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Mar 2022
Yes, a great customer experience matters - but what can you do right now to improve it? From personalising their experience to customer journey mapping, here's how to build real steps to a great customer experience into your business strategy
What does a great customer experience look like?
Most of us can describe what a great experience means to us - and we know that we want our own customers and clients to have them. Beyond intent and understanding though, it's a complex area that most likely stretches across many, many areas of your business. Unlike the 'single touchpoint' of customer service, customer experience encompasses every touchpoint your audience has with you.
If that's feeling like a behemoth of a task for you right now, we've gathered advice from our network to go beyond the 'aspirational' and share some tangible things you can get going relatively quickly to start seeing an impact, including short projects, innovative tech, and more.
Customer journey mapping is the process of building a story of your customers’ interactions with your brand. This exercise helps a business step into their customer’s shoes and see the business from their customer’s perspective. It also allows a business to gain insights into customer pain points and how to improve those.
All possible touch points should be mapped, including website, social channels, and calls. However, whilst digital journey mapping can often be analysed using tools like google analytics and CRMs, offline experiences like calls can often rely on anecdotal insights, making it harder to get a true read on what your customer goes through.
Our partner, Call360, are experts when it comes to call-tracking to help map the customer journey across offline and online interactions.
Read: Using Research To Build A Brand Identity That Reflects Your Audience
Lewis Vasper, Director, Call360: “Implementing calls tracking allows a business to better understand your customer’s journey throughout your brand. As soon as you begin to track, you can start to understand things like customer effort scores and customer resolution time.
For example, our AI transcribing technology can analyse complaints and see if there are patterns in what people are saying. As a result, common problems can be quickly dealt with and therefore help to immediately improve the customer experience.”
“Through analysing and tracking calls, businesses can quickly identify problem areas and immediately take action to increase profit. Without being able to consolidate this information in real-time, you’d have to reach out to thousands of people retrospectively when their experience wasn’t fresh.”
“Call360 is easy to implement. The system is integrated across your marketing platforms (it could be that customers act differently when they call from Facebook as opposed to Google.)
When a call comes through our switchboard, a transcript is produced and our AI will categorise the intent, outcome and sentiment of each call based on conversation without the need to listen to the call.”
How a customer experiences your business, and whether they want to spend money with you more than once, all boils down to how they perceive your brand.
Building a brand that reflects your customers can be a great way of improving their experience. Start by thinking about their needs, habits, and circumstances. Use data and research to build out audience personas to define your position in the market.
Whilst these projects can often seem like a heavy lift internally, bringing in an external partner can drastically speed up this process.
GO! have some amazing research and insights agencies available in our Network, ready to help build out your own customer profiles.
Download: The (Re)Brand Workbook
When developing your brands’ visual identity, your vision needs to be relevant and consistent. From your tone-of-voice to your preferred outputs, the experience for your customer at each touchpoint should be constant and authentic with no pain points.
On the importance of brand, Charlotte Graham-Cumming, CEO of GO! Network Member Ice Blue Sky says ‘Getting to the essence of what your business is is a difficult task, which is why many don’t do it. But it gives the brand integrity and longevity and ensure the customers know what you stand for.”
Just like research and insights, GO! can help with brand building and tone of voice. Get in touch to find out how.
Using analytics and customer insights to create messaging and product experiences unique to each customer is a great way to improve the customer experience. But it’s more than just mass-inserting a customer name into an email template. Tailoring the experience from start to finish helps the customer feel understood by your business, but at a larger scale, it can feel like concessions have to be made.
However, with the growth of data platforms and innovative tech solutions to support, creating a ‘personal experience’ for every user is more accessible than ever.
One example is the ability to personalise your website experience depending on who visits. Our partner, Webeo, are world-leading when it comes to B2B website personalisation.
Dawn Upton, Head of Customer Marketing, Webeo: “Ultimately, it's about the right content, at the right time, to the right person. Our clients work with a wide range of industries and want to present the most relevant content to a business when they visit their website, depicting their expertise in that sector.”
"Webeo is a no-code tool that can overlay an existing site, intuitively designed to allow B2B organisations to create personalised experiences to their website through relevant, tailored content. It is simple to use and quick to implement, allowing clients to make updates to their website fast.
Webeo integrates with Salesforce, Hubspot, Marketo and Pardot so that Webeo customers can benefit from personalising to as many website visitors as possible, both from Webeo’s IP database and the data customers hold in their CRM or MAP."
“Our customers see an increase in conversion rate when comparing personalised and non-personalised experiences. They also achieve improvements across key website metrics, such as increased average number of page visits, increased dwell time and a reduction in bounce rate.”
Disparate teams managing disparate parts of the customer experience can lead to disjointed communications as well as internal trouble when challenges arise.
Again though, aside from steady internal comms, pulling these touchpoints together can feel insurmountably complex.
When it comes to centralising communication within the customer journey, our partner Gnatta says “every contact, regardless of channel, is part of a single experience.” Gnatta automatically associates each message with the correct customer.
Rob Mead, Head of Marketing, Gnatta: “Gnatta centralises all customer communication for pre/post sales enquiries making agents more efficient and more effective. Efficiency makes your bottom line better and effectiveness means your customers have a much better experience encouraging repeat business and a higher customer lifetime value.”
“Gnatta helps achieve better cost per contact, better first time resolution, better average contacts per hour and more contacts handled without a human agent involved.”
“The contact data you unearth with centralised communication has a big impact on sales/marketing and the CRM team. If one of your most profitable customers is constantly asking questions and taking up time, they might not be so valuable.”
“Easier than you think. With Gnatta, we can get the client answering queries with full real time data within 10 minutes of signing up. We make use of calls with product experts to help people create an implementation plan to meet their objectives as quickly as possible.”
Improving customer experience is not a one-time task. It is a continuous and ever-changing challenge that businesses need to keep on top of at all times. As customer expectations change and new tools shift the goalposts of ‘best practise’, it’s crucial to continuously monitor your standing.
It can feel overwhelming to look at the whole picture, but from tools to help with personalisation and customer journey tracking to brand building and omni channel strategies, there are many things you can implement to keep your customers happy and, ultimately, coming back for more.
Our team can provide free insights into how your business stacks up against others in your sector, recommend solutions, and qualify specialist agencies to solve your specific challenges. Get in touch now to get started.
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