Drive Growth with Customer Experience Optimization

In today’s competitive market, providing an optimized customer experience is a must for you to differentiate your brand. But you shouldn’t be waiting to hear this from your users. The key is to be proactive and optimize your customer experience using data as well as the feedback you generate from your users. 

Let’s start with defining what customer experience optimization is. Customer experience optimization is not just the experience someone has while interacting with your brand, but the experience someone has when they meet your brand, from watching videos, seeing ads, interacting on social media, to browsing your website.

With that said, let’s think about why customer experience optimization is important. First and foremost, you wouldn’t shop with a brand if the quality of the experience was bad or inconsistent, right? Of course not. You want to provide a consistent and high-quality experience for every interaction someone has with your brand. Otherwise, they will just go somewhere else, where they will get the more useful, more personalized experience they expect.

Now that we’ve clarified what customer experience optimization is and why it’s important, let’s outline some of the benefits. Some of the benefits of optimizing your customer experience include better brand perception, higher conversion rates, larger order values, and increased engagement that results in happier customers, which are repeat customers, giving you an opportunity to cross-sell and upsell.

Let’s focus on some ways you can begin to optimize your customer experience.

Discover where your customer experience currently stands

Position yourself to communicate with existing customers and prospects at every stage of your sales funnel. Use this feedback and any data metrics you might have to determine where your gaps are. Because unless you know where you are today, you can’t optimize where you want to be tomorrow.

You should also evaluate your online presence. This means that every aspect of your brand’s online presence should be reviewed and researched to ensure it is consistent across a range of devices in order to provide that powerful brand experience.

Know who your customers are

It is imperative to understand the customer journey and design changes through the lens of your customers, versus what you think they need. There are a few things that customers want. First and foremost, they want to be recognized and remembered. People also like to be given choices, or at least feel like they have one, and they want to feel delighted with their purchase. So, analyze data from past interactions to gain more knowledge of what your customers want and need. This could be from surveys or social media comments.

Then you can identify areas for improvement and start developing new strategies to optimize your customer experience. In the end, if you want to understand what is working and what isn’t, you need to look through the numbers and feedback.

Understand how your customers interact with your brand across channels

To customers, a great experience needs to be simple, something they don’t even think about, it just happens. For the brand, it is about making an omnichannel experience. Brands must be able to provide a consistent experience across all channels.

Look at the metrics

These could be things like average time on page, customer abandon rate and customer satisfaction ratings. Whatever metrics you decide to choose, be sure they help you discover what’s important to your customers and what isn’t. 

The best way to truly understand is to talk to the customers themselves. Begin by collecting customer feedback in real-time with surveys as they browse your website; interact on social media, or right after purchase.

In conclusion, customer experience optimization is never over. Your brand must optimize continuously. Technology changes daily, and so do people and their way of interacting with it. Thus, you must be ready to reevaluate your engagement with customers all the time. Think not only about what you optimize but also why you optimize it.

For more information, check out our ebook: “Choosing an Optimization Platform“.