Customer experience, or CX as the cool kids call it, is one of the main ways that shops and services try to make themselves different from their competitors. It’s a term that means a lot of things – it can be how easy it is to browse a shop’s website or what kind of service staff offer when a customer walks through the door. It’s the way a business treats its customers and how enjoyable and easy they make it to buy with them!
The last year has caused some massive shifts in consumer behaviour, there hasn’t been a choice in the matter, we’ve all had to shop online more and shop in limited and different ways on the high street. So, now more than ever before, customer experience is going to be really important in bringing back customers and reminding them why a service or product is better than the rest!
Customer-First
Walking in a customer’s footsteps, online and offline, is a great way to test out the customer experience that your business provides for customers. Mapping out a customer journey and taking a look at every way to interact with your brand in sharp focus can help you to improve customer experience.
Mapping out and visualising the behaviours, emotions and paths to purchase behind all of your digital and physical touchpoints can identify points of difficulty or obstacles. Ideally, you want to make it as easy and seamless as possible to purchase a product or service – e.g entering your website and finding it cluttered, slow and cluttered with broken links will make it much more difficult for customers to complete their path to purchase.
Think of this in the physical store sense aswell – if you went into a shop that was unclean, cluttered and the staff were nowhere to be seen, you would already be turned off by the experience. You might find the product you want eventually, but the chances that you’d buy would be less and there would be more obstacles in the way dissuading you from doing so.
Thinking like a customer in every step of your digital output means that you can make it an easy decision to purchase, instead of something you’re hoping and crossing your fingers they’ll do.
Personalisation
One of the best ways to improve customer experience is to implement personalisation strategies. Knowing your customer, knowing their needs and preferences through data can help you to tailor digital and physical experiences that match their behaviour.
Because of the pandemic, a lot of data you held previously might have changed, as has people’s circumstances and especially their perspectives – it’s worth sending out some new surveys and emails aiming to collect thoughts and feelings around such a sensitive topic, so you can respond and create certain customer experiences for people that require something new or slightly different. This is especially relevant for in-store experiences, but also for delivery requirements etc. If you can meet people’s new expectations, it’s one way to affirm that they’ve had a good customer experience.
There’s been so much digital acceleration this year and we’d love to help out if we can, get in touch with our team at DOWO today.