What are customer experience best practices? A customer’s experience with your business doesn’t begin when they move from the opportunity to the closed-won stage. It’s the entire experience with a brand and the journey from marketing prospect to renewing customer.
To influence this experience, you must add value to every relevant touchpoint.
Before diving deeper, trust that most customers are regular people genuinely interested in enjoying your product or service. But you’ll also encounter a few who are hard to please no matter what you do. These are outliers.
When deciding on best practices for customer experience (CX), focus on your entire customer base rather than creating a process to win over the outliers.
Now, let’s take a look at the top fourteen customer experience best practices.
Making Your CX Strategy Customer-First
A business’ bottom line depends on its CX. Giving them what they need to generate a fresh revenue supply is essential. However, achieving this without an in-depth understanding of your customers’ needs is challenging.
1. Know your customer
Believing you know your customer is a good start, especially if you’re in the target audience. However, based on your knowledge, customer preferences, experience, and environment, you might have a few biases.
In such cases, you’ll assume your personal choices represent the market’s overall preferences. Conduct customer research to avoid such biases, and use those insights to position the brand’s messaging.
In your research, try to understand the customers’ needs and pain points. Encourage them to purchase your product or service to help solve them.
The 4F framework provides an actionable way to do this:
- First: Talk to your customer first, and understand the challenges preventing them from achieving their goals.
- Finest: Ask about their best experience with a product or service they use. It can be an internal process that works for them.
- Failure: Check if they face any challenges with the product or service while using it.
- Future: Encourage them to share their long-term goals. Discuss a new product or service to help achieve them.
This framework helps you understand customers’ needs and what products they perceive as valuable.
2. Develop buyer personas
Have a well-documented buyer persona ready for your sales and marketing team. If the buyer persona isn’t the same, create a separate user persona.
When creating a buyer persona, make these details as granular as possible. The details will help you discover the ideal customer your brand, marketing, and messaging should target to deliver an exceptional CX.
Here’s an example of a buyer persona from which you can take inspiration:
3. Align your business around the customer
The easiest way to align your business around the customer is to align teams, especially those that work with the customer.
Yamini Rangan, CEO of HubSpot, says, “Aligned teams are the foundation of everything you do, but the discipline of aligned strategy is the next crucial step to building a delightful customer experience.”
Rangan feels that poor CXs, like having to give your details to every department, happen because businesses run on a function-out strategy.
This means every department has a plan based on what’s best for its function. Instead, the company should have a customer-in strategy. This will help them look beyond what’s best for their function and understand what’s best for the customer.
One way to do this is to align your teams and keep them on the same page. You need a CX platform to help you engage, market, sell, and service customers in one place. This will keep customer-facing teams aligned.
Moreover, you need to make strategic changes to keep your CX strategy customer-first. The platform will help you enable the change, but it would start with an intention to focus on the customer rather than what’s best for a particular department.
Making Your Customers’ Journeys Seamless
Create a seamless CX that they don’t even register as an experience. It should feel as natural to them as if they were cruising through it on autopilot.
An in-depth understanding of the customer journey will come in handy to achieve this.
4. Map the customer journey
Understand omnichannel customer journey and study closely how customers come to you, what they do when interacting with you, and the touchpoints along their journey. Be precise in finding the channels customers use to interact with you and understand why.
Below are some statistics that showcase the usage of different channels to engage customers. Check to see if you’re missing any channels.
Source: Salesforce
It’s best to use a marketing module in a CRM to track existing customer journeys from the time they enter your system as a lead. Follow that journey closely. The marketing module of your CRM will assist you in tracking these interactions. Look for the pages they visited on the website and how they interacted with them.
Next, look into call records and notes to understand the verbal communication stream. This will give insights into what they need at a particular step or point of their journey.
However, if you’re just starting and you don’t have the tools required to track customers’ journeys, you can do it the conventional way. Talk to your champion customers who supported you when you were just starting out, and understand what journeys they followed before they became customers.
When describing their journeys, customers might miss a few points, but it will give you enough to create a customer journey map.
5. Offer omnichannel support
Every customer is different, and so are their preferences. Some like to connect with a brand via instant messaging, while others prefer calling or texting. Many customers prefer email to reach out.
You need to be present on all channels a customer is comfortable with. Chances are you’re there already, but creating unified communications across them is tricky.
Nextiva’s CX software integrates customer engagement, sales, service, and support channels, creating one source of truth that all customer service teams can refer to.
You’re offering multi-channel support when you’re simply present on different channels. Unifying all channels and messaging into one platform is an omnichannel service experience.
Focus on delivering an omnichannel service experience. If you need more clarity about the difference between multichannel and omnichannel, compare the two situations below.
6. Reduce friction in the process
Give your audience a streamlined customer journey. Make sure the customers feel your support when it comes to checkout, returns, or issue resolution. Design the UI/UX so that every step of the customer’s journey subtly encourages the customer to proceed to the next stage.
The less friction there is, the easier it will be for your customer to move their journey forward. The friction won’t go away by fixing the UI/UX; it’s just one part. There are many things involved. You need to give the customer what they want and when they need it to keep their interest up.
Return to the customer’s journey and buyer persona and predict what a customer might need. You can create self-service documentation for technical processes or concerns people might have. You can also create an AI sales agent (or a chatbot) to manage complex website queries. Try to make these processes frictionless so the buyer doesn’t need to go through multiple steps to find the information they seek.
Making Engagement Personalized
Buyers expect customer support teams to personalize engagement to their needs and wants. This personalization goes beyond using their name in conversations. It includes aligning with real customer expectations of having a good experience and delivering the same.
33% of people worldwide feel that getting an issue resolved in a single interaction means a good customer service experience. In the U.S., 39% feel that having knowledgeable customer service represents a good support experience.
These stats give an overview of what customers generally need to call their CX “good.”
7. Personalize interactions
To deliver a satisfactory CX, start looking into customer data for granular details, which will help you add relevant personalization. Look at customers’ purchase history, website interactions, and feedback. Analyze this data to understand customer behavior and preferences.
While providing service to these customers, consider their preferences and suggest solutions accordingly. For example, if a customer frequently asks about new features, proactively send them an update whenever you launch a new one.
8. Communicate proactively
Communication is the key to turning good experiences into exceptional ones. You need to be proactive while you’re at it. Assess what a buyer may need before they actually need it.
For example, if a customer purchases a plan for more users and seeks help setting them up, send them links to relevant content on enabling role-based access or videos if you have them.
Whether they reach out or not, make sure you send them relevant updates about order status, upcoming offers, promotions to keep in touch, and most importantly, be there for them.
When you contact your customers proactively, it shows them you care, and that reflects how they feel about your brand. The stats say it, too.
Keep in mind that 73% of customers who are contacted proactively report a positive experience that improves their perception of the brand.
9. Empower employees
Based on the Statista report above, it’s clear that 36% of people in the U.S. feel that first-contact resolution (FCR) is a sign of good CX. But how will you achieve this if your employees don’t have the autonomy or resources to resolve customer issues?
You need to empower employees to make decisions that are good for the customer and the business without seeking several approvals. This autonomy will come through confidence, which will come through training programs and in-depth knowledge and understanding of the product, service, techniques, and tools.
Create a culture where seeking suggestions or advice isn’t judged as a lack of confidence. Encourage employees to seek feedback based on customers’ interactions and, if possible, recognize or reward them for doing so.
Making Customers Brand Advocates
Good experiences make a brand memorable and trustworthy. Customers feel naturally encouraged to pitch your product or service whenever they discuss it.
From loyal customers, they become advocates for your brand, using word of mouth to gain the trust of potential customers.
10. Be transparent
One way to gain that trust is to be upfront about your policy, pricing, and limitations. For example, 65.8% of customers consider a company’s transparency about how they use their personal data influence them to trust the company.
Hidden fees or unspoken restrictions often lead to frustration, leaving the customer with nothing but distrust. Therefore, it’s important to communicate everything clearly and transparently.
When things go wrong, own up to it. Apologize sincerely, and explain how you’ll fix the issue. It shows integrity and commitment to improvement.
11. Actively listen to feedback
Customers’ feedback comes in all forms. Ranging from a sigh of frustration on a phone call to a big positive note on social media, feedback is the source of your next opportunity to improve further and keep customers happy.
Seek feedback proactively through:
- Customer surveys on different aspects of your service.
- Social listening on social media to be attentive to what customers say about your brand.
- User interviews that deliver in-depth insights into customers’ real experience.
The feedback will help you tune your offerings to the customers’ frequency. When they sync, it will be a melodious symphony of trust, advocacy, and revenue.
12. Go the extra mile and invest in community
Surprise customers with unexpected gestures that make good experiences memorable. Giving your customers unexpected perks, customer loyalty rewards, and exclusive experiences shows you’re willing to put in more effort.
It further encourages customers to advocate for your product or service while making them feel they’re a valuable part of your group.
Invest in community-building programs where you organize meet-and-greets with your team or special (maybe exclusive) workshops for your customers, helping your champions discover new ways to use existing or fresh features.
Making Continuous Optimizations
Even when delivering great experiences, there’s always room for improvement. As technology evolves, new techniques and tools emerge to transform a seemingly great experience into a phenomenal one for customers.
13. Invest in the right technology
You’re likely no stranger to VoIP phone systems, CRM software, or Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platforms. These platforms have been around for some time and help companies streamline customer interactions.
However, as software becomes more focused on solving niche problems, the sheer number of tools that you use in your day-to-day role is on the rise. BetterCloud suggests, “Organizations with over 1,000 employees use 150+ SaaS applications.”
In such a situation, you need a unified platform that aggregates phone systems, CRMs, or CCaaS software into one solution, like Nextiva, where you can visualize and streamline the overall CX.
14. Measure CX metrics
One of the last customer experience best practices is to make sure you measure relevant CX metrics like:
- Customer satisfaction score: Informs about the overall CX.
- Net promoter score: Gives the likelihood of your customers recommending the brand to others.
- Customer effort score: Measures CX on the effort required to use a product or service.
- First response time: Measures the elapsed time between the customer’s first inquiry and the first responses that were shared.
- Average resolution time: The time it takes to resolve customer issues, on average.
- First-contact resolution: Shows the percentage of issues that are resolved in the first interaction between customer and support professional.
There are several other metrics you can measure. They change from company to company. However, what’s important is to measure the state of your CX initiatives continuously and make a conscious effort to improve them. Build a culture of continuous improvement, and be willing to adapt and make changes based on feedback and data.
How Omnichannel CX Platforms Power Exceptional Experiences
Successful CX platforms envelop the customer experience best practices mentioned above into their functionality and features, helping you deliver memorable CXs.
Omnichannel support
It’s a key feature of a reliable and scalable CX platform. It lets you track conversations in one place rather than keeping tabs on separate platforms, streamlining communication effectively.
For example, a customer who contacts you on Instagram won’t have to repeat themselves if they pick up the conversation via email later.
Data and insights
CX platforms can analyze interactions in real time on diverse channels. They create a dashboard for you to get customer insights for decision-making rather than analyzing customer data from scratch.
Personalization
The CX platform automatically analyzes data across multiple touchpoints and channels. It provides the insights to personalize messaging, campaigns, customer support interactions, and surveys appropriately.
Automation and artificial intelligence
Efficient CX platforms let customers turn manual, time-consuming processes into automated workflows, helping agents increase their productivity. Nextiva makes a good example here with its recent acquisition of Thrio, an AI-powered CX management software.
Feedback and surveys
CX platforms have built-in survey tools to help you seek feedback for continuous improvement. You can create post-call surveys to measure customer satisfaction scores with issue resolution.
Ensure Customer Experience Best Practices With Nextiva
Nextiva improves CX while reducing churn and improving customer retention. Its omnichannel support, advanced call features, and contact center functionality make it a go-to solution for companies interested in reliability and scalability to make their CX exceptional.
Companies like Ikea, Tata Play, DHL, and others trust Nextiva with their CX. They reduced costs by 40% and customer response time by approximately 2 hours.
Related: Step-by-Step Customer Experience Research Framework
