14 Innovative Ideas to Improve Customer Experience

14 Innovative Ideas To Improve Customer Experience

“The best advertising you can have is a loyal customer spreading the word about how incredible your business is.” – Shep Hyken

Take note of Shep Hyken’s advice, which highlights the need of placing a strong emphasis on the customer experience.

Customer experience, or CX, relates to how customers see their overall interactions with your brand. 

Therefore, you need to be mindful because everything you do shapes customers’ perceptions and influences their decision to come back to you.

Why Customer Experience is Important?

Happy customers spend more and advocate on your behalf and that’s why a positive customer experience is becoming a deciding factor in growing your business. Here are several advantages of providing a great customer experience, making it vital for the business to understand how to enhance the customer experience.

14 Innovative Ideas to Improve Customer Experience

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  • Improved Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty 

Great customer experience delivered at all touchpoints of interaction with the customer can make customers satisfied.  Customers just wouldn’t choose to work with businesses that fall short of their needs and expectations. According to a study, an estimated 95 percent of purchasing decisions are motivated by emotion rather than reason.

And, only by providing an unfailingly excellent customer experience will you be able to influence their emotional decisions, satisfaction, and ultimately loyalty.

  • Increased Retention (Reduced Churn)

Positive customer experience helps build strong customer relationships and prevents customers from churning. Meanwhile, if your customers have a bad experience, they stop using your services, which impacts the reputation of your business.

  • Increased Revenue

Statistics show that “84% of consumers do not trust adverts anymore. Offering a top-of-the-line customer experience helps reinforce brand advocacy and increases ROI through recommendations.

88% of consumers read reviews to determine the quality of a business’s customer experience.”  If businesses succeed to pull the customer experience off they can find themselves in good reviews.

Positive word of mouth, pleasant reviews, and referrals all boost your ROI unquestionably. According to Deloitte, “customers who have positive experiences with a brand spend 140% more than those who reported negative experiences.”

 

Innovative Techniques for Boosting Customer Experience

Failure to provide your customers with an enjoyable experience will lead them to switch brands. The innovative ideas to improve customer experience that is provided below can be useful for surviving in the hugely competitive industry and keeping up with changing customer expectations.

1. Online Presence

A good online presence ensures that you are accessible when customers want to interact with your business—whether that be via social media platforms, your corporate website, or chat applications.

Having an appealing website that perfectly matches your brand sentiments can be something that would have the customers hooked. Besides the aesthetics, ease of navigation, content accessibility, website speed, and efficiency will have them browsing more and discovering more about your services. On the other hand, if customers find your website confusing or complex, it’s unlikely that they’ll return.

A company’s ability to connect with more customers and address their social media complaints is aided by its significant social media presence.

Businesses can enhance the customer experience by interacting with customers online by posting helpful articles, sharing discount codes and links to events, or hosting webinars.

As a result, having a great online presence improves the accessibility and visibility of your business.

2. Personalize

When customers engage with a brand, personalization is something they desire. A report says, “ 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences.” 

Humans have an innate desire to be acknowledged for their distinctiveness. Everybody appreciates it when their names are remembered or when they receive the service they prefer. A personalized customer experience will leave a lasting impression on the customers, setting the scene for future business, retention, and referrals.

Therefore, 

  • Develop products and services to meet the customer’s unique needs.
  • Conduct personalized surveys to get to know the customers better.
  • Send out personalized messages/emails.
  • Provide contextual responses based on customer’s choices, or interaction history.

The stated ideas all work together to provide customers with personalized support that goes above and beyond customers’ expectations.

14 Innovative Ideas to Improve Customer Experience

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3. Customer Journey Mapping

A great idea to improve the customer experience is through customer journey mapping, a visual representation of the customer journey. 

You can eliminate customers’ pain points and address them at every point of contact by mapping out the whole customer journey. By doing this, you’ll be able to streamline the customer onboarding process, compare the desired and actual customer experiences, and—most importantly—gain a deep understanding of your customers.  Again, this will increase the customer support team’s capacity to respond promptly and proactively to customers’ issues.

4. Empower Your Employees

If properly utilized, the workforce, which has been considered the “pillars of support” of the company, can significantly improve the customer experience.  Ensure that workers have the resources they require to perform their jobs to the highest standard. 

Better say, the customer experience begins with employee experience, as only empowered and happy employees are capable of carrying the same vibe to customers. 

Therefore, give employees the tools and backing needed to support customers efficiently and accurately. 

Virtual Assistants, such as Kapture’s ‘Agent Assistance Window’ can help your support team by answering their questions contextually.  As a result, employees do not have to distract their peers while answering customers’ questions, reducing hold times.

When employees are required to complete training, a learning management system that they can use to enroll in courses and take quizzes at their convenience is quite helpful.

Likewise, implement employee appreciation and personal welfare initiatives to keep them motivated to care for your customers.

5. Omnichannel Customer Support

Delivering an exceptional customer experience doesn’t just mean resolving customer issues on time. It also means having proper coherence between the various channels that customers use to reach out to you to ensure that the customers enjoy a connected journey from the start. 

A customer service solution that offers omnichannel customer support integrates various applications and channels together to deliver a comprehensive customer experience.

6. Customer Loyalty Program

Loyalty programs make customers feel special and recognized. Offering reward points to new and loyal customers, as well as discount vouchers on birthdays or special occasions, makes customers happy and motivates them to return for repeat business. To give an example of how companies do it, 

  • 5% of purchases made with a co-branded credit card from General Motors are applied to the purchase or lease of a new vehicle.
  • For frequent card use over the course of six months, American Express has provided two airline tickets. – source

7. Voice Of the Customer Programs

Programs that focus on the voice of the customer assist organizations in gathering, evaluating, and acting on customer input in an effort to enhance the customer experience. In this case, your product and service are ultimately driven by the wants of the customer to provide an excellent customer experience.

You can bulk-send customized surveys to various customer segments using customer service automation software. Above all, act upon the customer feedback if you wish to make meaningful improvements in the areas suggested by your customers. 

The voice of the customer programs can help you understand why customers come back to you, how to improve their needs, and what interests, and expectations they have.

8. Chatbots

Businesses can deliver round-the-clock support by deploying chatbots, a technology that is steadily and inevitably becoming a part of our lives.  When connected to an extensive knowledge base, chatbots can help navigate articles, tutorials, or guidelines to help them solve their problems.

Providing remarkably quick responses can assist in meeting customer expectations of receiving prompt remedies, making chatbots your brand’s preferred interface for customer engagement.  If necessary, chatbots can also link users with live agents.

By offering relevant and personalized responses that are determined by carrying out extensive customer data analysis in the back end, the sophisticated AI chatbots raise the standard of service delivery.

With chatbots, customers spend less time waiting since answers to their common questions are given right away rather than having to wait for a response like they would with an email or phone contact. AI chatbots will unquestionably assist you in keeping a competitive edge in the customer experience arena, where responsiveness is key.

9. Self Service

“70% of customers said they expect a company website to include self-service options”. – source

A lot of customers prefer to troubleshoot problems by themselves because the self-service options provide speedier responses and save them the time of reaching out to a live agent. Hence, think about investing in knowledge bases (a centralized repository of information) where you can store the self-help articles such as FAQs, troubleshooting guides, policies, tutorials, and so on. 

A knowledge management system will let you access the knowledge base through portals, chatbots, or discussion forums. When customers find the easiest path to find the piece of information they need to address their problems, they tend to be more satisfied with the experience. 

10. Automate your Practices

Use a help desk management solution to automate the routine functions of your customer support team. Ticket creation,  assignment, and follow-up help you close tickets as per the SLAs.

Bringing efficiency to routine and repetitive tasks by means of automation can make customer service a pleasant and flawless experience. And, the quality of customer service affects how customers view your brand, eventually influencing the customer experience.

11. Re-evaluate your Mobile Experience

Ascertain that your company’s website is mobile responsive enough to function flawlessly on customers’ mobile devices. Giving customers a mobile experience is no longer cutting edge but increasingly the standard. Businesses that do not provide a seamless mobile touchpoint are therefore obsolete. 

The most private of all the channels is a mobile device. Therefore, design your website, self-help articles and customer surveys, for instance, customized to the small screen. Customers may become discouraged and quit your page or refrain from completing surveys if there is a lot of scrolling. 

Reevaluating your mobile experience is a suggestion you may take in light of the fact that mobile is a powerful platform for delivering a positive consumer experience.

12. Customer-First Culture

Only companies that put themselves in the customers’ shoes and envisioned their business strategies in line with those needs have achieved success. A top-down strategy should be used to attain customer-centricity. You base your decisions on your customers’ needs and build your products and services accordingly. Thus, by maintaining a relentless focus on customers you will be able to provide a pleasant customer experience.

13. Respond to Customer Reviews

Customers enjoy sharing their experiences online, particularly on social media. So regardless of whether a review is positive or negative, you should respond to it to protect your brand’s reputation.

In order to guarantee a prompt response, it is advantageous to use a help desk solution that can consolidate customer inquiries on social media. 

One of the aspects of the help desk software, canned responses, aids in quickly responding to common customer inquiries, helping the customer service team to keep up with the response times on social media.

14. Customer Service Tools

No matter how much your business has expanded, you must maintain a high standard of customer service. To handle the rising number of customer support requests and enhance the customer experience, businesses can make use of numerous technological choices such as a help desk solution.

Help desk solutions make it easier to keep in touch with customers, route support tickets efficiently, and guarantee that no customer requests are overlooked.

 

Kapture: Your Key to Scale Up the Customer Experience

The help desk solution from Kapture is built specifically to support you in keeping your customers at the center of everything you do. With the help of our scalable, omnichannel, and cutting-edge technological solutions, you can give your hyperconnected customers a splendid customer experience.

 

About the Author

Seema C Mohan
Seema C Mohan
Seema C Mohan is passionate about all things XaaS and loves to write value-added content. She has been in Business Process Management in the past and has published technology articles in journals.

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