3 Ways to Improve Your Customer Experience Strategy

Whether you’re launching a new product, hosting an event, or conducting business as usual, your customers’ experiences need to be one of your top priorities. 

Customer experience (CX) includes all of the interactions a customer has with your business that inform their opinion of your organization. These experiences and how your business responds to them can determine whether a customer stays loyal and recommends your product or service to others or seeks to do business elsewhere. 

A strong, deliberate CX strategy can help you improve your retention and word-of-mouth marketing by turning customers into advocates for your business. In this guide, we’ll explore a few ways you can improve your CX program to create frictionless customer interactions, ensure customers feel heard, and provide evidence your program is succeeding that you can bring to your board. Let’s get started. 

1. Create automated alerts 

Your CX program should help you identify trends in customer feedback that can inform long-term improvements. However, where CX really shines is its ability to help you respond quickly to customers who have had negative experiences and take action to prevent them from lapsing. 

Ensure you’re using a CX platform that can identify survey responses with negative feedback and automatically elevate them to the appropriate manager to respond and close the loop. PeopleMetrics’ guide to closed loop customer feedback explains this in detail: 

• Customer provides feedback. CX starts with customer feedback. Provide customers the opportunity to submit feedback at key moments in their customer journeys known as moments of truth. These are moments that are often turning points in your relationship with a customer and will determine whether they continue working with your business or not.

• Technology alerts manager if follow-up is needed. Your technology should analyze surveys and automatically alert managers to feedback that requires immediate action. This can be both positive and negative feedback. For example, a customer who had a great experience might name an employee who helped them. In this case, the manager would just need to reach out to the employee to recognize them. 

• Manager takes appropriate action. For negative feedback, the appropriate manager will need to reach out to the customer who submitted the survey to follow up and resolve the issue. Managers should aim to reach out to customers quickly to show customers you care about their experience and help your business retain them.

• Root cause of the problem is identified. If customer feedback points to a deeper issue or you notice multiple customers all reporting the issue, it may be necessary to launch an investigation into your business’s operations. 

• Steps are taken to fix the root of the problem. After identifying the root cause, drive improvement at your business by taking steps to fix it. For example, if multiple customers describe having a frustrating experience signing up for events due to accessibility issues, you can use that as an opportunity to not only invest in more accessible event technology but reassess your website as a whole for accessibility. 

This cycle will then repeat every time you receive new feedback from customers. To ensure that feedback is acted upon promptly, set up automatic alerts to notify managers. This helps break down data silos and empowers employees to act as soon as feedback is elevated to them, creating more efficient, frictionless experiences for customers. 

2. Use text analytics

For large businesses, analyzing every survey for insight into specific problem areas can seem impossible. After all, no one at your business actually has time to read thousands of surveys. Fortunately, with text analytics, you can get an overview of your customers’ thoughts and opinions by taking their actual words into account but without poring over each survey individually. 

Use CX software that includes text analytics and automated sentiment analysis features. Ths will provide you with a high-level overview of how customers view your business. With text analytics, you can:

• Identify common topics. Text analytics will pull out common words and phrases related to various aspects of your business. For example, you might tell your text analytics to look out for the name of a new product you’ve just launched to see how customers are responding to it, or maybe you’re interested in seeing how customers feel about entire aspects of the customer journey, such as what their experience dealing with customer service is like. 

• Identify tone indicators. Text analytics can pick out not just topics but how customers feel about those topics by looking at the language around them. For example, let’s say two customers submit a survey about contacting your customer service. One customer shares how your staff was knowledgeable and empathetic to their problem, and even names the specific employee who helped them. By contrast, another customer complains that they got stuck on hold for half an hour and eventually gave up. Text analytics would be able to tell the difference between these two responses despite both revolving around the same topic. 

• Get an overview. After collecting data from surveys, text analytics will display the information in a variety of easy to read reports. Commonly, these take the form of a word cloud. Topics that come up a lot will be in larger font and can even be colored based on whether more customers expressed positivity or negativity about that topic. For example, if 150 customers had a negative experience with your event registration page, but 300 felt it was straightforward and easy to use, the word “event registration” might appear in large green text to indicate the overall positive experience. 

Text analytics is a powerful tool, but keep in mind that there is a margin of error. For example, text analytics might have trouble knowing how to categorize misspellings or slang it isn’t familiar with. While these issues will be minor compared to the amount of surveys text analytics are able to accurately analyze, they can be pervasive in large data pools. 

To reduce these impacts when investing in CX software with text analytics, ensure your platform provides a human touch alongside its reporting capabilities. This means your CX software provider should be a partner in understanding your customers’ experiences rather than just a service you renew but don’t interact with outside of the technology. 

3. Approach customers with empathy

Your customers’ experiences are informed by a variety of factors outside of just product quality and price. While a customer may initially make purchasing decisions based on those factors, they’re unlikely to continue buying from a business they feel doesn’t listen to their concerns or respect their time.  

Frustrated customers are at a turning point in their engagement, and poor follow up can harm retention. That’s why during these intense and potentially emotional moments, businesses should strive to treat their customers with empathy and patience. 

To determine the most intense, potentially high-emotion points of your customers’ experiences, try creating a customer journey map. This map should include a satisfaction trajectory, which is a line graph that represents on average how customers should feel at various points in their journey. 

For example, satisfaction is likely to start low as customers are still learning about your business, then is expected to increase after finding the information they need and deciding to make a purchase. However, you might note a common dip in satisfaction from when customers order a product to when it arrives, as they’ll need to wait for shipping, which can be an annoying process. 

A business who knows they have a long shipping process might get ahead of this issue and show greater empathy to customer concerns by sending regular messages tracking where their package is and create a system where customers can easily report whether they believe their package was lost in the mail. 

Outside of interactions with individual customers, your business can also project empathy as an organizational value by participating in corporate social responsibility (CSR). Crowd101’s corporate giving statistics report shows that 90% of companies claim that partnering with a charitable cause enhances their brands’ reputation. For supporters who care about a specific cause or want to make ethical shopping decisions, this can be the deciding factor in whether they make a purchase or are even drawn to your business in the first place. 

CSR and showing individual customers empathy can even overlap in some situations. For example, if your business is hosting a CSR event, consider not just how you represent the cause your business has partnered with but also how customers at that event are treated. This applies to other aspects of CSR, as well, such as providing information on your business’s philanthropic projects that’s easy for customers to find and understand so they can make informed purchasing decisions. 

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Your CX strategy influences how you approach individual customers and your business as a whole. Improve your efficiency with tools that can alert you to problems and provide a bird’s eye view of your customers’ experiences. But never forget to add a human touch by ensuring you have systems in place that facilitate listening to individual customers and approaching them with empathy.