agent-customer interactions. Cisco even shares a prediction that 85% of customer service interactions will be facilitated by chatbots. This saves the customers’ time since they can get the information they need quickly.
Managing customer touchpoints and brand reputation
The aim of customer experience management is to maintain a brand’s good reputation. Doing so enables a company to continue doing business with existing customers and to attract more consumers, making it important to connect every channel of communication with members of the target audience. One bad experience would be enough for even a loyal client to choose the competitor.
People are also more likely to spread their less-than-positive interaction with a brand widely. It is not just their family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who would know. Individuals searching for a brand on the internet would be aware, too, because they would visit review sites where other customers left their impressions.
To avoid that scenario, businesses have to make sure that they give customers a good, holistic experience with customer experience management examples. Taking a look at the FinancesOnline customer experience design guide can also help.
