Home / 10 Customer Experience Tips You Need to Know
According to our eCommerce 202X survey, the majority of brands (55%) believe that the customer experience is more important than any other aspect of digital marketing. It’s the key to growing their business and setting it apart from rival brands.
If so many brands understand the vital importance of CX, then why are so few actively investing in it? According to our survey, only 29% of brands are currently putting their money where their mouth is and investing in CX, a stark contrast to the 55% who believe it should be priority number one.
If you ask us, the reason is simple: most brands don’t know where to begin. It’s simple enough to just increase your paid media budget, for instance – but to really enhance your customer experience, you need to do more than just flick a switch. Creating a customer experience that’s equal parts enticing and effortless takes a whole lot of time, research and creative thinking. Trust us, we’ve been at it for more than 25 years.
To help nudge you in the right direction, we’ve put together a list of 10 easily digestible customer experience tips. We’re going to run through each of them below, as well as recap the importance of customer experience and what the term really means.
It might sound like yet another marketing buzzword, but in reality it’s anything but. Often abbreviated to CX, customer experience refers to the overall process a customer goes through when they interact with your brand, from the very first click right through to the umpteenth purchase.
It’s not just about customer service – it’s about how your brand comes across at every stage of the customer journey. Something as simple as a badly-worded or ill-conceived social post can immediately turn people off your brand, creating a negative experience right from the get go (and losing you a customer).
The same applies at every point in a customer’s path from awareness to conversion. Someone could fall in love with your brand and your products, get all excited about the prospect of buying them and be put off at the final hurdle by a clunky, frustrating checkout process or a lack of payment options.
It used to be the case that a flawless customer experience was a ‘nice to have’, not a must-have. Things are different now. People expect websites to work quickly and faultlessly. They expect engaging and compelling content. They expect to get their questions answered in minutes, not days. So, unless you want to be overtaken by your rivals, nailing your customer experience should be a top priority.
As promised, here are 10 handy tips to help you get started on your CX journey.
If you’re serious about CX, you have to leave all your preconceptions at the door. You might think you know what your customers want or what you’re doing better than your competitors, but how can you really know for sure unless you have data to back it up?
Optimising your customer experience is partly about letting go of what you think is best and establishing what actually is.
That leads us nicely onto point number two: understand your audience. Take the time to group your customers into categories and study the data to establish who is interacting with your brand and who isn’t. Are you targeting the right people? And does your current CX serve their needs?
You can always learn something from your competitors. Even if you feel your brand does things better than they do, chances are there’s at least one part of their customer experience that’s more effective than yours. Find out what they’re doing right and then do it even better yourself.
To really create a seamless experience for your customers, you have to be everywhere – and you have to be consistent. From your social accounts to your search presence to your ads and on-site content, make sure you’re offering a consistent experience across every platform.
Customers don’t want to feel like, well, customers. They wanted to be treated like human beings, not just a number on a screen. Try to personalise your email campaigns and on-site content to suit their individual preferences – use the data you have available to address emails to them by name and offer tailored recommendations on your site for products they might be interested in.
There are so many different services out there that have been built specifically for CX optimisation, from heatmapping tools to analytics platforms and more – so make sure you’re using them to inform your decisions.
It’s one thing to gather data on customer journeys and demographics, but it’s quite another to have specific, written feedback directly from customers themselves. Encourage people to leave reviews and respond to surveys to make sure you’re going in the right direction.
If there’s any aspect of your customer journey that creates friction and prompts users to go elsewhere, there’s no time like the present to rectify it. For example, if your site’s checkout doesn’t support PayPal, Apple Pay or Google Pay, it might be time for an upgrade.
The customer experience doesn’t end once an order is placed. It’s what you do next that could transform a one-time buyer into a loyal, repeat customer. Do what you can to offer customers incentives and rewards for repeat purchases, keeping them engaged with your brand.
Yes, there’s more to CX than just customer service. But if you don’t interact with your customers in the right way and get the fundamentals right, your efforts to optimise the remainder of the customer journey will fall flat. Try to create helpful content that answers customers’ questions on each page, and add a live chat function to your site so they can speak to you directly without having to write an email or make a phone call.
Not sure where to start or how to prioritise all of the CX-related tasks on your to-do list? We can help. With more than two decades of experience transforming the user experience for brands of all sizes and industries, we can help you work out what’s holding your brand back – and do something about it. From the initial research and strategy creation right the way through to content creation and ground-up redesigns, we know what it takes to create a frictionless eCommerce experience.
To find out more about how we could help your brand, reach out to our team today or check out some of our recent success stories.
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