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What Is Customer Experience (CX)? A Comprehensive Guide

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By Michelle Hawley

Explore the impact of Customer Experience (CX) on business success, from customer journey nuances to strategies for enhancing CX and fostering brand loyalty.

The Gist

  • Total journey. Emphasizes the importance of the entire customer experience, from first contact to post-purchase interactions.
  • Emotional connect. Highlights the critical role of emotional engagement in enhancing customer experience and building loyalty.
  • Strategic CXM. Underlines the necessity of a strategic approach in customer experience management to exceed customer expectations and foster brand loyalty.

In an era where choices are vast and competition is fierce, understanding why customer experience matters is a cornerstone of business strategy. Customer experience, often referred to as CX, shapes the way companies interact with customers, build lasting impressions and drive loyalty.

Let’s break down the intricate layers of CX and uncover its role in dictating success in the digitally connected world.

What Is Customer Experience?

Customer experience represents the complete journey a customer takes with a business, including every interaction from initial contact to beyond the final purchase. It includes the emotions, impressions and responses customers experience throughout these interactions. Within this definition are various types of customer experience, each defined by the nature of interaction, be it digital, in-person or via customer service channels.

The idea of customer experience recognizes that the entire experience of the customer contributes to the customer’s final evaluation of your company, not just immediate enjoyment of the product, said Colin Crowley, VP of customer support at Maven Clinic.

He pointed to the example of ordering a new pair of shoes: “It’s not just about having a nice pair of shoes, but the experience through which your customers journeyed to research the company, to order the shoes, to receive the shoes… and the customer service surrounding any questions about the shoes, to name just a few examples.

What Is Customer Experience Management?

Customer experience management (CXM) is a strategic approach that focuses on creating customer experience that exceeds expectations. It involves optimizing each interaction between a customer and a brand in a way that enhances customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.

Integral to this process is understanding the customer’s journey and ensuring every touchpoint contributes positively to their perception. An important subset of CXM is consumer experience marketing, which focuses on tailoring marketing efforts to enhance the overall customer journey and experience.

What Is the Customer Journey?

The customer journey maps the path a consumer takes with a brand, from initial awareness to the final stage of purchase and post-purchase interactions. It covers every touchpoint where a customer engages with a company, such as through word-of-mouth, email, reading reviews, social media posts and more.

 

A map depicting the five stages of the customer journey

 

The customer journey breaks down into five stages:

  1. Awareness: The customer becomes aware of the product or service.
  2. Interest: The customer starts considering the product or service as a solution to their needs or problems.
  3. Purchase: The customer makes a purchase decision.
  4. Retention: Post-purchase, the focus shifts toward retaining the customer through excellent customer service, quality products and ongoing engagement.
  5. Advocacy: Satisfied customers become advocates for the brand, sharing their positive experiences with others.

What’s the Difference Between Customer Experience and Customer Service?

Customer service is a single part of the broader customer experience, focusing on the support and assistance provided to customers. It tends to be reactive, coming into play when a customer faces an issue or needs help. In contrast, customer experience encompasses the entire customer journey, a proactive and comprehensive approach that includes every touchpoint and interaction a customer has with a brand.

Why Is Customer Experience Important?

Customer experience directly shapes brand perception, drives customer loyalty and influences purchasing decisions. A positive experience can lead to increased customer retention, referrals and a strong brand reputation, all essential for long-term success. In fact, research from Deloitte found that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies not focused on the customers.

In contrast, neglecting customer experience can result in lost customers and negative reviews, adversely affecting a company’s growth and profitability. The importance of customer experience extends beyond immediate sales — it’s a strategic asset that differentiates a brand and fosters sustainable growth.

How to Measure Customer Experience

To learn how to understand customer experience, you should begin with looking at effective ways of measurement. “Because customer experience is a holistic concept,” said Crowley, “the metrics to measure it should also be holistic and all-inclusive of all aspects of the customer experience.”

Look at the Whole Journey

You need to measure the different aspects of a customer’s experience, explained Crowley, and to do this, you need to demarcate all the different points at which your company touches the customer — website experience, ordering experience, delivery experience, etc.

“Each of these experiences can be evaluated in their own way and be owned by a cross-functional team of people at your company (think of a pod) consisting of key stakeholders across relevant teams,” he said.

Analyse Customer Survey Results

Two holistic measurements you can turn to are the customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey and the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey, which do not evaluate one aspect of the customer’s journey, but the entire journey, said Crowley.

CSAT surveys, for instance, typically ask a customer to rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10, or by using a graphic scale with smiling, neutral and unhappy faces (like the one below). NPS scores, on the other hand, ask for a numerical score based on a single question, such as, “How likely are you to recommend the product?”

 

An example of a customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey

 

“These holistic metrics are helpful, especially to establish benchmarks with companies in similar verticals (which is where NPS helps, because there are well-publicized NPS benchmarks for certain industries), but you should also be sure to combine such holistic metrics with freeform response opportunities,” said Crowley.

Regularly Ask for Customer Feedback

Beyond CSAT and NPS surveys, Joe Miliziano, chief operating officer at Harri, recommended constant prompting for constructive feedback. Some ways his company asks for feedback include:

  • Asking for in-product feedback
  • Email campaigns
  • Exit prompts when clients leave

Another way they ask for feedback? “In our Support Center, we’ve given the ability to actually post comments and vote other people’s things up and down. I think that’s always a very helpful thing, because you hear very loud clients, and sometimes, if you see ten people saying something’s a good idea, it’s probably a good idea,” said Miliziano.

Tap Into Text Analysis Tools

“Rather than just looking at a rating scale response,” added Crowley, “you can use AI-powered text analysis tools to dig deeper into what drove your customers’ responses.” These tools can uncover valuable insights hidden in unstructured data, such as reviews and social media comments.

This approach allows business to look at sentiments, preferences and pain points of customers, providing a roadmap for targeted improvements and personalized experiences. Beyond identifying areas for improvement, text analysis can also help companies foresee trends, adapt to changing customer needs and maintain a competitive edge.

Identify Rate of and Reasons for Churn

Another big measurement to keep an eye on, according to Miliziano, is retention. “In the business world, at the end of the day, are my clients staying with me? Or not?” Yes, he said, they might give a good NPS score, but are they staying in and are they continuing to buy more?

If customers are leaving, it’s essential to find out why. During exit surveys or interviews, ask departing customers directly why they chose to leave. Use engagement metrics like usage frequency, session time and future adoption rates to identify declining engagement, which often precedes churn. And comb through customer support interactions to look for signs of dissatisfaction or recurring issues that went unresolved.

Ultimately, said Crowley, “A combination of holistic metrics and granular metrics will combine to give you the best view of the customer experience, statistically speaking.”

5 Ways to Improve Your Customer Experience

Why improve customer experience? Because great CX is key to fostering loyalty, increasing customer satisfaction and standing out in a competitive market. Let’s look at some key strategies for crafting and optimizing CX:

1. Understand Who Your Customers Are

Understanding your customer base is one of the first steps in crafting a great customer experience. This process involves analysing customer data, identifying different customer segments and recognizing their unique needs and preferences. Tailoring your approach to meet these specific customer segments ensures more relevant and impactful interactions.

2. Create an Emotional Connection

Developing an emotional connection with customers can transform the overall experience. In fact, according to a Forrester report, emotion is the most important driver behind customer experience. To tap into the emotional side of things, brands create stories, values and experiences that resonate with their target audiences on a personal level. When customers feel emotionally invested, they’re more likely to purchase from a brand (according to Iterable) and build lasting relationships.

3. Personalize Customer Interactions

Personalization is a powerful tool for creating memorable customer experiences. In fact, according to a Twilio Segment report, more than half of consumers polled said they’d become repeat buyers after a personalized experience.

Twilio Segment statistic showing more than half of consumers polled said they'd become repeat buyers after a personalized experience
Twilio Segment State of Personalization Report

 

To craft these experiences, brands can utilize data analytics to understand individual preferences and tailor interactions accordingly. From personalized emails to customized product recommendations, this approach makes customers feel valued and understood.

4. Act on Employee Experience

According to Miliziano, happy employees lead to customers who enjoy themselves more — especially in the hospitality industry. “Having people stay with your company for more than a minute is a big driver in my mind of what successful client experience ultimately is.”

The key, he claimed, is to look at the expectation you set for the employee and determine how to measure it. “How do I measure what they’re telling me, number one, and then how do I marry that with their actions?” It’s important, he added, to determine their sentiment in a meaningful way so that you can cut through someone merely having a bad day or determine if there’s a real problem with employee engagement.

5. Create Seamless Omnichannel Experiences

Today’s shoppers have many avenues to interact with a brand — in-store, on the phone, online. Companies have to consider not just how employees interact with customers, but also mobile experience, usability and seamlessness between all channels.

The various touchpoints and channels that make up the concept of omnichannel

 

No matter where a customer decides to interact with a brand, they expect consistency in service and quality to ultimately develop trust and consider the brand reliable.

3 Poor Customer Experience Examples

A positive customer experience is the ideal. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad CX examples you can learn from, too.

1. The CVS Debacle

On a trip to local CVS, one of our very own journalists, Dom Nicastro, witnessed some poor customer experience in action. He saw a man in his 80s approach the pharmacy counter and ask for a COVID-19 vaccine. But the pharmacist rep turned him down, telling him he had to schedule an appointment online. The man asked, “What about people that don’t have a computer?” But still, the representative refused to help.

What was a lack of empathy or understanding on the part of the employee ended up being a bad look for the brand as well. Fortunately, Nicastro himself helped the man schedule an appointment online — but what about the other computer-less people who didn’t have a journalist around to help out?

2. A Flight to Nowhere

Last year, I had a staggeringly poor customer service experience myself. And it all took place in an airport. What started as an attempt to fly from Pennsylvania to Tennessee ended up with me spending nearly 12 hours in an airport and, ultimately, no flight.

Some delays are inevitable, right? True. But the bad experience boiled down to poor communication (getting boarded onto a plane, only to then deboard), poor customer service (a gate agent re-booking me on a flight to Iowa, despite multiple attempts to tell her that’s not where I was headed) and a being passed off from in-person customer service to phone customer service to an online form to try to get a refund for my trip, with each person saying they were unable to offer me any help.

3. United Breaks Guitars

Back in 2008, musician Dave Carroll took a United Airlines flight with his band from Halifax to Omaha. Upon landing and waiting to deplane, he looked out the window to see baggage handlers throwing their guitars around without regard. Carroll attempted to talk to a flight attendant about the issue, but she cut him off and told him to talk to another agent “outside.” Ultimately, Carrol’s instrument suffered $1,200 worth of damage.

After calls to customer service, emails and many months of waiting, Carroll’s request for the airline to cover the repairs to his guitar were rejected. So he decided to take to the internet with a song that ultimately went viral: “United Breaks Guitars.”

3 Excellent Customer Experience Examples

When it comes to CX, actions speak louder than strategies. These three real-world examples of excellent customer experience showcase how businesses can transform customer service into unforgettable acts of kindness.

1. The Starbucks Barista

One Starbucks barista went the extra mile to show a customer she cares. Krystal Payne, recognizing that a deaf customer at their Leesburg, Virginia, location struggled with ordering his drink, spent more than three hours studying American Sign Language (ASL) to help make the man’s experience seamless.

The customer, Ibby Piracha, was surprised one day when he arrived at Starbucks with a note from Payne explaining her efforts. Piracha, touched by the gesture, shared a picture of the note online — and even framed it. This example serves as a great reminder to brands that selfless gestures from frontline employees can have a significant impact on individuals’ lives and offer heart-warming brand stories that those online can read and enjoy.

2. The Disney Experience

One brand renowned for its excellent customer experience is Disney, and it does this through employing its Compass Model — an approach that looks at four different aspects of the customer experience:

  • Needs: What the customer desires from the experience. Some needs are stated, but many are not.
  • Wants: The underlying objective or purpose of customers — some stated, some unstated and some not even recognized by the customer.
  • Stereotypes: The preconceived notions (both positive and negative) that customers have about the experience.
  • Emotions: The emotions that customers have or are likely to experience.

The compass model has been so successful for Disney that many other brands (like airlines and hospitality companies) have decided to take it on.

3. Southwest on Twitter

Air travel can be a nightmare. There are long lines, crowded airports, delays, cramped seating. Yet one airline seems to know how to come out on top: Southwest. The airline is known for putting customer experience at the forefront, and it encourages its employees to build meaningful connections with its customers.

And customers, in turn, have taken to the internet to share their happy experiences. Southwest decided to highlight 175 of these positive tales in a campaign using the hashtag #175stories. Some highlights? A plane from Houston full of dozens of cats and dogs rescued from shelters during Hurricane Harvey. A man who won a vacation to Cancun. And a cabin crew who sang to a woman on her 80th birthday.

8 Customer Experience Management Tools

According to a 2024 CMSWire report, digital customer experience is complex and requires a diverse toolkit to truly deliver success. And while some of these capabilities are bundled into single platforms or solutions, others are standalone products.

Chart depicting the top customer experience tools
CMSWire’s State of the Digital Customer Experience Report

 

Right now, the top five tools and apps used within companies’ customer experience ecosystems include:

  1. Email marketing tools
  2. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems
  3. Content management systems (CMS)
  4. Social media analytics
  5. Social media management platforms

Let’s take a deeper dive into today’s available customer experience management tools.

1. Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), part of Adobe’s Digital Experience Cloud, is a content management solution for building websites, mobile apps and forms. AEM provides tools for creating, managing and optimizing digital customer experiences across all channels, including web, mobile, email and social media.

This tool can help brands manage their marketing content and assets more efficiently, with its strengths lying in its ability to deliver personalized experiences to customers, robust scalability and integration with other Adobe products.

2. Zendesk

Zendesk is a customer service software and customer relationship management system. It’s known for its comprehensive helpdesk capabilities and user-friendly interface. This customer experience tool can integrate with other various business operations, offering features like ticketing systems, live chat, automated workflows and a centralized knowledge base.

The Zendesk agent workspace
The Zendesk Agent Workspace

 

Zendesk offers analytics and reporting tools that allow businesses to track customer interactions, identify trends and continually improve service quality. It’s also flexible in its scalability, meaning it’s a popular choice for businesses of all sizes.

3. Zoho

Zoho is a customer experience platform that offers a number of applications designed to streamline business processes and enhance customer interactions. Known for its CRM solutions, this platform integrates sales, marketing, customer support and inventory management functionalities, providing a unified approach to managing customer relationships.

Zoho is equipped with tools for analytics, campaign management, social media integration and automation, allowing businesses to deliver personalized customer experiences efficiently. It also boasts flexibility and scalability, making it suitable for businesses of varying sizes and industries.

4. Medallia

Medallia is a customer experience management platform designed to capture feedback across multiple touchpoints, analyse it in real-time and deliver actionable insights. Its capabilities allow it to understand customer sentiment, behaviour and needs through advanced analytics and artificial intelligence.

Medallia's omnichannel performance dashboard
Medallia’s Omnichannel Performance Dashboard

Medallia’s suite of tools include survey creation, text analytics, social listening and experience management across digital channels, making it a comprehensive solution for companies looking to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

5. Tealeaf

Tealeaf is a customer experience analytics solution that provides insights into user interactions on websites and mobile applications. It specializes in capturing, analysing and replaying customer sessions to help businesses understand the customer’s online behaviour and experience.

This platform’s analytics capabilities include anomaly detection, struggle analysis and journey analytics, allowing organizations to identify pain points, optimize user interfaces and improve conversion rates. It’s also useful for detecting and resolving issues that affect customer experience, such as usability flaws or technical glitches.

6. Qualtrics XM

Qualtrics is a customer experience management software that allows organizations to capture and analyse customer feedback across multiple channels. It’s also known for its robust research and survey capabilities, providing deep insights into customer preferences, behaviours and sentiments.

 

Qualtrics Contact Center Analytics Dashboard
Qualtrics Contact Centre Analytics Dashboard

 

This platform combines data analytics with a user-friendly interface, allowing  businesses to conduct complex research, track customer journey analytics and identify key drivers of customer satisfaction and loyalty. It also offers features like survey design, targeting and data visualization.

7. Salesforce

Salesforce is a well-known customer relationship management platform that offers a suite of solutions to enhance CX. At its core, Salesforce provides an integrated platform that allows businesses to connect with customers in a more personalized and efficient way across various channels.

 

Salesforce Einstein Copilot Interface
Salesforce Einstein Copilot Interface

 

This platform combines sales, service, marketing and analytics tools, allowing companies to gain a 360-degree view of their customers. It also has the ability to automate complex business processes, deliver powerful data insights and customize solutions to fit specific business needs.

8. HubSpot

HubSpot is a holistic customer experience platform that specializes in inbound marketing, sales and service software. It offers tools designed to attract, engage and delight customers throughout the entire journey.

This platform’s strength lies in its ability to integrate CRM, email marketing, social media management, content management and customer service functionalities into one solution, providing businesses with a comprehensive view of their customer interactions and data. The platform also excels in automating and streamlining marketing campaigns, managing sales pipelines and offering exceptional customer support.

Future Outlook for Customer Experience

Crowley said he expects a few areas within customer experience to grow and continue to evolve in the coming years — such as AI-based technology and personalization. “There will undoubtedly be increasing personalization in customer experiences, as AI allows more and more customers to be treated like individuals at scale,” he explained.

He also added that the importance of holistic customer experience will continue to be represented in organizational changes, where companies increasingly recognize that, to provide great CX, all the people who impact different aspects of the journey should be united under one vertical to prevent slow downs in communication and siloed thinking.

“We see this trend evidenced in customer support (and even customer marketing), organizations growing their organizational mandates into areas previously isolated from them, such as social media, online communities, and voice of the customer programs,” he said.

By Michelle Hawley

Michelle Hawley is an experienced journalist who specializes in reporting on the impact of technology on society. As a senior editor at Simpler Media Group and a reporter for CMSWire and Reworked, she provides in-depth coverage of a range of important topics including employee experience, leadership, customer experience, marketing and more. With an MFA in creative writing and background in inbound marketing, she offers unique insights on the topics of leadership, customer experience, marketing and employee experience. Michelle previously contributed to publications like The Press Enterprise and The Ladders. She currently resides in Pennsylvania with her two dogs.

Sourced from CMSWIRE

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‘Butterfly effect’ customer journeys: how algorithms change everything

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By Sam Huston 

Dept’s Sam Huston charts the complexity of the modern customer journey. It’s one, Huston argues, that is constantly moved by the ripples of algorithmic dominance.

The convergence of brand and performance media creates butterfly effects across the consumer journey. This means that even small changes in a marketing campaign can have significant, unpredictable consequences. For example, a study by Google found that a personalized ad can increase click-through rates by up to 20%. However, if the same ad is shown to a consumer who has already purchased the product, it could backfire and damage the brand’s reputation.

The divergence of individual media consumption habits is further exacerbating this butterfly effect. In the past, consumers were more likely to consume media in a linear fashion, meaning they would see the same ads multiple times. This made it easier for marketers to build brand awareness and positive sentiment. However, today’s consumers are much more likely to consume media in a nonlinear fashion, meaning that they may only see an ad once or twice. This makes it more difficult for marketers to reach their target audiences and to have a lasting impact.

Culture at the speed of algorithms

Algorithms are playing an increasingly important role in this new marketing landscape. They’re used to target consumers with personalized ads, to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and to make predictions about consumer behavior. In some cases, algorithms can even have a direct impact on product sales and brand adoption.

For example, a study by Nielsen found that consumers are more likely to trust recommendations from friends and family than traditional advertising. However, an algorithm can use social media data to identify which consumers are most likely to be influenced by their friends and family, and then target them with personalized ads that are more likely to be effective. Culture now moves at the speed of algorithms, and Brands need to be prepared to move at the same speed reacting to the butterfly effect in real time.

The great convergence

The convergence of brand and performance media, the divergence of individual media consumption habits, and the growing importance of algorithms are all creating a new marketing landscape that is more complex and unpredictable than ever before. Marketers who understand and adapt to this new landscape will be the ones who are most successful in the years to come. However, those unprepared for this new reality may find themselves at a significant disadvantage.

Need convincing? Here’s some cold, hard data for you:

  • A study by Salesforce found that 70% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that they have interacted with on social media.
  • A study by Gartner found that by 2023, 80% of marketing budgets will be spent on digital channels.
  • A study by the World Economic Forum found that by 2025, artificial intelligence will create 133m new jobs – and displace 75m others.

These data points suggest that the future of marketing is increasingly digital and data-driven. Marketers who embrace these trends will be well-positioned to succeed in the years to come. Those unprepared for this new reality may find themselves at a significant disadvantage.

Feature Image Credit: According to Dept, the modern customer journey is buffeted by butterfly effects of algorithms and media convergence / Drz via Unsplash

By Sam Huston 

Sourced from The Drum

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3 Ways Ecommerce Brands Can Use AI for Personalization

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By Shane O’Neill

How AI is revolutionizing ecommerce, from personalized ads to dynamic pricing and enhanced customer support.

The Gist

  • AI powerhouse. AI for personalization enhances individualized ecommerce experiences.
  • Tech advantage. Machine learning dynamically adapts prices, boosting consumer appeal.
  • Customer support. AI-enabled chatbots provide personalized, emotionally intelligent assistance.

Attention ecommerce brands: The days of blanketing consumers with vaguely relevant ads are over.

Seven out of 10 consumers now expect brands to personalize ads and product recommendations, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen, according to McKinsey research.

In response, nine out of 10 businesses, including Coca-Cola, Netflix and Sephora, are investing in the practice of using artificial intelligence (AI) for personalization to give consumers a one-to-one experience, or something close to it.

In a nutshell, personalization in ecommerce uses data to show customers products and deals tailored just for them. Instead of asking shoppers to sift through a list of products, personalization uses a customer’s purchase history and browsing behaviour with the brand to suggest the most likely item that person would buy.

To return the favour, 78% of consumers are likely to make repeat purchases from companies that personalize, according to the same McKinsey report mentioned above.

Yet personalization will only boost customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and sales if it’s executed precisely. And to do that requires culling insights from droves of customer data that humans simply cannot process and analyse manually.

And this is where artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) come into play for ecommerce brands.

AI for Personalization in Ecommerce

Personalization in ecommerce is still possible without AI, but it relies on grouping customers into “personas” based on shared demographics or interests. While this is an adequate approach, today’s consumer can sniff out when they’re being marketed to as a persona rather than an individual.

AI-based personalization is much more specific, using advanced algorithms to scan volumes of customer data and deliver information to you based on your own specific behaviour.

“AI’s ability to process data in real-time and adapt on the fly to create personalized experiences is a key advantage for ecommerce brands,” said Kristin Smith, managing director and retail commerce lead at Deloitte Digital. “It also helps that AI isn’t prone to human mistakes and can work 24/7.”

With advanced personalization now expected by the majority of consumers, ecommerce brands have a variety of ways to utilize AI to deliver tailored shopping experiences. Here are three of them.

1. Product Recommendations for the Individual

One of the clearest examples of using AI for personalization are the tailored product recommendations we see in emails or when logging on to our favourite ecommerce brand’s web site.

Here, complex machine learning algorithms mine your previous purchases, cart adds, product reviews, and product interactions, and generate personalized product recommendations in real time.

This customer data becomes the basis for training an algorithm that continues to learn and improve on the accuracy of recommendations as it receives new data.

Example to Emulate: Netflix

Netflix is a recommendation trailblazer. The streaming giant’s recommendation engine, called NRE (Netflix Recommendation Engine), uses algorithms to analyse data from each member’s viewing history and generates hyper personalized movie and TV show recommendations.

2. Automated Dynamic Pricing

Constantly adjusting product prices is a necessary but time-consuming task. By incorporating machine learning into pricing, ecommerce brands can automatically adjust prices in real time based on their own manufacturing costs, competitor’s prices, market demand and seasonality.

AI-based dynamic pricing benefits consumers by:

  • Monitoring the competition and adjusting prices to ensure customers get a fair price.
  • Offering real-time personalized discounts based on a customer’s behavior. For instance, if a person continually shows interest in a product, a dynamic pricing algorithm could entice that person with a time-limited discount.

Example to Emulate: Amazon

Amazon is the king of AI-based dynamic pricing. The ecommerce giant uses machine learning to update the prices of millions of products several times every day. Its repricing algorithm factors in product demand, stock availability and customer behavior. This allows Amazon to consistently offer the most competitive prices.

3. Personalized Customer Support via AI-Powered Chatbots

Using NLP and sentiment analysis, today’s chatbots understand not just text but also the emotion behind customer support requests.

When you combine sentiment, access to customer data and speedy responses, it’s easy to see why chatbots are now a personalization tool. Today’s chatbots can greet customers by name, recommend products and discounts based on purchase and browsing data, and even help customers complete online purchases.

Example to Emulate: Sephora

Most ecommerce chatbots can handle rudimentary customer inquiries, but the more innovative chatbots also serve as shopping assistants.

Cosmetics retailer Sephora is a prime example. Sephora’s website chatbot answers questions about returns and exchanges. But it’s also a virtual assistant that asks customers questions about their skin tone and makeup preferences and then gives tailored recommendations.

The Big AI Personalization Challenge: Relevant Data

The benefits of using AI for personalization are clear, but the success of your strategy hinges on your data.

Kristin Smith of Deloitte recommends that ecommerce brands ask themselves the following questions regarding customer data:

  • What is the quality and source of the data your brand is trying to use?
  • Does the brand have permission to collect and use the data they have?
  • How actionable and granular is the data?

“Many organizations have customer data only at a high level,” Smith said. “But high-level, demographic data does not always translate to actionable insights for personalization.”

In addition to having the skilled staff in place to implement and maintain AI tools, the entire marketing and data team should always ensure that the data the AI algorithms are using is unbiased and specific enough to actually help the customer connect with your brand and buy from you consistently.

“There will be a rabbit hole of ideas for data points AI can collect for personalization,” said Derric Haynie, head of demand generation at Pipe17 and co-founder of Ecommerce Tech.

“Maybe you’re going to test new products based on previous purchase history. Or test personalized emails based on when customers last visited the site. There’s a lot to personalize, and the nature of personalization is recognizing each person has a different customer journey, and catering to it.”

Feature Image Credit: Blue Planet Studio

By Shane O’Neill

Shane O’Neill is an award-winning journalist and content marketer with more than 20 years of experience covering digital transformation, content marketing, social media marketing, artificial intelligence, and ecommerce. His work has been recognized nationally, earning an ASBPE Award for Blogging and a Min Editorial & Design Award for Best Online Article. Shane’s experience as both a B2B journalist at CIO.com and InformationWeek and as a content marketing director at tech startups gives him a unique insider/outsider perspective on tech innovation. Connect with Shane O’Neill: https://twitter.com/smoneill 

Sourced from CMSWIRE

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Why Brands Failed to Deliver on Welcome Emails

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By Chad S. White

Here’s what happened after I signed up for over 100 promotional emails. There were some surprises.

The Gist

  • Forget something? Testing out 100 email signups, more than 8% of brands didn’t send a welcome email, missing a valuable opportunity to deepen the relationship with their new subscribers through promotions, education, profiling, expansion or evangelism.
  • Send a series. Nearly half of brands sent a welcome series, with subsequent emails including reminders to use discounts, explanations of brand strengths, pitches for loyalty programs, encouragements to download mobile apps or behind-the-scenes looks at their organizations.
  • Welcoming fails. Some brands missed the mark by using senseless or overly corporate sender names in their welcome emails, while others failed to seasonally optimize or personalize their messages, or had quality control problems.

I shared takeaways from having signed up for promotional emails from 100 brands in my last column, so for this one I want to share what happened next: I received a lot of welcome emails!

But that’s not to say there weren’t some surprises. There were. Here are my key takeaways and the major opportunities I see for brands when it comes to crafting better onboarding experiences.

1. Shocking Number of Brands Didn’t Send a Welcome

More than 8% of the brands didn’t send a welcome email. Instead, they just dropped me into their promotional mail stream. Not only is that slightly jarring, it passes up a big opportunity to deepen the relationship in a way that your promotional emails just can’t.

Here are the five principle messaging strategies for welcome email calls-to-action:

  1. Promotion: trying to drive a purchase through incentives or product promotions.
  2. Education: trying to deepen brand affinity and loyalty by educating the new subscriber about your brand’s history, products, services, values and social causes.
  3. Profiling: trying to to gather more information about the new subscriber so the brand can send more relevant messaging.
  4. Expansion: trying to get the new subscriber to connect with the brand through additional channels.
  5. Evangelism: trying to get the new subscriber to refer their friends or colleagues.

For most of those, messaging them immediately after signup is the ideal time to drive action and establish a healthy long-term relationship.

2. Nearly Half of Brands Sent a Welcome Series

In contrast to brands that didn’t send even one welcome email were those at the other end of the spectrum that sent a welcome series of two, three or even more emails.

What were the subsequent emails in those welcome series about? Brands included:

  • Reminders to use the discount they included in their first welcome, which was very common for retail and ecommerce brands.
  • Explanations of their brand strengths in terms of what’s unique about their products and how they do business, which was popular among direct-to-consumer brands.
  • Pitches to join their loyalty programs, which was also common for retail and ecommerce brands.
  • Encouragements to download their mobile app.
  • Behind-the-scenes looks at their organizations, which was most common among service-oriented brands.

Surprisingly, none tried to collect any preferences from me or profile me in any way using polls, surveys or quizzes. That’s a missed opportunity, as that kind of zero-party data can power personalization and segmentation during a time in the relationship when there’s little to no first-party data yet.

But the bigger opportunity here is that if you’re only sending a single welcome email, consider testing ways to expand it into a series.

3. Sender Names Could Have Been Better

For some brands, their welcome emails felt like they were sent by a different department or marketing group because of the sender names they used. For example, some brands had senselessly different sender names from the one used for their promotional emails, adding “Inc.,” “Company,” and “USA” to the end of the brand names for only their welcome emails. It made their welcome emails appear unnecessarily corporate and stiff.

That’s not to say that there aren’t opportunities to extend your sender name with purpose. Extending your sender name for your triggered emails, in particular, helps them stand out — not only from your other emails, but from all the other emails in your subscribers’ inboxes. Yet, only two of the brands I received welcome emails from extended their sender name. One used “BrandName Welcome” and the other “BrandName | Welcome.”

If you’re not currently extending your from name for your welcome emails, consider testing it and seeing how much of a lift you get. Adding an extension like “Welcome” is a sensible place to start.

Again, avoid overly corporate-sounding extensions. For example, some other welcome emails I received used sender name formats such as “BrandName Account,” “BrandName Account Services,” and even longer “BrandName Account Member Services.” Another used “BrandName E-mail Subscriptions,” with the dated hyphenation of email. While all of those are descriptive and accurate, they’re not particularly friendly sounding. They seem like they were written by lawyers, not marketers.

4. And There Were Smaller Opportunities to Improve, Too

In addition to those three big areas for improvement, brands sent welcome emails that…

  • Weren’t seasonally relevant. Only one brand seasonally optimized its welcome email, adding in imagery and content to match the season in which I signed up.
  • Rarely used emoji in their subject lines. 😢 Only 13% of brands used emoji in any of their welcome email subject lines. That seems a bit low, given their usage in promotional emails.
  • Included little personalization. Many brands required my name when I signed up, but few used it. For example, only 3% of brands used it in the subject lines of their welcome emails. First-name personalization isn’t great personalization, but if you ask for my name, use it.
  • Had quality control problems. One brand’s welcome email was sent twice, and another’s contained multiple broken images (but thankfully lots of HTML text, too). Not a good look.

Final Thoughts on Welcome Emails

Your welcome email — like all of your automations — are living campaigns. They need regular care and attention.

In fact, this goes double for your welcome emails since they are pivotal to making a good first impression and setting the tone for the emails that follow. If you haven’t reviewed your welcome emails lately, sign up for your email program with fresh eyes and see what improvements you can make or test.

By Chad S. White

Chad S. White is the author of Email Marketing Rules and Head of Research for Oracle Marketing Consulting, a global full-service digital marketing agency inside of Oracle.

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Erik Smith: Top Customer Experience Trends to Watch in 2023

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Contact centre leaders who want to improve the way their teams engage with customers this year should keep one critical objective front and centre.

According to RingCentral’s latest State of Customer Experience Technology report, contact centre leaders who want to improve the way their teams engage with customers in the coming year should keep one critical business objective front and centre.

“Customer satisfaction is still the most important objective leaders should focus on,” said Erik Smith, Digital Principal, RingCentral. “If you want to retain customers and attract new ones, you must get this right. It’s easy to get caught up in cost savings and the latest artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, but always look to evolve your contact centre through the lens of providing great customer service.”

RingCentral is a provider of cloud-based communication solutions based in Belmont, California and a sponsor of Simpler Media Group’s virtual Digital Experience Summit (DXS). During the conference, Smith presented the session, “Top Digital CX Technology Trends Heading Into 2023.” Here, he shares with us some of the most important ideas uncovered in the report and how contact centre leaders can use these findings to enhance the support experiences they provide to their customers.

Tech Spend and Channel Preferences in the Contact Centre

CMSWire: During your presentation, you discussed findings from your State of Customer Experience Technology report. Where are contact centre leaders investing their technology spend in the coming year?

Erik Smith: We’re seeing an increasing trend towards conversational AI and other self-service functionality in order to meet changing customer communication preferences, and in some cases, find more economic ways to handle inbound contact centre volume. We’re facing lots of uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment, and that can be worrisome. Choosing your new technology tools wisely and through the lens of enhancing customer service can help alleviate some of that worry.

CMSWire: Which digital channels are people engaging in most for their support needs?

Smith: It largely depends on the industry, but the original three — chat, email and SMS — remain prevalent, followed by direct messaging channels on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We’ve been encouraging companies to look into Apple Business Chat (now Apple Messaging for Business) and WhatsApp, even for domestic use cases, and finding that many don’t yet understand how easy these channels make communication for their own customer base, which should be the goal.

Why Omnichannel Support Is Key

CMSWire: As customers continue to raise their expectations, offering support across channels has become table stakes. How many organizations are still failing to meet these expectations for omnichannel support?

Smith: There’s still a wide spectrum of omnichannel maturity in most industries, with tech leading the way in digital communication options for their customers. Companies that are feeling pressure to improve should seek to understand the benefits of the various digital channels and how to properly deploy them — not just jump into the deep end with no plan. That can backfire quickly.

CMSWire: What are the biggest challenges organizations face when providing support through email, chat, voice and other channels, and how can they overcome them?

Smith: There are a few tricks to perfecting a strong omnichannel approach. The first is ensuring that your agents have the right skills for adding new digital channels. Communicating on Twitter is quite a bit different than answering the phone, with different consequences for making an error.

 

 

The second is providing smart self-service options for easy-to-answer questions so your agents are free to handle the higher priority, and often more challenging, issues. The sooner you can connect a frustrated customer to an agent with the correct answer, the better chance for resolution, and for retaining them as a customer. And finally, provide your agents with the tools necessary to serve your customers competently while providing coaching for continuous improvement.

CMSWire: During your presentation, you discussed how more organizations are investing in AI, yet it hasn’t been consistently implemented in the contact center. How can AI be used most effectively, and what can organizations do to ensure they successfully incorporate these capabilities into their systems and processes?

Smith: As individual customers, we’ve all had frustrating experiences with bots, whether on a website or in an interactive voice response (IVR) system. There are many pitfalls to nailing this strategy. Once you’ve had a bad experience, either as a customer or as someone trying to implement AI, you’re less likely to try again. It’s just human nature.

Fortunately, the tech is improving and there isn’t much you can’t automate these days. We often recommend starting small with the easiest automation options—such as FAQs, password reset, and even appointment scheduling — and really nailing that. Once you have it completely dialed in and you’re comfortable with the technology, then seek to expand to more complex options.

Start and End with Your Customer

CMSWire: What does workforce engagement management (WEM) mean to you, and what are the benefits of implementing this approach?  

Smith: To us, WEM is all about continuous improvement, both in the tools we give our agents and teams to self-improve, as well as the management tools to analyse, diagnose, and coach those agents and teams. You should be asking questions like: How do we optimize? How do we improve at the individual level so our entire organization gets better? What can we learn from our customer feedback that we can scale to improve our company? There’s so much valuable data that comes through the contact center, and we want to capitalize on those insights.

CMSWire: What are the top recommendations contact center leaders should take away from this report to help them more effectively engage with customers across channels?

Smith: I’m going to end where I started — with the customer. Isn’t that why we’re all here? How do we get customers, keep them happy, and retain them for life? Same thing we’ve been doing forever, just now through different mediums. The more you spend time learning the nuances of each channel or technology, the more comfortable you’ll be applying the same timeless best practices of customer service.

 

By CMSWIRE STUDIO

The CMSWire STUDIO team transforms clients’ data, concepts and thought leadership into accessible and engaging articles that appeal to the broader CMSWire audience and are optimized for findability. These works are created independently of CMSWire’s editorial operations.

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Design Thinking From the Start: Planning CX With Strategy

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By Nathan Eddy
Building a customer-centric future is more important now than ever. Agile CX designs that can keep up with changing customer preferences are essential.

The race to customer experience (CX) excellence has been on for quite some time, but today it’s more apparent than ever that the online experience can really make or break a brand.

There’s very little room for error, and this is even truer in an economic downturn when customers are more cautious with their spending.

Having a customer-driven, solution-focused approach to CX design is critical to delivering the experiences customers want — not the ones you think they want.

Marketing and CX experts need to be aligned on what both see as the common customer problems, customer bright spots and the priorities to reinforce and fix those areas to best work together to incorporate design thinking.

Boosting CX Agility With Design Thinking

“The secret to increasing engagement and reducing dropoff is pretty simple: understanding what customers are trying to do, and how they want to go about it,” explained Niki Hall, CMO of Contentsquare.

She said the benefit of the design thinking approach is that is has a built-in strategy to test, troubleshoot and improve — key attributes of CX agility, which has proven critical in the face of shifting consumer trends.

The short form of the design thinking process can be articulated in five steps or phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test.

“The whole design thinking methodology is underpinned by empathy — in other words, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes,” Hall said.

When it comes to building standout experiences that can adapt to shifting consumer priorities, having that ability to understand customers in real time and to surface friction and bottlenecks along the customer journey is key.

“That’s the beauty of customer experience data — with a holistic understanding of why customers behave the way they do, CX teams are equipped to experiment, iterate and improve,” she noted.

Design Thinking Offers Consistent Approach

Chad Storlie, senior director and analyst at Gartner, explained there are two primary reasons why design thinking is important for CX.

“First, design thinking is built around the customer and CX improvements all revolve around determining and delivering to the customer needs along the customer journey,” he said. “Second, design thinking is a consistent approach for observing, understanding and delivering to customer needs.”

He said this consistent approach fits very well with other customer experience tools such as personas, journey maps and customer experience scorecards.

“Design thinking is not a ‘giant killer’ for instant customer experience success,” he cautioned. “It is a rigorous research and development process that must be fully adhered to, so customer needs are clearly understood, developed, tested and delivered for customer success.”

Customer Needs Must Be the Focus

Just like in customer experience, the success of design thinking is built within the clear and precise understanding of what the customer needs to be successful at the design point or at the customer journey stage, which is usually encapsulated within the empathize and define steps.

Storlie said these are the critically essential elements because if you do not fully understand what the customer needs, then all the following steps in the design thinking process will be flawed because you did not fully understand what the customer needed to be successful.

“For example, if I am building a mobile application targeted at rural farmers, I have key considerations for the daily work of a farmer,” he said. ”If I don’t make the application UX easy to use when the farmers are wearing gloves or when they are in a low availability of Wi-Fi area, I am fundamentally misunderstanding my customer base in my design process.”

Therefore, the design thinking process should really emphasize customer observation, customer “go and see,” and customer interviews to make sure that they have identified the correct customer needs.

A Companywide Commitment to Design Thinking

From Hall’s perspective, design thinking is more than just a tactic; for it to be impactful, it needs to be an organizationwide mindset.

“When it comes to building outstanding customer experiences, customer understanding needs to be at the heart of all decision-making, and across the organization,” she explained.

Design thinking provides a framework and methodology to ensure impactful action, but it really boils down to having a human-driven, solution-focused, iterative process — something that can benefit any innovation and troubleshooting strategy.

Storlie said design thinking must focus on the consistent end-to-end execution of a process that will deliver for the customer.

“Design thinking will extend into internal teams that need to have their own internal redesign process to meet the customer needs that design thinking steps have revealed,” he noted.

With this understanding, design thinking stakeholders must include the internal functional teams that are directly and indirectly involved with delivering the improved process originating from the design thinking process.

He pointed out the inclusion of all direct and indirect internal stakeholders also significantly increases the likelihood of adoption because stakeholders are identified and included in the design thinking process from the beginning.

“The inclusion of internal stakeholders also makes the design thinking team more effective because the internal stakeholders can provide their expertise and historical experience to ensure an effective design thinking product,” Storlie said.

Building a Customer-Centric Future

Hall explained business success in the customer experience era hinges on understanding customers and being able to adapt as quickly as their priorities and preferences do.

“Consumers have never had more influence and agency over the digital experience, and this is only increasing,” she said. “A keen understanding of customers and the ability to drive intelligent and impactful action across the organization will be key to keeping up with the pace of digital transformation.”

Storlie added the real reason that customer experience and marketing professionals should be excited about the growing appreciation of design thinking is that it is another important step placing the customer at the centre of an organization.

“The transition from a product-centric approach to a customer-centric approach is a challenge for every organization,” Storlie explained. “The use of design thinking is another important tool that helps an organization understand, create options, test and deploy solutions that will make a real difference for customers.”

By Nathan Eddy

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How Digital Marketers Can Do More With Less

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Why going back to the basics of customer experience can give marketers the efficiency leverage they need.

In the last several months, tech marketers have faced the immense challenge of having to achieve more, but with fewer resources. As companies contend with dropping valuations and brace for a recessionary environment with layoffs and budget cuts, CMOs are being forced to squeeze more growth opportunities out of significantly smaller budgets.

But the fact is that making every penny count with channel optimizations and productivity boosts can only go so far, so marketers have to find ways to make their investments work harder, and micro-optimizations simply won’t cut it.

There is, however, an opportunity for leaders to make a bigger impact on the bottom line with a more holistic approach to serving customers; many are going back to the basics to solidify their foundation, such as improving core customer experiences via online storefronts.

A recent study from the SaaS (software as a service)-based website operations platform Pantheon (as reported in Business Wire) shows that 86% of marketing and IT leaders are looking to increase their websites’ agility because they recognize that boosting the efficacy of this mission-critical asset is one of the best ways to leverage existing customers cost effectively. Delivering elevated and value-oriented digital experiences is a surefire way of keeping visitors satisfied and engaged, and increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can result in a 25% boost to the bottom line, according to a Bain & Company report.

Digital force multipliers like websites can simultaneously improve customer service, boost conversion rates and increase the efficiency and success of associated marketing teams. So, although the inclination may be to save costs by pausing digital investments, I’d argue that it’s more important than ever to ensure you’ve got those basics covered.

A Frictionless Digital Experience

Today’s customers are more discerning than ever. They’re looking for value, of course (their budgets have likely been cut, too), but are also seeking fast and easy paths to getting what they need, and there are few things bottom-line worse than a web experience that leaves customers wringing their hands in frustration and despair.
People remember these bad experiences, and 61% will head to a competitor after a single bad encounter, according to zendesk’s CX Trends 2022 report. And while customers may forgive mistakes here and there, particularly if brand loyalty is strong, the hard truth is that digital expectations have skyrocketed since the pandemic, and cheap attempts to win people over will never compensate for the lack of a core customer-oriented experience.

The pathway to achieving this is not necessarily about ramping up spend or optimizing channels; a more substantive approach is ensuring that your online storefront (arguably the most significant marketing asset you own) is getting the fundamentals right — it’s a long-term bet that will pay off.

Focus on Delivering Value

When the SaaS model of software delivery launched in the late ’90s, no one really understood it. Wall Street was focused exclusively on enterprise software, and customers were used to paying for products and services upfront in exchange for value that could only be recovered over many years of use.

SaaS completely disrupted this model by tying the destinies of the vendor and customer together with ongoing fees collected in exchange for ongoing value. Today, customers come with a built-in expectation of this kind of ongoing value delivery.

In the health sector, this expectation has resulted in the rapid deployment of digital experiences where customers get something immediately for a fee. Mercury Health, for example, found ways to deliver greater value by leveraging its investment in more efficient website development to get patients access to treatment providers at a time when many competitors were falling behind. Using a SaaS model to optimize its web tools and processes (as well as scale its human power), it reduced weeks or months of website development time down to single-day turnaround across a portfolio of over 200 websites. The payoff was a 70% increase in speed to market.

Delivering value doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. If you get the basics right, you’re already well ahead in the game. Get them wrong, and customers will go elsewhere.

A Human Approach

Remember Google+, the platform that launched in 2011 and shuttered in 2018? Despite nearly limitless resources, the parent company failed spectacularly in its efforts to capture social media audience share, even with many of the best product designers and engineers on staff, not to mention huge brand clout globally.

The trouble is that ideas that make sense on paper are often incredibly difficult to pull off, and Google+ was no exception, not because Google is bad at making software products (it’s world-class), but because it wasn’t able to understand its customers well enough to design this particular product with substantial unique value. All the money and talent in the world couldn’t make up for the gap in empathy and nuanced understanding that prevented customer acquisition and retention.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of solving problems with optimizations and strategy, but you simply can’t substitute a solid understanding of customers’ needs with shiny objects. Figuring out what web visitors want to accomplish on your site, and making it easy for them to do so, is the kind of leverage needed to compete in today’s online marketplace. One of the most remarkable statistics in a 2021 market research survey by OpenText and 3Gem (as reported by strategy) was that 67% of U.S. consumers are more likely to buy from brands that treat them like an individual.

I’m not advising the relaunch of your entire website, but instead a more iterative and less cost-prohibitive approach. That said, you can’t just paper over the parts that are leaky; go back to the basics of your customer experience and take a long, hard look at its foundation. That’s where to unlock the marketing leverage you’re looking for.

Feature Image Credit: GaudiLab | Getty Images

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6 Proven Business Marketing Strategies to Grow During a Recession

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Protect your business from the looming recession with these business marketing strategies! Help ensure your business has long-term growth.

In 2022, the United States is fortunate enough not to be in a recession. However, the odds of a recession in 2023 are on the rise. Experts predict there’s currently a 30% chance of recession, and that number has doubled over three months.

As a large or small business, it’s essential to have a plan if a recession hits. Luckily, there are several recession-proof business marketing strategies that you can use. These marketing ideas will help your business continue to find success, even during a recession. Continue reading, and find out how you can fuel your business growth:

Strategy 1: Focus on customer experience

Today’s market values authenticity and excellent customer service. Around 65% of Millennials are willing to pay more for customer experience.

The best businesses know that happy customers give great reviews and spread the word quickly. It’s much easier to market your business when customers have already mentioned your company as one of their favourites. In fact, word-of-mouth marketing is a critical factor in 74% of purchase decisions. It drives six trillion dollars of spending every year.

By focusing on customer experience, you’re saying that you want to be the best in the market. There are a few ways you can improve the customer experience:

Provide quality products: In the event of a recession, customers will be even more careful about what they spend money on. Make sure your products and services are of high quality and that customers will be happy with them. This puts you in the good graces of your target market, because you’re providing a quality product or service.

For example, if you’re selling shoes, you need to make sure that the shoes are made of high-quality materials that will last for a long time.

If you’re providing a service, you need to ensure that your services are always completed promptly.

Provide high-quality customer service: Customer service is dying in America. Everyone talks about making customers happy; however, many companies fail to deliver the expected level of customer service.

You’ll never be able to make everyone happy. However, you need to make sure you’re delivering excellent customer service. Make sure that when customers walk in the door, you do everything within your power to show them you’re honest, reliable, quick, efficient and friendly.

Sometimes the best customer service you can provide is just listening. Take the time to really listen to your customers and build a partnership with them.

Always look for ways to improve: As a business, you should constantly find ways to improve while still providing high-quality services. What can you do to make your products or services better? Can you reduce the price? Can you reduce the wait time? Can you provide a guarantee on your products or services? This is the time to go above and beyond to impress your target market. Let them know that you’re different from your competitors.

Strategy 2: Improve your conversion rates with automatic emails

All businesses can improve their conversion rates. The most important thing is to ensure that you’re sending out automatic emails to your customers.

By promoting your content through email marketing, you can ensure that you’re reaching each one of your customers and getting them excited about your products.

Strategy 3: Analyse your competitors

Analysing your competitors is one of the smartest strategies you can use. By analysing your competitors’ content and their backend search engine optimization (SEO), you can capitalize on what they fail to do.

Strategy 4: Use social media to engage with customers

Social media is a fantastic way to get your business in front of the eyes of larger audiences. By having a robust social presence and a solid social media strategy, you can drive interested consumers to your online store.

By ensuring that you’re interacting with customers on social media and establishing yourself as the authority in the niche, you can guarantee that you’re getting the best possible sales and reviews that your business can get.

It’s also important to build a strong social media presence through exclusive content. It’s not enough to simply post your content online. You need to ensure that it’s only available to your customers on your social media sites. This will encourage a strong relationship between your customers and your brand, which will drive up your conversion rates by encouraging customers to share your content with their friends and family.

Strategy 5: Use content marketing to attract customers

Content marketing is a strategy that allows you to attract potential customers by providing them with informative and valuable content. With content marketing, you can reach a larger audience of interested consumers and drive sales and traffic to your online store. Here are some tips:

Create a blog and keep it updated: Creating a blog and keeping it updated is an excellent content marketing strategy you can use to attract interested consumers. A blog is a fantastic way to share knowledge and information with your customers, and by blogging and keeping your blog updated, you can guarantee that you’re always being current and up-to-date with the market. Blogs are also a fantastic way to build backlinks to your site, which helps influence your search engine ranking.

Publish content that inspires customer interaction: Publishing content that inspires customer interaction is one of the most effective ways to improve your conversion rates. You can build a next-generation marketing strategy by creating content that encourages customers to share their own experiences with your products.

Strategy 6: Don’t forget to track your progress

With this final strategy, you can see if your marketing strategies are working. By using a backend analytics tool, you can confirm that you’re actually seeing growth. This will allow you to tell if the marketing strategies that you’re using are really working.

There are many business marketing strategies out there. However, by using the right strategies, you can ensure that your marketing strategy is recession-proof.

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How brands can stand out in the customer experience economy

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By Morgan Mitchell

Online customer experience is changing like never before. So, brands need to decide: adapt or die, writes BOSCO™’s Morgan Mitchell.

The new customer experience economy is set to be the making or the breaking of not just newer brands but established ones too. Since 2020, the customer experience (CX) online has evolved dramatically. The need for a winning online CX is essential for success and is proving to be one of the most important and fundamental elements of marketing in today’s digital landscape.

With 81% of retailers increasing their investment in CX over the past two years, what does that mean for brands, consumers and the long-term relationship between the two?

The BOSCO™ index measures the online footprint of brands and benchmarks how effective they are with their paid and organic media channels. Using third-party data, BOSCO™ generates a score between 0-1,000 to determine how successful brands are in the digital space.

What is online CX and what does it include?

Online CX refers to the digital customer experience of your brand. It includes every stage of the consumer buying journey, including pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase.

Online CX is a huge part of brand perception as it encompasses every interaction a customer has with you digitally. That could be from first finding your Instagram page to using your online chat function to troubleshoot an order problem. While that may sound overwhelming, online CX is really just about providing a persona to your brand and carrying this through every customer-facing element of the business. And as we’re sure you know, consistency is key.

Why is online CX changing?

Unsurprisingly by now, the online and digital space is changing. Major steps have been brought forward by the Covid-19 pandemic as the world moved solely online as a result of international lockdowns. The need for online customer support skyrocketed and brands that previously didn’t have a digital-first approach scrambled to catch up.

Plus, it’s getting even more difficult for brands to retain consumers. 94% of sales and marketing professionals say that their business is effective at nurturing newer relationships during the ‘interaction’ and ‘awareness’ stage of the buyer journey. But that all changes at the advocacy stage, where professionals feel they are only 77% effective. What that tells us is that it’s harder to sustain long-term consumer relationships. This is where online CX comes into play.

So, how are brands adapting and strategizing to fit this new customer experience economy? What can we learn from these insights and consumer behaviour patterns?

Instant messaging & online chat functions

As the pandemic hit in 2020, consumers moved their lives entirely online in a way that hadn’t been seen before. We couldn’t pop into a shop to see a product, make a return, or just speak to an employee. Phone lines became jammed, so consumers turned instead to online messaging.

Since then, brands and retailers alike have amped-up their online messaging capabilities. Whether that be a live chat function on their site or through their social media, messaging became the go-to way to interact with brands online. In fact, between 2019 and 2020, social messaging rose in popularity by 110% – that’s huge.

Implement an omnichannel CX approach

Businesses fail to form meaningful, positive relationships with consumers when processes become tricky to navigate. For example, support tickets are passed from department to department without proper follow-up.

Let’s put that into context. A consumer messages you on social media with a complaint. The social team pass this on to customer service where the consumer has to explain the issue again. This then gets passed on to a complaints department and once again, the consumer must explain the problem. This could go on and on, meanwhile, the consumer is becoming more and more annoyed at the lack of communication within your business.

Instead, an integrated omnichannel CX system is seamless. Agents can easily transfer customer messages between apps and departments without the need to start from the beginning every time. This creates an easy, problem-free interaction that solves problems quickly, efficiently and, most importantly, leaves the consumer with a positive experience.

It’s not just about problem-solving either. Great online CX is more about being proactive rather than reactive. A great example of omnichannel CX is Zara’s (BOSCO™ score: 731) use of ‘Store Mode’ in its app. This allows users to only see products available in their local Zara store which they can then buy online and pick up in that store on the same day. This real-time shopping perfectly blends both online and offline channels using GPS and QR technology to its advantage.

Be open and responsive to feedback

When it comes to consumer feedback, there tends to be only two options: incredibly positive or incredibly negative. No one bothers to leave feedback or a review for an average experience, but they have plenty to say when everything has either gone right or wrong.

Being open to and receiving feedback is a huge part of uncovering valuable insights into your consumer base. While you may think your online CX is bulletproof, your consumers are the people who can really put that to the test. What they have to say is a massive part of the digital evolution of your brand. Plus, that open-ended communication helps you to build that relationship further and patch up damaged ones. Often, your next clever CX move will be the result of real-time feedback directly from the consumers themselves.

Uber (BOSCO™ score: 738) is a leading example of using customer insights to improve its online CX. The business makes around 22,000 tweaks to its app every month to customize it in every city it operates in. It does this using incident and reliability reports to tailor how the app operates based on where its user is. This eliminates data problems early and lets users know it is listening and adapting.

The key to digital transformation

Standing out in the digital space isn’t easy, and with the rapidly changing online CX expectations of consumers, brands need to fast decide their strategy.

The first step is to stay up to date with changes and developments as they happen. Take note of other brands that are adapting their online CX well and look at how you can implement something similar. With 58% of consumers expecting more from services than they did pre-pandemic, the need for integrated, omnichannel CX with room for personalization is key to digital transformation.

BOSCO™ is an AI learning platform that integrates your cross-channel digital marketing data into one personalized dashboard. The data allows marketers to make better digital marketing spend decisions with the help of data-driven insights, forecasting and mapping tools. Unlock your BOSCO™ score, today.

By Morgan Mitchell

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Applications of Sentiment Analysis

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By Mitul Makadia

What is Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment analysis can be defined as analysing the positive or negative sentiment of the customer in text. The contextual analysis of identifying information helps businesses understand their customers’ social sentiment by monitoring online conversations.

1. Brand Monitoring 

A brand is not defined by the product it manufactures. It depends on how you build a brand by online marketing, social campaigning, content marketing, and customer support services. Getting full 360 views of how your customers view your product, company, or brand is one of the most important uses of sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analysis enables you to quantify the perception of potential customers. Analysing social media and surveys, you can get key insights about how your business is doing right or wrong for your customers.

Companies tend to use sentiment analysis as a powerful weapon to measure the impact of their products and campaigns on their customers and stakeholders. Brand monitoring allows you to have a wealth of insights from the conversions about your brand in the market. Sentiment analysis enables you to automatically categorize the urgency of all brand mentions and further route them to the designated team.

Keeping the feedback of the customer in knowledge, you can develop more appealing branding techniques and marketing strategies that can help make quick transitions.

    2. Customer Service 

Customer service companies often use sentiment analysis to automatically classify their user incoming calls into “urgent” and “not urgent” classes. The classification is based on the sentiments of the emails or proactively identifying the calls of frustrated customers.

The customer expects their experience with the companies to be intuitive, personal, and immediate. Therefore, the service providers focus more on the urgent calls to resolve users’ issues and thereby maintain their brand value. Therefore, analyse customer support interactions to make sure that your employees are following the appropriate process. Moreover, increase the efficiency of your services so that customers aren’t left waiting for support for longer periods.

As the customer service sector has become more automated using machine learning, understanding customers’ sentiments has become more critical than ever before. For the same reason, companies are opting for NLP-based chatbots as their first line of customer support to better grasp context and intent of the conversations.

    3. Finance and Stock Monitoring

It is said that “Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful.” But here, the question that arises: how do you know if others are fearful or greedy? Well, here, you can make use of the sentiment analysis technique. Making investments, especially in the business world, is quite tricky. The stocks and market are always on the edge of risks, but they can be condensed if you do correct research before investing.

For instance, if you are looking to invest in the automobile industry and are confused about choosing between company X and company Y, you can look at the sentiments received from the company for their latest products. It will help you to find the one that is performing better in the market.

    4. Business Intelligence Buildup

Digital marketing plays a prominent role in business. Social media often displays the reactions and reviews of the product. When you are available with the sentiment data of your company and new products, it is a lot easier to estimate your customer retention rate.

Sentiment analysis enables you to determine how your product performs in the market and what else is needed to improve your sales. You can also analyse the responses received from your competitors. Based on the survey generated, you can satisfy your customer’s needs in a better way. You can make immediate decisions that will help you to adjust to the present market situation.

Business intelligence is all about staying dynamic. Therefore, sentiment analysis gives you the liberty to run your business effectively. For example, if you come up with a big idea, you can test and analyse it before bringing life to it.

    5. Enhancing the Customer Experience

A satisfying customer experience means a higher chance of returning the customers. A successful business knows that it is important to take care of how they deliver compared to what they deliver.

Brand Monitoring offers us unfiltered and invaluable information on customer sentiment. However, you can also put this analysis on customer support interactions and surveys.

NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys help you gain feedback for your business with the simple question: Will you recommend this brand, product, or service to your friend or family? The output is a single score on the number scale. Businesses use these sentiment scores to analyse the customer as promoters, detractors, and passives.

Here the goal is to find the overall customer experience and elevate your customer to promoter level. Theoretically, include the phases as: will buy more, stay longer and refer to another customer.

The next step in the NPS survey is to ask survey participants to leave the score and seek open-ended responses, i.e., qualitative data. Qualitative surveys are far more challenging to analyse. Still, with the help of sentiment analysis, these texts can be classified into multiple categories, which offer further insights into customers’ opinions.

As mentioned earlier, the experience of the customers can either be positive, negative, or neutral. Depending on the customers’ reviews, you can categorize the data according to its sentiments. This classification will help you properly implement the product changes, customer support, services, etc.

Also, remember that getting a positive response to your product is not always enough. The customer support services of your company should always be impeccable irrespective of how phenomenal your services are.

    6. Market Research and Analysis

Business intelligence uses sentiment analysis to understand the subjective reasons why customers are or are not responding to something, whether the product, user experience, or customer support.

Sentiment analysis will enable you to have all kinds of market research and competitive analysis. It can make a huge difference whether you are exploring a new market or seeking an edge on the competition.

You can review your product online and compare them to your competition. You can also analyse the negative points of your competitors and use them to your advantage.

Sentiment analysis is used in sociology, psychology, and political science to analyse trends, opinions, ideological bias, gauge reaction, etc. A lot of these sentiment analysis applications are already up and running.

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By Mitul Makadia

Sourced from Data Science Central

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