Exceptional customer experiences are all about exceeding customer expectations and leaving a lasting positive impression. It’s every business owner’s dream to have a loyal customer base who returns regularly to make new purchases and become brand ambassadors, recommending your products and services to everyone they know.
By providing positive customer experiences, marketers can improve customer retention rates, encourage brand advocacy and build brand reputation to develop long-lasting relationships with existing customers and attract new customers, ensuring long-term revenue and growth. But how can this be achieved and what role do marketing teams play in creating exceptional customer experiences?
Making customer experiences (CX) memorable
Creating a positive impression with customers at every interaction and touchpoint is a challenge. But happy customers are a valuable asset to any business wanting to build reputation and brand loyalty. To go above and beyond the basics to provide a great customer experience that elicits an emotional connection with your brand, means implementing a strong customer-centric marketing strategy.
A good CX strategy includes:
- Personalising interactions to meet individual customer needs and preferences
- Ensuring a smooth and consistent experience across all channels and interactions
- Anticipating customer needs and addressing them before they become issues
- Understanding customer perceptions and valuing their feedback
- Providing fast and effective solutions to customer issues without unnecessary delays.
Top tips on creating exceptional customer experiences
There is no single thing that marketers can do to guarantee customers have a positive experience. Exceptional customer experience comes from a combination of marketing strategies that put customers at their heart.
Here are some tips on how to develop exceptional customer experiences across the entire customer journey:
Understand your customers
Customer relationship management (CRM) is vital to creating exceptional customer experiences. Use survey data, user journeys and analytics to gain customer insights into preferences and behaviours. This will help you tailor your marketing to resonate with customer perceptions.
Build a customer-centric culture
Ensure that every team member understands the importance of customer experience and is committed to delivering exceptional service. In addition, ensure your team is empowered to deliver excellent service with the training and tools needed to delvier excellent customer support and resolve issues promptly if and when they arise.
Personalise experiences
Audience segmentation and developing personas of typical customers by defining characteristics such as demographics, preferences and interests, can help you develop marketing messages that resonate.
Then, with data analytics and customer relationship databases in hand, it’s easy to personalise interactions with your customers based on individual needs and preferences, offering personalised recommendations, content, and services.
Engage through multiple channels, consistently
Find out where your customers are and which channels they prefer to use and engage with them there. Whether it’s social media, email, chat, or phone, provide consistent and seamless experiences, regularly, across all channels to build connections and ensure customer loyalty.
Respond to feedback
Regularly gather customer feedback through surveys and polls, and use the metrics to make improvements. Show customers that their opinions are valued and acted upon.
Create memorable moments
Aim to go above and beyond to surprise and delight customers. Small gestures, like special promotions via digital marketing, can leave a lasting impression with customers, fostering loyalty and word-of-mouth recommendations.
Measure and monitor
Decide on key performance indicators (KPIs) related to overall customer experience and track them. You can also calculate a net promoter score (NPS) by asking customers one question: “On a scale of 0-10. how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend, family or colleagues?” These data are invaluable when it comes to making informed decisions to drive future improvements and campaigns and increase customer engagement.
Customer journey mapping
Understanding how customers behave, from the moment they first encounter your brand, to the point when they make a purchase or respond to your call-to-action, will help you develop a successful marketing strategy. Here are a few ways that customer journey mapping will help optimise outcomes:
Identify pain points
Knowing where potential customers encounter difficulties with your website and drop off the site will help you make specific improvements such as simplifying navigation, enhancing page load times or refining calls-to-action.
Enhance user experience (UX)
Understanding how your customers navigate content on your website can help you make it more intuitive and user friendly and enhance the customer experience. It also allows you to pinpoint common issues that can be addressed with FAQs, or by chatbots.
Personalisation
Journey mapping can help you understand what information customers need and when and will help you tailor content accordingly, making the path from prospect to sale more seamless. It also allows you to ensure your messaging is timely and relevant to the customer, ultimately driving better engagement.
Testing
Having a clear map of the customer journey can support website improvements and allow you to implement A/B testing on specific elements to see what changes provide the best results.
Creating a unified customer experience strategy
Unified Customer Experience Management (CXM) integrates all customer interactions across touchpoints and channels into a single, cohesive system to provide a seamless, personalised experience for customers at every stage of their journey with a brand. It allows businesses to enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall experience, to help drive growth and success.
Unified CXM can provide:
- A holistic customer view, using automation to consolidate customer data from multiple sources such as sales, marketing campaigns and information from customer services interactions, into a single platform
- Consistent experience across all channels from social media to in store to create a seamless omnichannel experience
- Real-time interaction management using artificial intelligence (AI) and real time data to provide immediate and relevant responses via chatbots, or customer service teams.
- Personalisation at scale, ensuring customers feel valued and understood as individuals regardless of the size of the customer base
- Smooth communication and data flow between departments and channels also helps deliver overall a good customer experience.
Developing your management and marketing skills
Marketers are the architects of customer experience, designing and executing strategies that keep customers engaged, satisfied, and loyal to the brand. If you are looking to develop your career in leadership and management in a marketing context, an online MSc Management with Marketing from the University of Lincoln could be a good next step for you.
In addition to modules in organisational strategy and project management, the course will help you develop your understanding in key areas of marketing including, digital marketing, applied consumer behaviour and international marketing planning. This programme is designed for working professionals and can be studied anywhere, any time and on any device.