5 strategies for improving customer experience

Customer experience is a measurement of how well a company guides its customers through the process of making a purchase, along with any support or sales functions that may come after. Every touchpoint a customer has with your brand can impact their behaviors and generate loyalty. By and large, people will tend to remember distinctly negative or positive experiences with your organization above all else.

Customers no longer tend to base their loyalty on just the product or price. They expect a smooth customer journey. Providing great experiences to your customers will help with customer retention, brand loyalty, and positive word of mouth.

Now that we’ve defined what customer experience is, and how improving it can benefit your business, let’s take a look at a few different metrics you can use to measure the quality of your customer experience and identify areas for improvement.

Website Analysis

There is no such thing as “one size fits all” when it comes to business websites. Making your own webpages personalized and optimized for your unique customer base is the best way to ensure that their first impressions are positive ones. Utilize heat and scroll maps to test different versions of your webpages, and find out which parts are working for your audience and which ones aren’t.

Net CNS score survey

A Net Customer Needs Solution (Net CNS) is used to study your organization’s operational capabilities and to determine a benchmark for how well your customers’ needs are being met.

Initially, customers are surveyed, their need and wants are collected and grouped. Then, each particular need or want is weighted based on demand. Then, followup surveys are conducted to determine if these needs are being satisfied, or not. The Net CNS score is obtained by determining the percentage of customer needs that are being met, and subtracting the percentage of needs that have not been met—with a score lower than zero indicating more misses than hits, and a large positive score indicating a greater proportion of success. Your Net CNS score can then be used to develop a better understanding of customer requirements and how well your business fulfills them, along with an idea of where to concentrate on improvements.

Sentiment Analysis

Customers often interact with companies through multiple communication channels, such as email, telephone, social media, live chat, and self-service portals. Quick, helpful responses will help build positive customer experiences with your brand. Driven by advancements in business AI, it’s now possible to determine customer urgency based on language patterns in messages.

This makes it possible to prioritize which emails or instant messages require your immediate attention without having to read through them all individually first. Sentiment analysis can also help you score customer feedback from surveys and reviews, so that you can address your most urgent customer concerns.

NPS Survey

An NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey can help you determine your brand’s reputation among your customers. Since it was first developed, it has been adopted by about two-thirds of all Fortune 1000 companies.

The survey is based on a simple question: “How likely are you to recommend the product to a friend or colleague?”

Ratings are collected from customers on a scale of 0-10, and the overall score is obtained by subtracting the percentage of customers who are likely to spread a negative narrative about your brand (those who gave a score of 6 or lower) from the percentage of customers who are likely to spread positive word of mouth (those who gave a score of 9 or 10). You end up with a number between -100 and +100, with a higher positive score indicating a better reputation, where a negative score indicates that you may need to perform a followup survey to identify your problem areas. The end goal is to identify any problems faced by customers, rectify them, and convert fans of your brand into loyal brand evangelists.

Our recent experience with an NPS survey we conducted has helped us understand that customers are willing to talk if we are willing to listen. They feel comfortable sharing their issues and stories as long as they are being recognized and responded to.

RFM Analysis

It’s been frequently observed that 80% of a given company’s revenue tends to come from just 20% of its customers. Therefore, it’s crucial that you pay special attention to that 20%, and provide them with great experiences. That’s where an RFM analysis (recency, frequency, monetary) can help.

RFM analysis is based on the idea that companies can determine the right set of customers to focus on (the 20%) based on a combination of the recency of their interactions with the brand, frequency of their purchases, and the overall monetary value of their purchases, thus preventing them from investing time and money into less committed customers.

The process of performing an RFM analysis can be more or less complex depending on your approach. In brief, you start by segmenting your customers into numbered tiers (where tier 1 is the best) of each of the RFM categories. You then calculate which group of customers rank well in all 3 categories (or segments of customers who perform well in all but 1 category). Using this qualified list of premium customers, you can craft new marketing strategies to appeal to them directly.

Here at Zoho, we use our own products on a daily basis to evaluate and improve the quality of our customer experience along these metrics, among many others. If you’re interested in improving your customer relationships, we strongly suggest you invest in these insightful techniques.