10 ways to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and improve their experience

Your customers are the most essential part of your business, and what they experience when interacting with your brand impacts their loyalty and continuous patronage. This is why it’s essential to apply the right measures to boost the customer experience - from the first point of contact to the final purchase and beyond.

To achieve this, there are numerous strategies you can implement as an organization. While every company is different, there are universal best practices that help businesses improve their customer experiences across the board.

In this blog post, we’ll be taking a look at some of the best ways to improve the customer experience and drive up loyalty among your customers.

Here’s what we’ll consider:

1. 10 ways to improve the customer experience

10 ways to improve the customer experience

Here are 10 ways to improve the customer experience:

1. Understand who your customers are

One of the best ways to improve the customer experience is by getting to understand your customers better. Knowing about your customers’ needs and challenges is key to connecting with them and empathizing with the challenges they deal with.

To begin, you can contact your sales and customer support teams to get a better idea of the different types of customers that engage with your brand and product.

With accurate customer data, you can answer questions like

• Who are your ideal customers?
• What are their challenges?
• What are the goals and aspirations?

Since your customers are individuals with different goals, behaviors, and buying patterns, you’ll need to segment your customer data and build unique personas.

With Engage, you can build unique customer segments so you can connect better with your customers and improve the customer experience.

2. Use a customer journey map

Having a clear picture of every step your customers go through when interacting with your brand can make a positive impact on their overall digital experience.

This is where a customer journey map comes in. It helps you gain insights into your customers’ buying processes, needs, struggles, and perceptions, throughout their engagement with your brand.

With this understanding, you and your team can pinpoint gaps in customer digital interactions and redirect marketing efforts to the areas of customer experience that need improvement. To learn more about applying customer journey mapping in your marketing efforts, you can check out this article we wrote about using a customer journey map in your marketing messages.

3. Collect customer feedback regularly

If you don’t ask your customers how they feel about their experience with your brand, then how can you tell if you’re delivering a remarkable experience? Collecting customer feedback ensures you don’t miss out on valuable information. Even more, it can help you:

• Gain a deeper understanding of areas where your customers experience issues
• Know what they love about your brand and product
• Identify more product features that your customers would like to engage with

This is useful information that will help you identify areas for improvement and improve the customer experience.

Here’s an example of how Twitch uses email to collect feedback from customers. The message also includes an incentive to motivate customers to participate in a survey.

To capture customer feedback, you can use LiveChat, in-app messages, and push notifications, then send follow-up emails to each customer using a customer experience platform.

4. Create an emotional connection with your customers

Creating an emotional connection with your customers is crucial because it makes them more likely to buy from you, become advocates for you, and recommend you to others.

There are several ways that you can create an emotional connection with your customers. The first of which is by listening to what they have to say. By doing this, you can show that you care about what they have to say and are willing to listen to them. Another way that you can create an emotional connection with your customers is by showing them that you care about them.

For example, by sending them personalized messages, offering additional discounts or rewards when they purchase certain items, or signing up for your service just like Cocoa beans did in its email.

It is also important to ensure that you are providing value for the money they are spending on your products or services. This will go a long way in creating an emotional connection with your customers.

5. Deliver great customer experiences at every touchpoint

In today’s digital landscape, it’s important to create seamless, personalized customer experiences across every channel. In fact, customers expect organizations to have a consistent message and experience across every interaction and channel. This includes your website or app, email communications, social media channels, product features, and more. Delivering these consistent experiences is a challenge for even the best marketing teams. Fortunately, with the right strategies and tools, it’s possible to create a consistent and engaging customer experience across any channel, including point-of-sale systems, customer service tools, and more.

6. Personalize your marketing messages

Today, buyers prefer brands that offer a form of personalization in their digital efforts.

According to Twilio’s 2022 State of Personalization Report, 62% of consumers say a brand will lose their loyalty if they deliver an unpersonalized experience. When you send a personalized message to customers, you make them feel like you know them and understand their needs.

Here are some ways that you can apply personalization in your marketing messages:

• Offer recommendations based on your customers'' purchase data
• Send follow-up emails regarding a recent survey
• Personalize your messages based on location

7. Empower your employees

Empowered employees can contribute to a positive customer experience. For example, if there’s a misalignment between leaders, managers, and employees of a company, it could create a negative company culture, which in turn could affect how customers are treated.

So, it's important to consider your company culture, do all your employees and leaders in your organization share common values that contribute to positive CX? How can you build a customer-centric culture in your company?

8. Leverage Customer Data and Usage Patterns

As you begin to understand which areas of your customer experience need improvement, you’ll want to start collecting data to inform your strategy. This includes reviewing customer surveys and onboarding engagement data, as well as monitoring customer pain points and frustrations through complaint boards and social media. By leveraging customer data and usage patterns, you can better identify areas where you can improve your customer experience. This will allow you to prioritize your efforts, so you can focus on improving the greatest pain points that customers are experiencing. By collecting, analyzing, and applying this data, you can make more informed decisions when it comes to improving your customer experience.

With Engage, you can track your customer data and gather useful information to improve your marketing messages:

9. Design With Customers in Mind

To improve the customer experience, you also want to apply initiatives that support a positive experience.

This includes designing both your customer-facing platforms as well as internal tools and assets designed to support these experiences and the functionality of your website or app. By designing with customers in mind, you can create more intuitive and personalized experiences that engage and delight your customers. This will, in turn, help drive more customer engagement and satisfaction.

10. Measure the ROI from delivering a great customer experience

Once you’ve implemented your customer experience improvement strategy, you can then evaluate how well it succeeded. The key to doing this successfully is to identify key performance indicators that will allow you to measure the impact of your customer experience strategy. Once you’ve identified these key performance indicators, you can then review the data to determine whether your customer experience improvements were successful. When you review the metrics and lessons learned from your customer experience improvement strategy, you can create a continuous feedback loop. This will allow you to further improve your customer experience and make necessary changes to your marketing strategy.

Wrapping up

Your customers need constant nurturing and care and a powerful customer experience strategy can make it possible.

Your customer experience strategy should focus on how you can deliver empowering and problem-solving content to your customers. As we mentioned earlier, there’s no silver bullet when it comes to building strategies to improve the customer experience. You need to figure out what works for your customers and go from there.

You can begin by understanding customer-specific challenges and goals, behavioral patterns, and purchase history, then use the insight to create personalized content that addresses them.

At Engage, we have made this process less challenging for you. You can use our customer engagement and email automation software to deliver personalized messages to your customers at the right time.

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