9 Customer Experience Tactics You Need to Be Using

Why great customer experiences matters

Customer experience (CX) is key to the success of any business and one of the most important factors in cultivating customer loyalty. This is achieved through increased satisfaction, clear communication of your brand values and a reduced churn rate, leading to better long-term relationships with your target audience.

There’s no doubt that some businesses struggle to acquire and convert new customers. It’s estimated that the average ecommerce conversion rate is between 1-3%. According to Paul Farris in his book Marketing Metrics, “a repeat customer has a 60 to 70% chance of converting,” which means you can’t afford to let them split away due to bad CX.

What causes bad customer experiences?

There are multiple factors that can create bad CX, from the relatively small, such as a difficult checkout process to large PR disasters like the case of a passenger being dragged off a United Airlines flight in the age of social media. While these two examples sit at different ends of the scale, they both have the effect of damaging brand loyalty and therefore the bottom line.

What tactics should you be employing to create great CX and return customers?

1. Knowing who your customers are

Improving the customer experience starts with your buyer personas, because marketers need to know who their customers are. Therefore, customer profiles are key and while every customer is different, they can also be divided up into segments that reflect their behaviors. Marketers should take the following factors into consideration when creating personas:

• Age
• Location
• Income
• Job title
• Buying habits
• Pain points
• What they expect from your product or service

By knowing who your customers are, you’ll better be able to create relevant and personalized content, targeted ads and posts on social media that convert.

2. Listen to your customers and act

It’s not enough to just know who your customers are; you need to listen to them too, gather feedback and take action on the things they say. Feedback is ubiquitous among brands, but there are many ways to go about collecting it. Some of the most effective include:

• Customer feedback surveys to identify feelings towards the business and areas that need improvement
• Follow-up emails once a product or service has been provided. They can be formatted as a poll, survey or questionnaire
• Live chat to address issues on the spot
• Social media in the form of direct messages, surveys, polls or comments on posts
• Asking directly over the phone or face-to-face

Learn more: How Creating a Customer Feedback Loop Can Fuel Loyalty

3. Collect CX management scores

As well as asking for opinions when you reach out for feedback, it’s also worth collecting scores that can be turned into useful data. These usually sit within four key metrics, which offer a valuable insight into different areas of your customer experience management:

• Customer Effect Score (CES)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
• Time To Resolution (TTR)

4. Create a seamless online experience

Customers can communicate with your brand through many channels, but it’s vital that none of them are neglected. While many businesses have now successfully implemented a multichannel strategy, this isn’t enough for customers to benefit from a seamless online experience - it must become omnichannel.

That means customers can expect and receive the same level of service whether they get in touch over the phone, in person or through any one of the many online channels available to them. Not only this, but as they switch from one to the other, they’ll find that all information about their account is shared across departments and solutions can be found quickly.

In the 2020 Marketing Automation Statistics Report, it was found that there was a 287%

higher purchase rate when three or more channels were used successfully. This was summed up by Deloitte in its Unlocking the Power of the Connected Customer report, when it said: “Connected customers want to be able to buy anytime, anywhere.” Omnichannel is the way to make that happen.