What Is Customer Experience Optimization and How to Do It Properly
By Moradeke Owa
| Last updated:
Nov 19
|
11 min read
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Optimizing your customer experience has a significant impact on your acquisition and retention rates. If your customers have an enjoyable experience with your company, they are more likely to purchase your product and be loyal to your brand.
Regardless of how great your product is terrible customer experience is a huge dealbreaker for most customers. Your churn rate will continue to skyrocket if your customers have a negative experience with your brand.
While features may stir up your customer’s interest in your product, it is the customer experience that drives them to desire and remain loyal to your brand. To stand out from the crowd and be the best option for your target audience, you must be proactive in optimizing their experience.
Here’s a guide to what customer optimization is, why it’s important, and how to do it properly to boost your customer acquisition and retention rates.
Customer experience is the quality of the interaction between customers and your company. Customer interaction with your brand is also known as touchpoints, they start from the first encounter customers have with your brand e.g ads, blog posts, email, etc.
Read- Customer Journey Touchpoints: The Complete Guide
Optimization means using the resources available to improve results. So, customer experience optimization means using the available resources your company has to improve customer experience.
Customer experience optimization covers all customer touchpoints and ensures that they have the best possible experience throughout their journey. It also ensures that you maximize available resources and avoid incurring exorbitant costs to provide your customers with a positive experience.
There are so many brands that provide customers with exactly what they want in terms of products, features, and services. So, if you want your brand to be the top choice for your target audience, you must make their experience with your brand as pleasant as possible not just offer a good product.
Going after every customer touchpoint to perfect it to your customer’s taste is highly ineffective and expensive, that’s where optimization comes in. So, customer experience optimization isn’t just about improving every customer touchpoint; it’s about identifying which touchpoints need to be improved and focusing on them with the available resources.
Here are major reasons why customer experience optimization is important:
One of the primary reasons for customer experience optimization is that it helps you in meeting customer expectations while keeping the company’s goals in mind.
There are so many products that provide high value to users, which sets the bar for what they expect from businesses. So you must meet and even exceed these expectations.
Your company also has goals and KPIs to monitor to ensure your company’s growth. Customer experience optimization helps you in achieving these goals while meeting customer expectations.
Excellent customer experience helps companies connect with their customers and build long-term relationships. Customers value experience just as much as they value the product itself; if they have a positive experience during their journey, they are more likely to convert and become repeat customers.
For example, if potential customers visit your website for the first time and find it difficult to navigate, they are likely to look for a competitor with an easy-to-use web design.
Building customer relationships is beyond discounts and incentives. Developing a long-term relationship with your customers involves providing them with exceptional value and service.
So, if you provide your customers with the product they need while also providing an exceptional experience, they are more likely to stick with you and even recommend you to their network.
Every organization’s customer touchpoints differ, so it’s only natural for the customer experience optimization technique to vary from company to company. To develop an effective customer optimization strategy for your brand, you must first track your customers’ journeys and determine what they need from your company.
Here are some tips for developing a successful customer experience optimization strategy for your brand:
Data provides reliable data about what customers do when they interact with your product. Of course, data enables you to see if customers are dropping off at a particular touchpoint, which can help you optimize it so that customers have a better experience at that touchpoint.
But asking your customer what they need helps you discover what they actually want from your product, how they feel about it, whether they like it or not, and how they perceive your product and brand.
Design a custom needs assessment survey to learn what your customers want from your product. The survey feedback helps your product and engineering team in optimizing the product’s features.
Use this: Customer Needs Assessment Template
Monitor your customer touchpoints including website visits, social media engagement, emails, customer support requests, and others. Knowing and monitoring all of these touchpoints will help you understand why and how customers interact with your brand.
The next step is to map out the typical customer’s interaction with your brand. Having this map allows you to identify where your customers are more engaged and how their perception of your brand is shaped. You can then use this data to improve their experience with your product by focusing on the steps they don’t engage with or enjoy.
Determine why customers need your product and the value they hope to gain from purchasing it. Understanding your buyer personas’ goals makes it much easy to help them achieve them and improve their experience.
Also, most people aren’t going to stick around for a long time to discover your product value, make sure your customers are aware of it through all of their interactions with your products.
An effective method to gain insight into why customers buy your product is to review your support tickets to identify their frustrations or roadblocks with your brand. Identifying these frustrations or roadblocks enables you to pinpoint the goal that your product should achieve but isn’t.
Also, have a conversation with the sales team to figure out the best channels and touchpoints for converting customers. This will guide you in improving the other channels and stages for better customer experience and sales.
Finally, don’t ignore your survey results. Include qualitative responses that will help you understand why customers want or need your product, and how you can improve it.
Using a user session recording platform allows you to better understand how customers interact with your website and app. Analyzing feedback gives you an idea of what customers want from your products, but a user session platform allows you to see what they do when interacting with your brand.
After reviewing the user session, use the insights to develop a helpful knowledge base and an onboarding flow. Also, if you notice that certain features receive all of the attention from customers, you can redesign other features so that users have similar interactions with them.
More than half of your customers won’t recommend a website that isn’t mobile responsive. So, if your product design isn’t mobile-friendly, more than 50% of them will abandon your website in favor of a competitor that is.
If you’re not sure of the percentage of your customers accessing your website via mobile, you can check the analytics to be sure.
Ensure your brand personality is consistent across all platforms including your website, app, social media, and customer service. Consistent brand voice and tone improve customer experience by helping them in understanding your company’s values and how it is structured to help them in solving their problems.
Your customer support team isn’t the only department involved in ensuring that customers have a positive experience with your brand. Create a road map that shows how each department contributes to the customer experience and how they can improve to increase customer satisfaction.
Invest in a community management team to keep your social media platform engaging and helpful to your audience.
You can optimize customer experience with Fullstory’s product analytics tool which allows you to track and eliminate customer frustrations. It also enables you to monitor user behavior with a heatmap that shows you how customers engage with your products e.g the pages they visit.
Fullstory also helps you understand what motivates your customer to pay for your product and services by providing you with their conversion journey map. It also helps you to identify custom pain points by providing you with session recordings.
Formplus provides you with various survey templates that allow you to pinpoint exactly what the problem is with your product or company.
For example, you can create user experience surveys to understand if your product design needs tweaks. You could use customer satisfaction surveys to find out if customers want more from your product.
Improve your customer experience by finding out what they need from your product. With a customer suggestion survey, customers can tell you the new services they would like to have from your company.
This will help your product team to create features that help customers achieve their goal of using your product.
Only a handful of customers complain about poor customer service if it’s not payment related; most of them would just switch to a competitor with better customer service.
So, before your product or brand starts getting multiple bad reviews, find out your customers’ frustration with your product and services with a customer grievance form.
Hotjar is a user experience and session recording platform that helps you see how customers behave on your website and why.
You can use Hotjar’s heatmap to see what users do when they visit your page and identify customer blockers. Your product design team can then use this knowledge to create a better user interface that eliminates the roadblocks.
You can also create customer journey maps using Hotjar’s session recording feature. The recording feature helps you identify behavior trends, and blockers to understand why users drop off or convert.
Finally, Hotjar has a feedback widget feature that helps you understand users’ experience with your product. With the Hotjar feedback widget, users can highlight areas of a page or app they like and the ones they don’t.
Intercom is a customer experience software that allows you to engage users and provide support to them throughout their customer journey. It’s also an omnichannel communication platform that allows you to support and convert customers from a single platform.
You can use Intercom to create a helpful knowledge base for customers to understand and use your product smoothly. Intercom also provides you with chatbots and in-app notifications that allow you to notify users of upcoming and new feature releases.
When customers need help from your support team, Intercom also allows provides your customer support team with an inbox that notifies them of customer queries so they can quickly resolve them.
Using Google Analytics gives you a graphical representation of how users behave on your website, your traffic source, the number of drop-offs, and more.
You can also build funnels that help you visualize customer journeys and how to maximize each stage to give your customers a stellar experience.
Google Analytics dashboards help you in tracking the effects of your optimization, who your audience is, how typical users behave on your website and more.
You can also use Google Analytics to see where your conversions are coming from and how to motivate your users to convert faster.
Mixpanel is an analytics tool for mobile and web applications that allows to you trace user conversion paths.
It also helps you improve your customer engagement strategy by monitoring in-app behavior, and identifying your user engagement stages. You can use this data to create a more effective engagement strategy so both new and old customers are always interested in your product.
Mixpanel also allows provides you with retention analytics to identify ways you can improve your user experience to prevent churn.
Customers value fast resolution, and using an AI chatbot tool like Netomi helps you reduce turnaround time for support tickets. Routing all support tickets to customer service representatives may be overwhelming and take a long time to resolve customer issues.
You can answer customer requests faster with Netomi’s AI chatbot across all your communication platforms, Social media, SMS, web chat, and others.
It also allows you to personalize the chat so the customers don’t just get robotic answers that may not provide them with the answers they need or resolve their issues.
Netomi also provides you with customer experience analytics that allows you to understand if customers find your customer service reliable and give you insights on how to improve it.
The goal of customer experience optimization is to help customers achieve their goals for using your products and keep their interactions as smooth as possible without breaking the bank.
The best way to help your customers accomplish their goal of purchasing your product and seeing your product value is through feedback. You can also study their behavior to understand how they interact with your product and how you can improve it.
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