Since the introduction of the internet and the rise of social media, enhancing the digital customer experience (CX) has become a differentiating factor and source of competitive advantage for organizations. Customer experience plays a critical role in improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, and due to its positive influence on customer retention rates, CX is also credited for increasing profits by 25-95 percent.
Despite its importance, some organizations fail to remember that customer experience doesn’t end with the purchase. As you can see from the customer journey diagram below, loyalty and advocacy should follow when positive customer experiences are present. This then leads to new recommendations and additional purchases, making CX a worthy investment.
Table of Contents
Listening to Improve CX
Analyzing CX Data
Engaging With Your Community
Driving CX Through Personalization
Customer-Centric Innovation
Visualizing Your Customer Journey
The following blog is an adapted snippet from our latest whitepaper. Download "The Social Media ROI Playbook".
Tip: Read this blog to learn more about the following questions: What is Customer Experience? And How Can You Improve it?
6 Tactics For Optimizing Customer Experience
Proactively making the digital customer journey more convenient and simpler for consumers to perform desired actions on your site or application is the holy grail of optimizing the customer experience. This can be achieved through the following tactics.
Tip: Meltwater offers a customer experience suite that can help you boost your strategy.
Listening to Improve CX
How can we gauge how our customers feel if we don’t listen to what they’re saying?
With more and more people turning to social media when they have a query or complaint, it’s essential that we’re monitoring our social media channels for reviews, complaints, and queries. Such conversations provide brands with the information needed to optimize customer experiences and meet growing consumer demands. In turn, consumers feel heard and businesses can also better minimize the risk of complaints escalating and reputational damage.
By using a media monitoring tool like Meltwater, we can quickly sift through millions of news stories and social media posts and track what is being said about our brand, competitors, and industry in real-time. This is necessary for increasing customer satisfaction, for example, if we don’t know about a negative post or story until it goes viral, it may be too late to prevent a PR crisis.
Analyzing CX Data
Analyzing data from client surveys and social media is a great way to keep your finger on customer satisfaction. Organizations often turn to metrics including Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a way of understanding how satisfied customers are. In addition to this, companies rely on media monitoring to understand:
- The sentiment towards their brand (and whether it has changed)
- The most common negative talking points
- How competitors are doing from a customer experience perspective
and learn more about how media monitoring can support your CX strategy.
Engaging With Your Community
Customers are becoming more demanding with regards to query/ complaints response times on social media, in fact, 66% of people now expect a brand to respond in less than 24 hours.
Meltwater's social media engagement tool helps brands keep on top of social media engagements and assign particular cases to relevant members of the team so that issues can swiftly be sorted. That being said, it's worth keeping in mind that not all customers complain directly to a brand...
To overcome this challenge, we developed listening capabilities that allow Meltwater clients to set geolocations as a metric to monitor conversations. This means that companies can see who has complained within a certain geofenced location. Say the queue at a fast-food restaurant is too long and customers begin to complain but don't @mention the restaurant, for example, the restaurant will still be able to spot and engage with negative feedback.
Tip: Check out more customer experience examples.
Being proactive with engagement is arguably an even more powerful way to boost customer experience. Community management often helps brands spot problems before customers complain. By searching through keywords related to competitors, we may spot an issue that could easily occur for our business too, and put plans in place to prevent this situation from occurring. We can also surprise and delight fans simply by replying to them and showing that we're listening.
Driving CX Through Personalization
According to a McKinsey survey, personalization can increase company revenue by 5-15%, something that should motivate even the most cynical marketer. By prioritizing personalization, we’re bridging the gap between data, technological experiences, and consumer delight.
Tip: Download our free guide on Personalization at Scale.
These days we have so much data on our customers that can be used to tailor our products and services. Ian Truscott, growth director at agency MRM Meteorite explains that ‘the consumer understands the data we’re collecting on them, and they are starting to expect a relationship with you that’s based on that data.”
Netflix is the ultimate example of a company whose obsessive pursuit of customer satisfaction is often credited to its success. With thousands of films, series, and documentaries to scroll through, finding something to watch on Netflix would be a headache if the tech giant hadn’t focused on removing friction for the customer by tailoring each touchpoint. Through the use of AI-driven personalization, Netflix’s algorithm helps viewers whittle down choices and find the content most relevant to them.
Personalization examples per industry:
Whatever service we offer as a brand, there are ways to personalize the customer experience. Here are a few personalization ideas to consider split by industry:
- Clothing brand: personalized items
- Airline: food menu tailored to individuals likes/dislikes
- Holiday provider: personalized itineraries
- B2B company: personalized email campaigns
- Streaming service: personalized song or movie recommendations
- Social media sites: algorithm based on who the individual most interacts with
Customer-Centric Innovation
Customer-centric innovation is another great way to improve customer experience.
Retail giant, Amazon, understands that customers are loyal right up until the second somebody offers them a better service, so they strive to be a forward-thinking innovative corporation. Amazon wins at CX as it invests in innovative solutions, enhances digital infrastructure based on customers' wants and needs, and keeps up with trends to ensure they remain number one.
Tip: Check out our retail customer experience guide.
Their profit goes directly back into R&D to help take Amazon even closer to its customers; they’ve invested over $100 billion in R&D since 2012. This allowed them to find ways to make a customer’s life easier or more convenient by tapping into the on-demand market and providing next and same-day delivery.
Speaking of Amazon’s approach to innovating, former Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos explained how their culture of starting with the customer and working backward puts them in a position to focus on real-world problems. He commented:
Working backward from customer needs can be contrasted with a 'skills forward approach where existing skills and competencies are used to drive business opportunities. The skills-forward approach says, 'We are really good at X. What else can we do with X?' That’s a useful and rewarding business approach, however, if used exclusively, the company employing it will never be driven to develop fresh skills. Eventually, the existing skills will become outmoded. Working backward from customer needs often demands that we acquire new competencies and exercise new muscles, never mind how uncomfortable and awkward-feeling those first steps might be.
Visualizing Your Customer Journey
The customer journey can be defined as the consumer’s path through all brand touchpoints that lead to a decision, such as making a purchase. The model enables businesses to better understand how consumers view their products and services, what their intentions and values are, and how a consumer interacts with the brand at different touchpoints.
There are a ton of benefits to measuring and visually mapping your customer’s journey, including pinpointing crucial moments in the decision-making process, reducing friction, increasing lifetime value, and making your budget stretch further. It's therefore quite surprising to learn that many companies haven’t yet visualized their customer journey. Truth be told, executives tend to struggle with this as they make customer journey mapping more complex than it needs to be. In reality, it involves a series of logical steps based on collecting and visualizing relevant data. We're happy to run through those steps and relevant data types with you, and we'll be in touch. Alternatively, watch our on-demand webinar "How to Map & Visualise your Customer Journey" or read our in-depth customer journey guide.
When mapping customer journeys, keep user intent in mind
In order to create and maximize digital touchpoints along the journey, the effectiveness of each channel consumers come in contact with needs to be considered individually. This is because motivating factors that influence decision making, behavior, and intent change throughout the customer journey, thus companies must position themselves within the realm of the user’s browsing mode by providing thoughtful content that matches the user’s expectations. For example, users don’t tend to look for transactional content on social media. Instead, you’ll find social media users typically in browsing mode or looking for new topics that entertain rather than hard-hitting content that covers difficult topics.
So there you have it, our 6 top tactics for optimizing your customer experience. If you want to explore anything in more depth, fill out the form below and we'll be happy to discuss. Also, don't forget to read our new whitepaper, The Social Media ROI Playbook for more tips on growing your business with social media!
