How to Improve Your Customer Experience

As a result of digitalization, virtually every industry is under constant competition. Products are becoming increasingly interchangeable, services differ little from one another. Customers are continually comparing where they can get the best offer at the best price.

However, the lowest price does not have to be the decisive competitive factor. Much more important is the Customer Experience. With a well-designed customer experience, you differentiate yourselves from your competitors and increase the loyalty of your customers. This can start on social channels and continue through the use of your apps to visiting your website.

In this article you will find out, what makes a good customer experience, how you can improve your customer experience and which software can support you in this.

What makes a good Customer Experience

A holistic and appreciative relationship with your customers forms the basis for building a good customer experience. A positive experience with your brand in turn pays positively into your relationship – a win-win situation! To achieve this, you need to know the expectations of your buyers. What do they consider standard, because they get it from other providers? Once you have identified this, you have to exceed these expectations.

Make pleasant surprises, when existing or new customers come into contact with your brand. You can do this, for example, by offering simple solutions, quick answers to emerging questions, or a particularly friendly phone call with your service staff.

Ask yourself the question, which channels your target group prefers and be present there – for example social media, app, chatbots, IoT or digital signage.

Offer your customers as many touchpoints with your brand as possible. Of course, you should remain authentic and not play on platforms that do not suit you.

With these efforts, you will convince them of you and make them want more experiences of this kind. This means that you distinguish yourselves greatly from other brands through the experiences that the customers have had with your company. In the best case, they will no longer be willing to enter into a business relationship with other providers. But it is important that these positive touchpoints run throughout the entire Customer Journey – from the first point of contact, via convincing product quality, a courteous customer service and good-looking packaging to after-sales care for your products.

Always communicate appreciatively and understandingly, put yourselves in the other person's shoes and make the contact with your company as positive as possible for them.

Also, it is important that you all build contact points intuitively and appealingly, removing hurdles and making it easy for your customers to place their orders, ask their questions or gather information about your company. If you know the needs and goals of your customers, you can also implement an optimal customer experience for them.

How you can improve your Customer Experience

For your Customer Experience to improve, you need to consistently align your Customer Journey with your customers. By conveying and arousing emotions, satisfaction becomes enthusiasm and you create added value that pays into your brand.

These components of the Customer Journey, which you have perfected through feedback from your customers, various tests and research, the next step is to integrate into your Customer Experience Management. This initially sounds like a very time-consuming task, as you want to continually satisfy all followers on all platforms. In order to create coordinated experiences on all channels where you interact with your customers, whose creation, monitoring and optimization do not bind enormous personnel and financial resources, you need a Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Underneath this, you can imagine a coherent and integrated set of technologies that allows you to combine, manage, deliver and optimize a variety of context-related digital experiences – and this throughout the entire Customer Journey. For this, content management is the central building block of every DXP. Additionally, it can include these technologies and features:

• Analytics
• Authentication
• Commerce
• Collaboration
• Customer Data Platform (CDP)
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Development & Operations
• Digital Asset Management (DAM)
• Digital Signage
• Marketing Automation
• Product Information Management (PIM)
• Optimization & Personalisation
• Search
• Templating
• Translation

A Digital Experience Platform can be composed of different technologies.

A DXP software is better suited for managing your Customer Journey than a Content Management System, because a traditional CMS cannot play out content at any desired channel. This costs you both time and money. It can also lead to limited display options within the customer experience, for example if your content and the commerce system cannot be seamlessly interconnected. A CMS is also not suitable as a central storage place for your data, but only for your content. So if you're looking for product data, which you want to communicate along the Customer Journey, you'll need to open a additional tool and transfer the data. In contrast, a Digital Experience Platform takes on the role of a content hub by centrally managing your content and customer experiences. This allows you to seamlessly create omni-channel customer experiences and produce your content even more efficiently. A DXP thus enables the implementation of a content-commerce strategy – the shop and CMS are no longer separate, but work hand in hand. So you can build custom customer experiences from all your content and products and play them out on all channels relevant for your target group. This is also made possible by the central gathering of your customer data, which you can directly use for personalizing your content.

These software help you improve the Customer Experience

OMR Reviews has many useful DXP software that can help you improve your Customer Experience. We would like to introduce you to the Digital Experience Platform of Magnolia, which is the leader of our DXP category.

The Magnolia Composable DXP consists of the proven and equally named Headless CMS, Out-of-the-Box integrations with leading shop providers, as well as features for personalization, marketing automation, digital asset management and many other functions. The platform is extremely flexible and adaptable due to its modular architecture. New systems can be integrated or removed if necessary. This is made possible by the Composable DXP solution, which the tool uses. There are also conventional DXP suites, which are all-in-one solutions, and their structures cannot be changed. Composable DXPs, like that of Magnolia, are based on a Headless CMS, which can be extended with a variety of tools or software according to your wishes. You do not have to rely on a standard solution in analysis or commerce, but can choose the software that fits best to your company and integrate it in Magnolia.

Magnolia uses the Best-of-Breed system, where you can freely choose which software you want to use as part of your DXP.

If you use Magnolia, you manage all the experiences of your customers centrally on this platform and standardize your content, data and information in an effective way. You achieve this through the modular composition of your software, but also through the simple form of communication within your teams. Through the central storage, you manage, personalize and enrich the customer journeys consistently and thus create incomparable customer experiences. Also for your content authoring the WYSIWYG editor from Magnolia makes sense, as it allows you an intuitive creation of your content. If you notice that these contents have successfully performed, you can use them at any time – once created for persistent success, for example at an international product rollout. Because with this DXP solution you can manage multiple brands for different countries in different languages simultaneously without problems. You can request the prices for the use of Magnolia via the company website. In addition, a whitepaper on the exact use of DXP with Magnolia is available to you, where you can find further important information.

Well positioned for a target-oriented customer journey

In order to remain relevant and successful as a company in the long run, you must never lose sight of the needs and wishes of your customers. Therefore, keep an eye on the Customer Journey, because your company should be able to play out the right content for your customers at the right time. In the reliable and goal-oriented play-out of this content, a Digital Experience Platform is your reliable companion and supports you in making the wishes of your customers come true.