How to Create a Better Customer Experience? Simple, Effective Advice.

Let’s say you already know that you want to focus on improving your customer experience. That’s a great first step, but where do you go from there? And for that matter, what does the term “customer experience” actually mean?

First, you should know that customer experience (also known as CX) is not customer service. CX is about the entire journey of your customer, from when they first discover your product, through purchasing, and all the way until they start using your product or service. Customer service refers to how your customers interact with the support team, and it represents only one small part of the entire customer experience.

Okay, now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s dive in.

Where do you start when it comes to creating a better customer experience?

The first step you should take is to map out the entire customer journey. This should be fairly straightforward and include the following:

• Understand your customer: Start the process by understanding the persona, their goals, and their motivations. Basically, what are they looking for, and why are they buying your product?
• Create a journey map: Once you understand your persona, start exploring the various touch points they have when interacting with your business or product. This includes how they discover your business, how they go through the sales process, the support they need, and how they use your product.
• Take the journey yourself: There’s no better way to truly understand your customer’s experience than to go through it yourself. Go through the entire customer journey—from brand awareness and sales process to support and using the product or service—and interview all of the stakeholders along the way.
• Identify pain points: Once you’ve gone through the customer journey, you’ll likely have a good idea of where their pain points lie. Based on those pain points, you can then make improvements to your product, rinse, and repeat.

Wait! Not so fast. Truly improving customer experience is about gathering data for a 360-degree view.

While you still need to understand your customer persona and map their journey, you also need a holistic understanding of your customer if you want to truly improve their experience. Gaining that understanding requires you to collect data across your entire business on not only the customer and interaction points, but also on things like sales and processes. Collecting and aggregating that data generates what’s known as a Customer 360, or a 360-degree customer view. Getting to this point probably seems much more daunting than mapping the customer journey, but don’t worry, there are easy solutions to help you get there.

Okay, you’ve got collected the data, now what?

Once you’ve collected data from across the business, the next step is to turn that data into analytics. More specifically, embedded analytics. Embedding analytics into different processes, workflows, and applications across your business gives you the tools you need to actively improve your customer experience.

“Now, we can unify and join the data, and I can draw clear lines and give a 360-degree view of the customer. This is immensely helpful when implementing and launching marketing campaigns and for our customer service department.”

Mike Terry
Business Analyst, Say Insurance

Creating a better customer experience is an iterative process that requires commitment and data. Constantly refining your understanding of the customer, what matters to them, and using embedded analytics throughout the journey, ultimately results in a superior experience. If you’re ready to start thinking about how you can improve your customer experience, I encourage you to check out our Customer 360 ebook. It does a great job of explaining why it is critical to achieving Customer 360 at scale so that everyone in the organization - not just a handful of users or C-suite, can have easy access to customer insights in order to deliver better customer experience, and exceeds customer expectations.