Picture yourself walking into a coffee shop where the barista greets you by name, remembers your favourite drink, and asks about your day. That kind of warm, personalised experience is the reason why so many of us choose specific spots for coffee. It’s necessarily not about the quality of the brew, though that does play a part; rather, it’s the totality of the customer experience (CX) that makes the biggest difference.
The good news is that the same principle applies to any business. Regardless of whether you run a B2B or B2C operation, good CX inevitably leads to tangible results that benefit your brand and bottom line. For example, in a study of 77 large Swedish firms, Eugene Anderson, Claes Fornell and Donald Lehmannfound that even a modest 1% increase in customer satisfaction can lead to an 11.5% rise in profitability over five years. While cultural and industry differences may have an effect on final outcomes, businesses that prioritise CX will often see higher customer satisfaction, better loyalty, and increased revenue.
Below are some proven ways to improve customer experience. These insights are distilled from B2B Customer Experience: A Practical Guide to Delivering Exceptional CX by Paul Hague and Nicholas Hague, a comprehensive resource on delivering outstanding CX and a must-read for any marketing team, regardless of whether they’re in a B2B or B2C business. Let’s explore some actionable ways you can build positive CX at your business today.
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Map the Customer Journey
Every customer’s experience with your business is like a road trip, with key stops, speed bumps, and a final destination. Identifying important points in their journey and smoothing out friction points makes things a lot more seamless for customers, priming them to buy. Mapping is foundational to all the other CX strategies and a key ingredient in successfully integrating a customer experience management platform and other CX technologies.
A 2023 McKinsey & Company paper suggests that companies excelling in customer journey optimisation experience a 20-30% increase in revenue growth, while those that don’t tend to see declines in customer satisfaction and loyalty. For instance, an online retail business might find that it has too many steps in its checkout process, frustrating customers and causing them to abandon their carts. Every unnecessary step removed could smoothen the journey, resulting in a boost in sales.
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Improve Responsiveness and Speed
The example in the previous point brings us to this one. A 2010 paper cited in the Harvard Business Review found that 94% of polled customers will repurchase if they experience low-effort positive interactions.
Low-effort interactions are all contextual, but it’s almost always possible to find metrics to improve on. Setting measurable goals like answering calls within three rings, acknowledging orders within 24 hours, and resolving complaints within a week are examples of things you can do to shift customer perceptions in your favour.
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Personalise Customer Interactions
Nobody likes being treated like just another number, even when they implicitly understand that that is the case. Personalisation makes customers feel valued, increasing their likelihood of buying from you.
A great example of a business going the extra mile to personalise services, as described in B2B customer Experience, is Singapore Airlines. Singapore Airlines is currently the world’s most awarded airline, with multiple accolades for customer service. This CX leadership is, in large part, thanks to the company’s highly personalised, AI-driven end-to-end services that take personalisation and customer case management to the next level. In addition, the airline also has a longstanding 40/30/30 rule where 40% of resources go to training, 30% to improving procedures, and 30% to creating new customer-focused products. This systemic approach ensures that each passenger’s specific needs are consistently met.
For other businesses, it may help to be more aware of opportunities to make the customer feel seen. Greeting people by name or even something as perfunctory as automatically sending a thank-you email after a purchase can create a lasting positive impression that keeps customers coming back.
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Train Employees on CX Excellence
A 2020 Gallup meta-analysis found that companies with highly engaged employees tend to see 23% higher profitability compared to competitors with disengaged teams. Fortunately, better training can help with engagement and solve CX hurdles at the same time.
To bring CX to new levels, you must invest in training employees on key CX areas—empathy, problem-solving, and product knowledge. These ensure your team is capable of delivering outstanding service, empowered to fully engage with customers. Employees who are well-trained in these areas will be much better able to understand customer needs and the solutions that are available to address them. Over time, your business should see improved CX as employees become better able to smoothen customer pain points.
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Reduce Customer Effort
Customers tend to remain loyal to brands that simplify their interactions and reduce the effort required to engage with them. Research has shown that minimizing customer effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—is a significant driver of customer loyalty. For instance, a report published in the Harvard Business Review found that organizations delivering low-effort service experiences tend to increase customer loyalty more effectively than those focusing solely on delighting customers.
Some things you can try include simplifying online purchases with one-click checkouts, intuitive self-service options, and clear site navigation. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and refer to their journey maps to consider what else you can do to make their lives easier.
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Use Customer Feedback to Drive Improvement
Companies that act on customer feedback see revenue growth higher than competitors without a structured feedback strategy. According to Bain & Company, loyalty leaders—companies at the top of their industries in Net Promoter Score (NPS) or satisfaction rankings for three or more years—grow revenues more than twice as fast as their industry peers. Learn to leverage Net NPS or other CX metrics to gain deeper, qualitative insights and make improvements that customers are actually clamouring for.
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Leverage Technology for Seamless CX
When done with a genuine appreciation for CX, digital transformation can boost satisfaction by 20-30%. Technology can compensate for the inconsistency and slowness (see point 2) of purely human responses, giving customers what they need, sometimes before they realise they need it. Customer experience management tools now use advanced AI to provide real-time insights as well as preemptive, hyper-personalised interactions. Tools like Robyn AI can analyse vast amounts of customer data to help businesses tailor their customer responses with precision.
Ensure your tech stack supports solutions that enable proactive service and reduce customer frustration. Set up AI chatbots, customer relationship management solutions, and a customer experience management platform that will allow you to analyse and act on customer feedback promptly.
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Offer Omnichannel Support
It’s no longer unusual for customers to go through multiple channels before completing a purchase. A survey of American holiday shoppers found that 90% of them expect a seamless experience, regardless of the touchpoints they use.
To begin, ensure your support teams are connected to a single source of customer information for smooth interactions. The aim is to keep customers from having to repeat themselves, regardless of whether they had their interactions over email, chat, voice calls, social media, or some other channel. This makes them feel that they are dealing with just one business rather than a collection of disjointed departments.
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Strengthen Emotional Connection with Customers
Over time, customers may forget what it was your business did, but they’ll never forget how they felt. As the authors of B2B Customer Experience note, this is just as true in B2B as it is for B2C. After all, while business entities aren’t human, their decision-makers most definitely are.
Integrating empathy and emotional intelligence into your processes improves customer retention by providing the emotional argument needed to cinch a sale. As an old adage points out, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”. Whether you’re in B2B or B2C, implicit trust and emotional capital are almost always needed to secure sales and repeat business.
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Continuously Benchmark and Improve CX Metrics
Pro athletes often track their performance against that of top performers in their field, enabling them to make meaningful improvements. The same principle applies when you leverage important CX metrics to produce improved customer experiences.
Studies consistently demonstrate that tracking key customer experience metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) can provide businesses with valuable insights for improvement. Once you have data on your own performance, you can then effectively benchmark your own scores against those of industry leaders to develop your CX programmes.
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Create a CX-Centric Culture
A Bain & Company paper contends that businesses with customer-focused cultures experience less churn. Further, the authors emphasise the need to focus on the subset of root causes that have the greatest effect, rather than on single initiatives.
This means that any serious attempts to improve CX must begin at the top—they cannot be simply dictated to line employees. The suggestions on this list won’t prosper if the people running the business do not truly realise the value of CX. Knowing that, CX advocates must learn to sell the idea of CX to their colleagues and superiors, enabling the creation of a meaningfully CX-focused business culture.
Conclusion
Business leaders are fortunate to live in an age where the tools and methodologies to effectively transform the customer experience are almost trivial to come by. Chances are, the list points to opportunities that you can harness for developing CX at your business.
Still, creating lasting CX success demands a long-term commitment that not everyone is prepared to make. As we’ve explored, developing good CX is a real team effort, making it more difficult than it may first appear.
Fortunately, CX does not always have to be delivered perfectly. It just has to be genuine and consistently pushed forward. So long as you’re committed, you should begin seeing increased loyalty and profits with the simple adjustments we presented. Go where your customers are, trust what the data says, and you will start winning at CX.
