TechBytes with Aimee Stone Munsell, CMO at Contentsquare

What is the most contemporary definition of Customer Experience? And why is Contentsquare the “most complete” platform on the market for this sector?

When defining customer experience, it’s so easy to think purely in terms of post-sale satisfaction. As a result, many brands get hung up on the idea of CX measurement as little more than just customer surveys and Net Promoter Scores. While these methods have their benefits, they all occur after a customer’s journey is complete. As such they cannot show exactly when or where customers are having a negative experience.

The newly released Contentsquare platform overcomes this issue. Through Experience Analytics technology, which creates visualizations and recommendations based on visitor behavior, brands can see exactly where they can improve the digital experience to meet their customers’ goals and increase business results. This goes far beyond traditional ‘find and fix’ solutions. With our platform, marketers and insight teams can discover new opportunities to increase revenue — tying the customer experience directly back to ROI.

It is only by both troubleshooting fast and innovating more that brands break through traditional benchmarks to increase Lead and Sales conversions by up to 2-3x. Our platform enables this and even helps team quantify and prioritize potential improvements so they can speed execution of what matters most.

How should brands leverage CX standards to improve their identity and reputation?

There are no universal templates when it comes to experience – there is what is best for your customers given what they want from your brand right now. Just as there isn’t one sole way of being convenient, there is no single gold standard for customer experience. Have a unique brand value to offer and your experience should reflect the specific relationship you want to cultivate with your customers. The difficult part is understanding what your customers are experiencing and making sure your whole experience is creating customer happiness in alignment with your business goals — that’s what Contentsquare enables.

What kind of tactics do you use/advise to brands to improve search and what role does CX play in it?

For Search Engine Optimization, quality content is everything. To build that content, you first need to know what your target audience is looking for, and that’s where Experience Analytics comes in. By analyzing your site’s content, you can see what’s resonating and what’s not, and then focus on optimizing the best content for search.

It’s also vital that brands optimize their own on-site search engines. On-site search has never been more important, with research showing that as many as half of all users navigating a website now go directly to search — avoiding traditional menu navigation altogether. Given the fact, it’s vital that on-page search engines work as expected and that the format and structure of results fit with the user’s anticipated experience. It’s easy to think of issues such as on-site search and navigation as little more than hygiene factors, but the reality is that findability is critical to your overall customer experience.

When it comes to solving these issues, marketers need to have the technology in place to know what elements of search are (and aren’t) working for their brands, as well as how customers want to filter and compare options once they execute a search. At Contentsquare, our platform can identify ROI hotspots, allowing marketers to see how many of their customers navigated via search and where they can improve. By tailoring the journey based on context, optimizing merchandising, and focusing A/B testing on these hotspots, brands can ensure Search contributes better to the overall satisfaction and conversion journeys.