10 CX Strategies to Elevate Your Brand:
- Embrace an Omnichannel Approach
With the explosion of digital consumer devices it’s never been more convenient to keep in touch with customers. But at the same time it’s never been more challenging to coordinate communications properly as you have more channels to manage. To enable this you need to integrate all your channels and create a centralised data source that all departments and channels can access. Your customer journeys need to omnichannel, or channel agnostic, and give the same experience and level of service to all customers. Or do they?
- Prioritise Personalisation
Generic customer interactions don’t wow anyone. Even offering multiple channels these days is nothing out of the ordinary. What does impress customers is personalising your service or use of channels to their needs. Bonus points if you can anticipate what they want and hand it to them in advance (see #7 on this list). All of this means that you don’t necessarily need to provide exactly the same service to all customers – as they don’t all want or require the same service. For some you do need to go the extra mile to keep their business, but for others you don’t. Personalising different channel experiences tailored to customer preferences, behaviours and purchase histories can actually be a way to save money, as well as improve CX and loyalty.
- Establish Feedback Mechanisms
Understanding how your business, brand and the customer experience you provide are perceived by your customers is the only way to get better. Measuring and tracking things like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) gives you real-time insights into customer sentiment, which lets you gauge satisfaction, identify pain points and highlight your weaknesses and strengths. At the same time, actively seeking feedback from customers with a Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme demonstrates your commitment to putting them at the heart of your business, all while enhancing the customer experience.
- Invest in Employee Training
CX isn’t just something that’s delivered in your contact centre. Customers will be influenced by their company-wide experience of your brand and your products at all touchpoints. Every employee plays a role in shaping the customer experience through their interactions with customers. Comprehensive training programmes ensure all employees possess appropriate product knowledge, effective communication skills, and a deep understanding of your brand values. This empowers them to address queries efficiently, offer suggestions, and build a proper rapport with customers. Again, there is no single way to do this – the employees of a skater-influenced clothing brand are going to act quite differently towards customers than those of a high-end jeweller – it has to be tailored to your business, brand and customers.
- Adopt Digital Transformation
Digital technologies allow you streamline operations while providing customers with greater convenience, speed, and choice. As well as the traditional and emerging channels that are now incorporated into many contact centres, look at how you can leverage upcoming innovations such as Augmented Reality (AR) technology or AI-powered chatbots (see #9) to give your customers innovative and useful experiences. By staying up-to-date with new technologies and embracing them when they add value, your business remains competitive and relevant in the changing customer experience landscape.
- Give Something Back
Your organisation’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities can play a pivotal role in shaping your brand image. A robust CSR policy, which emphasises ethical practices, sustainability and community engagement resonates with the desire of consumers to support businesses that make a positive impact. Participating in community initiatives and supporting causes that resonate with your customers can foster a deeper emotional connection with your customers, build trust, and enhance your brand’s reputation. Find a way to build these into your CX by getting your customers involved in these initiatives and – as long as it’s done genuinely – they will love you for it.
- Proactive Communication
Talking of making customers love you – another way to do that effectively is to give them what they want, preferably before they even know it. There are both service and sales elements to this approach. Taking the initiative to provide customers with updates, alerts, and recommendations shows your care and dedication. But with modern predictive analytics you can go one step beyond and anticipate customer service issues before they even happen. This could be as simple as pre-empting a customer’s call to book a service by sending them an SMS they can quickly reply to in order to set a date. From a sales perspective, if you offer new solutions or products that historical customer data tells you are likely to solve a real problem for a customer, they are far more likely to thank you – and buy – than resent the intrusion.
- Loyalty Programmes
The objective of CX is to retain customers as well as acquire new ones. By now everyone is familiar with loyalty programmes as supermarkets and petrol stations have been running them for decades. It doesn’t have to be onerous for customers, by making them sign up and carry a card around. Most businesses these days know who their customers are, what they purchase, and how often. It’s fairly trivial to segment your customer base and offer them appropriate discounts and offers depending on their purchase histories. You can also use conversational analytics on your customer interactions to tease out customer sentiment and understand what offers individual would be open to. However you do it, presenting personalised offers to customers in return for their loyalty makes them feel appreciated and drives engagement.
- Self-Service, Automation and AI
Modern customers, in general, highly value their autonomy when seeking solutions to their queries or issues. Offering self-service resources like FAQs, tutorials, or chatbots empowers them to resolve problems conveniently and quickly. This not only enhances the user experience, it also reduces the burden on your customer support teams. Emerging AI tools such as the large language models that power generative AI bots like Chat GPT can significantly improve self-service solutions by enabling customers to query a knowledge base using natural written or spoken language. In the front and back office, AI and automation software can significantly enhance the customer experience by streamlining processes and helping customer service agents to personalise interactions.
- Invest in Analytics
Your CX, and the operations that enable it, will only ever be as good as the data on which your organisation’s leaders, managers and frontline staff base your strategic and operational decisions. These days, there is an incredible amount of rich and useful data stored in the contact centre, your CRM systems, transactional databases, website tracking and meta-data, and in the recordings or transcriptions of your customer interactions. Analytics software can help you mine and tag your structured and unstructured data, then apply machine learning, predictive analytics, and natural language processing to it in order to tease out insights and connections that would escape even the most diligent data analyst (although you do still need those to design your analytics programmes, prepare the data, run the software and interpret the results). Conversational analytics, for example, can give you insights into customer sentiment down to the individual customer. You can then apply this information to personalise customer experiences and offers.
