The quality of your customers’ experience impacts satisfaction and retention. Here are 7 digital customer experience best practices. We’ll cover strategies for enhancing experience throughout your customer’s lifecycle, with an eye toward increasing retention. We’ll include tips for leveraging technology to optimize the digital customer experience.
1. Deploy Automation and Artificial Intelligence
In a digital environment, customer experience revolves around technology, making automation and artificial intelligence some of the most important tools for enhancing experience. Automation allows you to optimize customer experience by planning digital workflows which guide customers through desired outcomes at each stage of their customer journey, from onboarding to renewal and beyond. AI increases the efficiency of automation by allowing you to monitor customer data and trigger workflows when specific criteria are met.
For example, if data indicates that a customer has not completed their account profile, a workflow can be triggered which sends the customer a reminder and a link to a tutorial on how to finish their profile. The Totango Spark platform is designed to integrate automation and AI into all stages of the customer journey through KPIs, dashboards, and automated workflows called SuccessPlays which reflect best practices for an optimized experience.
2. Use Messaging Which Connects with Your Target Audience
Communication is the key to a positive customer experience. Prospects and customers enjoy a better experience of your brand when your messaging to them is relevant to their needs. A tip for driving relevant messaging for customer’s needs is running a short project focused on your customers’ outreaches & communications, so you can determine what their needs are and when they need it along the customer journey. This principle applies throughout interactions with your target audience, from using relevant keywords in blog posts to sending customers emails that address their practical concerns. Automation and AI can help here by allowing you to segment messages so that they speak to the needs of specific groups within your customer base.
3. Incorporate Personalization
Messages carry the greatest impact on improving the customer experience when they are personalized to speak to individual needs. Personalization takes segmentation to the most granular level, allowing you to customize messages and workflows to suit the needs of individual customers. For example, if a customer is using a product feature for the first time, a personalized message may be sent to them automatically offering tutorial tips on how to get the most out of the feature. This type of personalized customer engagement allows you to support customers at scale while still delivering customized attention, combining automated efficiency with a human touch.
4. Anticipate Customer Service Needs by Incorporating Automation
Automation can also help you deliver better service by allowing you to anticipate support issues and prepare responses in advance. For example, your digital data may indicate that a particular support issue is encountered frequently by customers in the onboarding stage. You can design an automated workflow representing a solution to this issue. The solution then gets triggered whenever a support ticket indicates a customer is facing the issue in question. This strategy can and should be used even be used to proactively provide solutions before customers reach out for support, increasing customer satisfaction.
5. Deliver Consistently High Customer Service
Customer service quality directly affects the quality of customer experience. Consistently high customer service will generate positive experiences of your brand, while a single negative experience may drive customers to leave a negative review or to a competitor. Make sure your customer service is consistently high by adhering to well-designed standard operating procedures. Use technology to support your service quality by applying tools such as AI monitoring of customer experience, chatbots, IVR, online knowledge bases and SuccessPlays which automate support best practices.
6. Use Customer Feedback to Refine Products and Services
To evaluate the quality of your customer service and experience, it’s important to solicit customer feedback. An efficient way to do this is to automatically monitor key performance indicators which reflect customer satisfaction. Two of the most useful customer satisfaction KPIs are Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures how likely customers are to recommend you to family and friends, and the customer satisfaction score (CSAT), which measures customer satisfaction with a particular product or customer service experience. Totango’s Voice of the Customer SuccessBLOC module lets you automate tracking of these important KPIs.
7. Make It Easy for Customers to Renew or Upgrade
A positive customer experience should culminate in a renewal or upgrade. Help customers continue to enjoy this phase of their experience by making it easy to complete the process. You can make it easier for customers to navigate this part of their journey by sending renewal reminders and upsell offers, streamlining your payment process, and creating automated workflows to help customers through common support issues which arise when renewing or upgrading. Totango’s Automate Renewal and Upsell and Expand Customers SuccessBLOCs provide KPIs, dashboards, and workflows to help you automate the renewal and upsell processes for a smooth customer experience.
Follow Digital Customer Experience Best Practices to Increase Retention and Revenue
Improving the quality of your customer experience promotes higher satisfaction and retention rates. Automation and artificial intelligence lay a foundation for superior experience by empowering you to monitor customer data and trigger optimized workflows which meet customer needs. Smart use of customer data can further help you segment and personalize communications with customers for a more customized experience. Technology further serves to improve the quality of your customer service, provided you allow customers flexible options for interacting with your support team.
Monitor customer feedback to help ensure that your customer experience strategy is delivering the desired results. Transform positive customer experiences into revenue by making it easy for customers to renew and upgrade.
Totango’s Spark platform provides out-of-the-box key performance indicators, dashboards and workflows to help you implement digital customer experience best practices. Try it free to test for yourself how automation can help you optimize your customer experience and satisfaction.
