What Does it Take to Deliver a Great Customer Experience?

Customer Experience Drives Customer Loyalty: Here are a few basic fundamentals to keep in mind

Customer experience is a priority for most leading businesses, some of the most successful brands have been able to gain traction and market share a lot faster in their segments solely because of their focus on enabling a seamless customer journey and well-planned customer experience strategy.

Companies that focus on building a strong customer experience strategy have been known to experience reduce churn rates and increased revenues.

A well balanced customer experience strategy can impact every area of the business, enabling better sales/marketing/operational outcomes.

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But for companies to ensure that their customer experience plans are not only a theory set in writing but something that is implemented to create a seamless online experience for every prospect and customer, there are a few aspects that matter:

 Set your own Guiding Principles to Drive your Customer Experience Strategy

Every business, every team of founders needs to have their own framework in place to help define the basis of their CX strategies. Without a basic framework that aligns to immediate customer-goals and business goals, internal teams will never be able to align on a set CX process that can create a seamless customer buying journey.

Most business leaders set their mission and vision statements to act as basic principles while many others embed different kinds of values into their corporate culture. This is what sets the pace for a seamless or out-of-the-box experience that can help deliver a ‘’wow-experience’’ to end users.

There can never be a process or framework set in stone when it comes to building out a brand’s customer experience, while many marketing and sales leaders might draw from what their immediate competitors or other leaders in the market already do, in order for a brand to truly stand out and deliver impact-oriented services, it is crucial for business leaders to first define what kind of experience they want to be known for and then, how they want to deliver it.

Real-time Customer Insights and Real-time Customer Feedback Forms the Basis of a Good CX

In a data-driven marketing and sales environment, marketing and sales leaders already have a ton of customer insights, metrics and analytics to help drive better customer experiences or to enhance their existing CX framework to deliver more impact.

Adding a layer of real-time customer feedback into this (via surveys, online chats, polls, etc) can not only help marketing and sales leaders understand what is foremost on their prospects’ and customer’s mind, it can create a more interactive and lively online customer journey.

Marketing and sales leaders who can then align their processes and outbound strategies to induce relevant conversations with follow up calls or emails depending on what the real-time feedback portrays will be in a better position to drive more engagement and improved customer experiences.

Real-time feedback additionally helps marketing and sales leaders understand what prospects and customer feel about the quality of customer service or products, this serves as a guideline to help teams understand what areas need improvement and what needs to be prioritized to deliver a better experience.

Your Customer Experience is Meant to Enable a Better Customer Journey

Many marketers of growing business often make the mistake of intertwining customer support with customer experience. In reality, these are two different areas and processes.

A good customer experience is meant to drive customer journeys that are suited to current business dynamics. In today’s B2B marketing world which is largely multichannel, multidevice and digital-first, marketing teams need to cohesively understand what areas needs to be worked on to connect customer experiences to seamless online buying journeys.

Amazon has always been in the news and been a point of reference for the way they have always taken a customer-first approach that is built around enhanced customer experiences.

With today’s innovations in predictive marketing systems, AI-driven martech tools and recommendation engines, it is a lot easier for tech-savvy marketing teams to build interactive website experiences and customer journeys across email, phone, social media and other touchpoints: how marketing teams plan these elements and what kind of tools are put in place to drive the right conversations at the right time are all a part of the whole customer experience game, that needs constant evaluation and change to keep up with evolving business trends and changing customer behaviors.

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Set your Own Benchmarks, Take Cues from Industry Leaders

Every business leader will have a set of brands they look at as a learning, it is crucial for business leaders, especially marketing teams to know what they want their CX strategy to look like also grabbing key takeaways from existing brands that boast of above-par customer experiences in the market.

In an online marketplace that is largely suffering from the influx of too much marketing and too much noise today, taking cues from leading industry brands is meant to help marketers know what they can do to optimize their own CX strategy, but they need to build on it further by drawing from those existing experiences, without replicating them.

A Great Customer Experience Strategy has to Evolve Everyday

Like any other marketing or sales plan, a customer experience strategy has to evolve continuously taking into account real-time needs, real-time challenges and real-time trends. Aligning marketing technologies to your data processes and understanding what experiences drive your customers and prospects to continue engaging with you is a task that needs constant work and evaluation.

Creating seamless customer experiences that drive better customer journeys today is a priority for most business leaders, how they do this differently and how well they execute this with their marketing technologies is what makes all the difference.

It is easier for marketers today to make immediate changes to plans based on their data and range  of customer insights.

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