The customer experience matters...here's how you can impact it.

Written By: Suzanne Hopson | CX is the buzzword of our times. And everyone is focused on it for good reason.

If you are here, you want the goods so here are 10 tips to improve your CX and WOW your customers:

Illustrate the customer journey. Map out the different stages and touchpoints that customers go through, from awareness to retention. If you take the time as an organization to identify the pain points, needs and expectations of your customers at each stage, you can then design solutions that address those issues with more accuracy and speed.
Equip and uplift your employees. Your employees are the face of your brand and the ones who deliver the CX. Make sure they have the right tools, training, and motivation to provide excellent service. Are they empowered to make decisions? Are they rewarded for positive feedback and are you soliciting their feedback throughout the journey?
Audit the customer experience from multiple internal perspectives. Gather input from different departments and roles within your organization, such as sales, marketing, product, support, etc. to understand how they contribute to the CX. When your goals, processes and metrics across your teams align, you can ensure a seamless experience.
Dedicate a clear focus to this initiative. CX is not a one-time project, but a continuous effort that requires commitment and leadership. Assign a dedicated team or person to oversee and manage the CX strategy and communicate the vision and value of CX to the entire organization. These are just buzzwords if no one buys in.
Personalize your interactions with customers. Customers want to feel valued and understood by the brands they interact with. Use data and insights to segment your customers and tailor your messages, offers, and recommendations to their preferences, behaviors, and needs. Remember how we were trained in the good old days to remember everyone's name and address them by it? Amazing!
Distribute customer experience data to your entire team. Data is essential for measuring and improving your CX. Collect feedback from your customers through surveys, reviews, ratings, social media, etc. and analyze it to identify trends, gaps, and opportunities. Don't take the data personally. It changes your lens.
Address and engage customer queries in real-time. Customers expect fast and convenient responses from the brands they interact with. Use live chat, chatbots, social media, phone, email, etc. to provide timely and effective support to your customers. Keep it short and sweet. It's about them.
Focus on building a customer-centric strategy. CX is not just about delivering good service, but about creating value and benefits for your customers. Think about how your products, services, and processes can help your customers achieve their goals, solve their problems, and enhance their lives. That is what will ultimately resonate under the superficial layer of all the hype and noise.
Measure customer satisfaction by identifying the right metrics. To evaluate and improve your CX, you need to track and monitor the key indicators that reflect your customer’s satisfaction and loyalty. Some of the common metrics are Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Customer Retention Rate (CRR), etc. Choose the metric that makes sense. Just pick one! What gets measured, gets improved.
Lastly, remember the internal triggers you have when you don't receive good service and that everyone has their own trigger and response. Again, it's about them.