Tips and Tricks to Create Positive Customer Experiences
This is how you create customer experiences that remain in the mind
- Customer experience examples:
- Customer Experience: Definition and Application
- Why is a positive Customer Experience (CX) important for businesses?
- 5 important components of a positive customer experience
- 5 Tools to Create Compelling Customer Experiences
- Conclusion
In this article, guest author Maike Haberkorn shows you what it takes to create good customer experiences and which tools can help you.
Customer experience examples:
1. Customer experience example
Imagine the following situation: You wake up in the morning, take a sip of coffee and look into your email inbox. You have received several emails from a shoe brand that you ordered something from some time ago. This shoe brand is now offering you discounts on children's swimming fins. You close your emails and unsubscribe from the mailing list immediately.
What led to this reaction?
- Multiple emails early in the morning put you in a bad mood
- You have no use for children's clothing because you are neither a child nor have a child
- You don't dive
2. Customer experience example
You come home after a successful day at work and receive a push notification from a food delivery app, which has back in stock the ice cream that you like to eat and was sold out last week. To compensate for it not being in stock last week, they offer you a 10% discount and express delivery. You are thrilled by this promotion, order the ice cream and share a post about it on your Twitter account.
How do the approaches of the brands in these two customer experience examples differ? In the first example, the brand has alienated valuable clientele with an irrelevant, unpleasant online customer experience. In the second example, the brand has increased sales and gained a brand ambassador to generate more customers. The reason for this is a customer-oriented strategy that puts the customer experience first.
Customer Experience: Definition and Application
The customer experience (also known as Customer Experience, CX) is the sum of all perceptions towards a company and/or a brand; from the first purchase to becoming a person representing the brand. Each individual touchpoint of users has significant impacts on the overall impression of a brand.
The most effective ROI is achieved by acquiring loyal customers who convert regularly and promote your brand for you automatically. The key to acquiring such customers is the customer experience.
Providing customers with a great experience at all times requires a customer-centric mindset and careful preparation. For this, it is recommended to understand customers in detail; what they want, value, where they are in their customer journey and much more.
Why is a positive Customer Experience (CX) important for businesses?
Being able to consistently provide a positive and optimal customer experience is crucial to a brand's growth strategy. An optimal experience is equivalent to an increase in repeat purchases and positive reviews. It also means fewer friction losses in every phase of the customer lifecycle.
Every business model can benefit from focusing on providing great customer experiences.
For example, retail brands could ensure repeat purchases and good reviews, or streaming apps could record higher DAUs (daily active users) and MAUs (monthly active users). They could also see a rise in free trial users who switch to paid tariffs for subscription brands, and fintech brands could experience fewer dropouts during onboarding.
In which key figures will you therefore notice a change if you want to realise unparalleled customer experiences?
- Increased customer loyalty and CLV (Customer Lifetime Value)
- A lower number of migrations
- An increase in new customers organically won through positive reviews and offline
5 important components of a positive customer experience
1. Introduction of a customer-oriented mindset in all teams:
Customer orientation should be deeply rooted in a brand's mission and values. In an era where customers are greatly driven by the values and culture of a brand, it is all the more important to implement genuine customer engagement to enrich the lives of customers.
The mission statement of Deutsche Telekom for example, is evidence of their customer-oriented culture. "Making people's lives easier and enriching them sustainably is at the core of our actions. We connect everyone with the opportunities of the present."
2. Understanding the needs of customers:
To best understand customers, it is advisable to get a complete overview of their entire customer journey across all channels: Whether it's about preferences, likes and/or dislikes; put yourself in the situations of your customers. This is where insights play a key role. Insights provide insight into who customers really are at their core and help create relevant experiences at every step. Eliminate data silos and invest in a platform that helps consolidate all customer information into a single view. A unified view enables you to create optimal and effective customer experiences.
3. Personalised content:
Personalisation is the be-all and end-all for a brand's sustainable growth. Customers want brands to create a real understanding of their preferences. According to a recent survey by MoEngage 62% of European customers said they expect a personalised shopping experience. 52% said that personalisation by brands has an impact on whether they choose a brand. Personalisation is an essential component of creating a positive customer experience. Customers expect brands to know their purchase history, their preferences and their location across all channels at all times.
For brands that want to create great experiences to win loyal and loyal customers, this poses both an encouragement and a challenge. The fact that customers want you to use the available data for personalisation offers numerous opportunities. However, the number of channels and touchpoints through which customers interact with you is large and growing. Only those who really understand their customers and communicate through the appropriate channel can therefore be successful.
4. Developing Customer Empathy:
Customer empathy is the ability to develop a deep understanding of customers. There is an abundance of options to purchase products or services. Why do customers therefore choose one brand over another? Customers only want to be associated with a brand that truly "understands" them.
The key is to see your target audience not just as customers but as people. It is therefore important to find out how you can enrich their lives. The following questions are relevant here:
- Who are my customers?
- What is important to them?
- What are the problems and challenges they face on a daily basis? How can my product or service help to solve these?
5. Accessibility:
Accessibility is a crucial component in building a great customer experience. In times where there are a multitude of options of brands, channels, payment methods and many more, it is crucial that you are present and available for your customers at the right time and on the right channel. In a value-oriented economy, the average consumer interacts with a brand at least twice a week before making a purchase. However, these interactions can happen time and time again across a different channel; your goal should therefore be to find out which channels are preferred and at what times customers are most active.
5 Tools to Create Compelling Customer Experiences
In the previous, we talked about the top five components that create a foundation for an optimal customer experience. The next step is about the tools that help create an extraordinary online customer experience. Every customer interaction enables you to optimise the quality of the customer experience with your brand. A great Customer-Relationship-Management Platform, coupled with an intuitive Marketing Automation Platform ensures that sales and marketing teams work hand in hand. Here are some must-have factors you should consider when evaluating platforms.
Tools for analysing the user path:
Gain insights from customers after an event, e.g. "app installation", or before an event of your choice. Learn how many customers take each user path to the targeted destination and why some of them drop out of the funnel. This enables you to eliminate friction points that lead to the most purchase cancellations.
Predictive Analytics Tools:
Brands often send the same message across all available channels, which does not necessarily lead to better results. There are tools that increase conversions by analysing your customers' past interactions to determine the most effective channels, the best time to send and the best frequency of messages. In this sense, it may actually be advisable to be less offensive to trigger higher engagement. For example, an e-commerce or food delivery app can achieve higher responses by primarily interacting with customers on their preferred channel and interacting with them there.
Whether you run an OTT platform, a food delivery app or an education company, customers notice when their needs are consistently met in the way they prefer. This ultimately creates long-term customer relationships.
Intuitive segmentation:
- Invest in tools that help segment customers according to the following criteria
- User properties such as location, name, email etc.
- Events such as app opening, product purchase, shopping cart abandonment etc.
Segmentation based on affinity, which focuses on grouping customers based on predominant preferences in terms of brand/category, time or usage, helps you to establish an effective match between products and the most receptive group of customers.
Personalisation tools:
These tools use AI, automation and insights from customer data and interactions to support you in the deep personalisation of channels such as websites, push notifications, emails, WhatsApp messages and more. They help you to reduce manual work and to switch from classical hypothesis-driven campaigns to AI-driven, automated campaigns and to send the message relevant to the customer, on the right channel at the right time.
Optimising the customer journey:
Customer Journey Optimisation tools help to design it across channels and combine interactions throughout the entire customer lifecycle. They also enable you to send messages sequentially and preferably (depending on user preference) to ensure optimal deliverability and not to impair customer satisfaction. More Experience Management Software can be found on OMR Reviews.
Conclusion
An optimal customer experience is becoming increasingly important. This is the decisive factor for brands to stand out from the crowd of competitors. The customer experience is a decisive criterion that will help your customers to prefer your brand over others. For most brands, the customer experience is the top priority in 2023. The above tips and tricks help to create consistently exciting customer experiences.