5 Tips to improve your CX program
Once you’ve fully understood your current customer’s journey and pain points, you can optimize your design to exceed customer expectations. Here’s how you can go about that:
#1 Analyze direct and indirect customer feedback
Customer wants, needs, and expectations continuously evolve. If you don’t update your CX design to reflect these changes, design aspects that once resulted in a positive experience could quickly create a negative one. To stay up to date on your customers and target market, it’s vital to listen to what they’re saying — both to you and about you.
While targeted, multi-channel surveys are one way to gather customer feedback, another efficient way to collect customer insights is through social listening. You can monitor social media channels for any mentions of your brand, product, service, competitors, or any keywords relevant to your business or industry. Advanced sentiment analysis techniques allow you to identify common customer emotions or problems voiced in the gathered information that you can use to improve your CX design.
#2 Optimize your user experiences (UX)
When it comes to customer experience design, particularly in relation to the online customer experience, you may hear a lot about UX and/or usability. Usability, user experience, and customer experience are three distinct areas, but they are all interrelated when handled correctly. And good usability and UX design can create a better CX.
Here are a few simple ways in which you can improve UX:
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Reduce the pop-ups, ads, banners, notifications, and other annoyances on your website.
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Minimize every action sequence in your customer journey map. Look for non-value-add steps, such as irrelevant info being collected in forms, and remove them.
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Incorporate instant, interactive support features such as live chat and/or chatbots. We will discuss these further in the next section.
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Make it easy for customers to find answers to their questions by simplifying your site structure and using clear hierarchies. This will improve navigation and lead to better search results.
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Use a resource knowledge base and a FAQ center to help provide quick answers to common customer questions.
You can use A/B testing to measure the improvements of any changes you make to ensure they result in greater usability. Another excellent method for assessing usability is heat maps. They allow you to see where customers spend time and what actions they take on your site.
#3 Adopt personalization at scale to boost CX
According to McKinsey, 71% of customers expect personalization from brands, and 76% are more likely to purchase from a brand that personalizes customer experiences. Understanding customer preferences across segments, addressing customers by their names in every customer communication, and sending targeted offers are examples of providing personalized CX.
You can use segmentation to improve your CX at scale by creating unique services, offers, content, and ad campaigns aimed specifically at each persona that you’ve created.
You can empower your customer support team to offer personalized and contextual support by enabling them with tools that help them access customer data and history effortlessly. This way, they can offer the right resolutions without forcing the customer to regurgitate information your employees should already know.
By adopting a helpdesk system like Freshdesk, you can have a 360-degree view of your customer information at all times. Freshdesk’s Customer 360 allows you to log each customer’s purchase activity and interactions with your support team into their customer profile. With this customer information, agents can give personalized assistance at any point in the customer journey.
#4 Build an omnichannel strategy for seamless experiences
Digital-first customers engage and interact with companies across multiple channels, including your website, email, chat, social media, SMS, messaging apps, and phone. Each of these channels may be used for different purposes over the entire customer journey. Moreover, research indicates that 43% of customers switch channels based on convenience and availability.
However, despite the growth in digital touch points and the rampant channel switching, customers want a seamless, cohesive experience across these channels. They expect brands to have complete context of their query irrespective of the channel they engage with.
To achieve this level of consistency, you need to be capable of providing omnichannel support across all potential customer touchpoints. And to achieve this, your CX design process needs to connect customer interactions across your business’ touchpoints and channels on one unifying platform.
Freshdesk helps you unify communication across channels into one single platform. This provides a centralized source of truth for your teams. Your team can see the entire customer journey and experience, no matter what channel they’ve switched between. Plus, this interconnected support allows collaboration among different departments and teams.
#5 Focus on providing effortless customer support
Research shows that effortless customer service interactions are directly linked to revenue growth, with 94% of customers more likely to repurchase a product from the same company and 88% more likely to increase their spending with the company.
Prompt responses and fast, low-effort resolutions are vital in offering frictionless customer support. Tracking and responding to customer queries from one unified interface and having customer information easily accessible for agents help deliver faster support.
Allowing customers to resolve simpler queries by themselves through an effective self-service portal makes resolutions more effortless. Additionally, AI-powered chatbots can provide instant responses and can also guide customers to self-serve with intelligent bot workflows. So, incorporating a chatbot on your website or support portal can help you offer quick assistance and also cut down on your costs.
