Achieving customer optimization for long-lasting results
Your customers and potential customers expect a positive experience in every interaction they have with your brand, from the in-person experience if you have a brick and mortar storefront to the web and mobile app experience, and even the support experience when something goes awry. A great product is not enough to keep you in business. You have to provide a pleasant, consistent, positive experience for your customers every time they come into contact with your business.
The question is, how do you optimize the customer experience across all the places your customers might interact with your business? This gets more challenging as you expand and grow your business, adding more variables to the mix, such as additional layers of staff and expanding numbers of communication channels. What can you do to ensure a positive experience for your customers across all possible interactions so they keep coming back?
Consistency is key
What is your brand saying across all its social media, website, mobile app, and other channels? Is the message the same? Is the experience consistent? Do your customers receive a great experience no matter where they interact with your business? If not, this is a great place to start with customer optimization.
If you have multiple staff members who interact directly with customers, they need to know exactly what you want the experience to be like for your customers. If the staff sending invoices is different than the staff posting and responding to customers on social media, which is likely the case, both sets of staff need to be able to provide the same interaction quality. The content and purpose of the interaction should not make a difference. Customers are looking for a consistently positive experience through the entire set of interactions they may have with your business.
What do you do to ensure consistency? First and foremost, everyone interacting with customers in your business should have a clear shared vision of what the customer experience should be like, no matter what their role is. Next, you may need to provide training and specific guidelines so that staff know how this vision applies to their role. And finally, your employees may need additional help from technology solutions.
Customer optimization technology solutions
There are some excellent technological solutions to help with customer optimization. Collecting data across your website and mobile apps can help you to assess the customer experience and improve it without waiting to hear directly from your customers. These customer experience analytics solutions range from click maps to sales funnel data to website session recordings. Getting a good handle on what the website and mobile app experience is like for your customers can provide you with valuable information to begin optimizing their experience.
What if your customers are giving you feedback more directly though? This is extremely valuable information and can complement your data analytics. For instance, if your customer support continually receives calls for the same problem, this tells you it is not a one-off situation and more in-depth adjustments may be needed for your website or mobile app. This allows you to prioritize optimization efforts by focusing on changes that will have the widest impact. If your support staff can flag these widespread technical issues for IT, call volumes will decrease and future customer interactions will be improved.
It may seem obvious, yet it is easy to overlook the importance of the customer support experience. Customer support is a vital component of the customer experience and needs to be part of your optimization efforts.
Let’s say you have a customer who is having trouble with your website and they call support. Not only does customer support need to be able to provide the consistency mentioned earlier, they also need to help the customer with a technical issue. Rather than asking permission to take control of a customer’s computer or stumble through trying to explain to each other which button to click when looking at entirely different screens, your customer support representative can use session replay tools to see where the customer is running into trouble. This speeds up resolution and frees the customer support staff to work with the next customer on the line.
Technology solutions can give your business a leg up when it comes to providing a consistently positive set of interactions with customers. What steps will you take to ensure your customers can trust your brand to provide a great experience every time?
