How to Improve Customer Experience

Every customer service rep can relate to that anxious feeling of suddenly engaging in an unexpected and unpleasant interaction with a customer. But in that brief moment where your welcoming and optimistic greeting was met with an immediate, hostile retaliation, have you ever wondered where that frustration was coming from?

I've worked in customer support for more than a year at this point. And, after encountering this time and time again, I wanted to know why these patterns emerged, and more importantly, how to fix them.

我开始密切关注这些案件，令我惊讶的是，大多数这些愤怒的顾客，挫败感并没有源于支持代表。考虑一下 - 当您致电支持线时，这意味着您有一个需要解决的问题。

在客户支持代表的结尾处，这可能会使他们在听到客户的问题之前与艰苦的战斗进行战斗。客户服务团队并没有成为不满的来源，而是在更大的客户服务生态系统中作为反馈机制（称为客户体验）工作。

Customer experience或CX是客户对与您公司的每一次互动的总体情感。bob全站app该评估与您的入站营销方法平行，从与客户的第一个联系开始，并以您的反馈渠道结束。

客户体验会说明导致支持电话的情况以及为什么您公司的总体客户体验导致挫败感。bob全站app虽然积极的CX可以成为忠实的催化剂客户群, a negative experience can influence potential prospects even before they interact with your company. Being proactive in your approach to CX can not only help your team solve these tricky customer situations but create a long-term game plan for problems that may occur down the road.

Ready to build a better experience for your customers? Check out these tips that can help you get started.

What impacts the customer experience?

更加积极re we dive into how to improve the customer experience, let's review what delights customers and what frustrates them.

为了找到这一点，我们调查了近300人，以了解使客户体验正面或负面的原因。

According to 69% of respondents, the main reason that consumers were impressed with a customer experience was that the service team was quick to respond.

38% of those surveyed said their customer experience was great because the problem was solved.

For 28% of respondents, they were impressed because the service rep listened to and understood their needs.

Check out the graphic below to find out the other reasons customers were impressed with a brand's customer service experience.

Data Source

While learning about positive customer experiences is great, we also wanted to know what made a customer experience negative for the consumers. Again, we surveyed nearly 300 people to find out.

According to 47% of respondents, the main reason a customer experience was frustrating was that they couldn't find the contact information on the company's website.

此外，有33％的人感到不高兴，因为他们不得不处理长时间的时间。

29% of those surveyed had a poor customer experience when they kept getting transferred to different reps.

Check out the graphic below to find out the other reasons customers were frustrated with a brand's customer service experience.

Data Source

Now that we know what delights and upsets consumers, let's dive into how you can work on improving the customer experience.

1. Illustrate the customer journey.

更加积极re you embark on a company-wide initiative, it's probably wise to preface it with a game plan. In most cases, creating a客户旅程地图is a great place to start.

A customer journey map is an outline of every step your customers go through when interacting with your company. This includes engagements that extend beyond just purchasing the product, like social media engagements, online advertising, and customer service cases.

Featured Resource:Free Customer Journey Map Templates

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构建你的地图时,务必consider a range of perspectives from your internal stakeholders. Insights into the customer journey are embedded across every part of your company so it's important to include opinions from all of your team members (we'll go into more depth on this in a moment).

It's also essential to account for both the pre-and post-sale aspects of the customer experience. While it may be tempting to spend the majority of your focus on the interactions leading up to the sale, the post-sale is equally vital to building a complete customer experience. Think about different touchpoints that the customer interacts with and how those experiences impact the customer's perspective.

By mapping out these interactions into one spectrum, it makes it easier for employees across your organization to visualize the overall customer experience. It will also improve their individual understanding of the客户的需求期望可以准确地指出他们的工作将在哪里影响客户的旅程。

With this understanding, your team can better identify the gaps between their desired and current performance and refocus efforts on new areas of your customer experience that could stand improvement.

2. Equip and uplift your employees.

Much of a customer's experience can be attributed to whom they interact with during their buyer journey. If employees think that they don't have the tools necessary to do their job efficiently, or feel underappreciated, it can affect their ability to perform.

为了提高员工的当前客户体验未达到标准时，您可以：

• Identify common employee pain points throughemployee feedback tools
• Review current systematic process (from contact center protocol to CRM software)
• Amend processes to foster a more positive CX experience

It's also possible for customer experience to dampen from employees not meeting expectations that the company culture promises. Evaluate if your upper management, managers, and employees all understand the values and tone expected of the company culture, and adhere to it for each customer.

Making sure the employee experience is positive can increase the probability of delightful customer experiences.

3. Audit the customer experience from multiple internal perspectives.

由于客户旅程受您业务的各个方面的影响，因此在进行客户体验审核时，您必须仅专注于一个部门。正如我们之前简短提到的那样，客户以某种方式与您的业务各个部分进行互动，因此要获得CX的完整图片，您将需要考虑每个部门每个部门的独特视角。这是三个可以让您开始启动：

Marketing

您的营销团队很可能会专注于customer acquisition，因此他们将对品牌知名度和用户期望有最好的了解。他们将了解您的访问者最消耗的内容，以及什么将产生最合格的线索。调查营销团队将帮助您了解人们如何找到您的业务以及如何更好地塑造您的声誉导致销售。

Sales

销售会有见解的早期阶段the customer relationship. They're on the front lines with the customer and their interactions reveal what is really motivating individual leads. Sales team members have information on the challenges that customers are encountering on a daily basis and how they expect your product or service to address those roadblocks. For the leads that don't convert to customers, your sales team can help you understand what from your product offer led to that missed opportunity.

Customer Service

It's important to know that what you're communicating in your sales and marketing processes actually align with your customers' real experiences. Your customer service and success team can provide insight into this reality as they're typically the first line of communication for feedback and product frustration. They hear honest feedback from customers on a daily basis, so welcome their perspective on what is causing the most problems for your customers.

For example, they can tell you what questions are asked the most during support calls and which topics on your feedback forums are generating the most activity. InSaaSbusiness, the support team works with the user interface the most, so surveying their thoughts on the product can be a great way to address technical pain points.

4.明确专注于这项倡议。

Your customer experience isn't going to change overnight, so it's important to demonstrate to your entire company a clear focus on your new initiatives. Dedicate someone to the execution of your customer experience plans. This person could be a VP of Customer Success, a Chief Customer Officer, Customer Success Manager, etc. It will be their job to communicate changes, facilitate operations, organize research analysis and perform any necessary actions to ensure that your new approach to CX is consistent across all departments of your company.

If you're sitting there thinking this may be a bit of an extreme step, The Economist Intelligence Unit revealed in new研究that companies that prioritize customer experience more often demonstrate higher revenue growth. While it's common for change to be met with resistance in some companies, investing in your customer experience strategy early can end up paying off for your business down the road.

When trying to implement new initiatives, you may see hesitation from more senior leadership that's rooted in their traditional approach. You will need to be sure to rally these employees to get on board as it will demonstrate a consistent show of support for change at higher levels of your company. At the end of the day, employees are going to follow whoever is in charge, meaning that failure to align senior leadership around customer experience can result in three detrimental roadblocks:

1. Inconsistent interactions between company and customer
2. Gating of information that could be potentially helpful to customers or employees
3. Overall lack of support from employees

5. Personalize interactions with customers.

根据公司的规模和范围，“个性化”可以承担许多不同的含义。bob全站app为客户个性化经验可以帮助品牌和买家之间建立联系。例如，在首次购买后向客户提供凭证可以个性化他们的体验，并使他们成为竞争对手的品牌忠诚。

Personalization doesn't have to just be a discount, it can take on many forms:

• Thank you letters or emailsto customers after purchase
• Customer follow-up surveys
• Dynamic website offers based on user preferences

Making the customer feel valued even after the sale is made is a great way to boost the overall customer experience.

6. Distribute customer experience data to your entire team.

If you want to get your entire company on board with your shiny new customer experience plan, then it's important that everyone has access to your findings. Keeping your employees in the loop regarding the conclusions you have found from your research will help your team optimize daily internal processes such as customer routing, workflow automation, and client tagging. Not only that, but distributing customer insights across your entire company can also help:

Address Customer Needs Faster

According toMetasaas，31％的SaaS许可证最终未使用，这使得尽快解决客户障碍变得更加重要。拥有有关客户在哪里可能面临障碍的数据，将有助于您的团队防止用户沮丧，并在客户旅程中的任何令人困惑的疼痛点上平滑。

Improve Product/Service Quality

正如我们之前提到的，您的客户服务或成功团队将能够洞悉您的产品或服务的可用性问题如何影响整体客户体验。通过让您的成功团队的领导者和贡献者与您的产品团队会面，您可以查看最高支持机票类别，以确定与可用性有关的最常见问题。

Increase Upsell Opportunities

Your sales team will have an easier time identifyingupsellingopportunities as they will have a better understanding of the best timing to reach out to customers. They can pinpoint specific opportunities on the customer's timeline to reach out with re-engagement initiatives (like a product add-on) which can increase overall revenue over time.

7. Learn from churn when it happens.

According to research fromBain＆Cobob全站appmpany, if you can generate a 5% increase in customer retention, you can increase your company's profits by 25% to 95%. A great way to begin is to use in-app analytics to analyze areas of the customer experience where there is low engagement.

Low engagement typically suggests a higher risk ofcustomer churn, especially in the SaaS industry. It will help to create an engagement correlation that can help you identify which customers have the highest risk of churn. You can use user app analytics to determine what percentage of engagement will result in the highest likelihood to churn then set up a monitoring system to alert your customer success team if a customer approaches that value. This gives your team the opportunity to proactively reach out to solve a problem before it's too late.

Even for the customers that you're not able to prevent from churning, be sure to find out why they decided to move on. Provide multiple channels for customers to leave feedback and take their opinions seriously. If you're truly focused on creating a better experience for your customer, then you should want to hear about the instances where your company came back short. Make it easy for the customer to cancel their account, but leverage your success team to find out exactly why this customer decided to cancel.

8. Consider customer experience with UX/UI design.

考虑客户体验开始的地方。更加积极re a potential customer makes it to a customer support rep, they will perform some of their own research before formally reaching out for help.

It's imperative that your company website is easy to navigate and clear in its offerings.

88％of users are less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience. To avoid complicating customer experience, have your engineers or marketing team optimize your digital domain to provide an engaging and informative experience— to begin their customer journey on a positive note.

Make Your Customer's Experience a Delight

Changing your customer experience begins with being proactive and planning out your strategy. Your product or service can be the perfect fit for a customer, and they might miss out on it due to underlying issues in their experience along the way. Take these tips and apply them to your strategy to make your customers happy and keep them coming back for more.