Why Customer Experience Optimization is Key for Success

The paradigm of what makes a company competitively strong in a market is changing, and how customers and other stakeholders perceive a business is gaining more competitive value than just having a strong and unique product to offer. Improving customer experience becomes a priority for businesses, but it’s important to remember that this is a continuous activity that always needs optimizing. That’s when customer experience optimization comes into play.

What is Customer Experience Optimization?

Customer experience optimization is the continuous activity and revisitation of how a business can improve customer experience throughout the customer journey and surpass customer expectations to enhance customer satisfaction consistently. Businesses need to constantly evaluate how customers experience their interactions with the company in different channels and stages of the customer journey to gain insights into maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction to remain strong and increase market margins. Customers' expectations and perceptions change with time, and to stay on top of these alternations, a process to optimize customer experience is needed to keep increasing the value of a product or service.

Some general perspectives commonly included and evaluated when performing customer experience optimization are the following four aspects:

1. The experience your customers have with your product or service.
2. Customers' digital and physical experience with your business and offerings.
3. Brand experience customers and other stakeholders have with your business.
4. The staff’s experience and how their experience affects your customer’s experience.

Why is Customer Experience Optimization Important?

Customer experience optimization is important to collect information and insights from internal processes and, of course, your customers to understand the current state of the customer experience in various stages of the customer journey. By attaining continuous knowledge of what your customers experience and their expectations are, you become equipped to optimize customer experience by finding solutions quickly, which is a valuable strength when market dynamics keep increasing.

Expand your customer base and attract new customers

A cross-industry goal in any business is to increase sales and revenue, and that equation usually includes attracting new customers and attaining larger market shares. One way to achieve this is by doing customer experience optimization. A good customer experience can be a deciding factor in why your current customers and new ones choose you instead of your competitors. Furthermore, satisfied customers are willing to pay more for your products and services and have a higher retention rate when they know they will receive better service quality and attain a good experience.

Customer experience optimization is vital in all businesses and has a customer-centric focus that helps you to identify improvements relevant to your ideal customer and be able to meet their expectations and enhance the overall customer experience.

What are the Benefits of Customer Experience Optimization?

One of the prime benefits of customer experience optimization is that you gain consistent and frequent insight into the current state of your customer's experience when interacting with your business. Furthermore, customer experience optimization helps to identify fluctuations in customer experiences in the customer journey and which factors may be causing the changes. This helps you detect when actions need to be taken to optimize customer experience and implement solutions promptly.

When conducting customer experience optimization, you embrace a customer-centric perspective to your processes and communications and increase your ability to identify inefficiencies and preparedness to react when improvements are needed. Many times, minor alternations can have a significant impact on improving the customer experience. However, when it’s time to put more effort into optimizing the customer experience, you have more data and information at your disposal to easily pinpoint which interactive touchpoint needs improving.

How to do Customer Experience Optimization

It goes without saying that a large part of customer experience optimization is about understanding your customers and their perception of your business. But, establishing a process to optimize customer experience, you first need to collect data and measure it to identify if any improvements are needed and, if so, where. Once you have the information that enhancements can be made to improve customer experience, you can more easily research solutions to your challenges.

Collect customer feedback to understand your customers

A great way to gain insight into your customers' perception of your business is to quite simply ask them what they feel about your product or service and why they chose you as their provider. Going to the main source of information will provide you with the best and most accurate data to analyze, and in this case, it is your customers.

Using a customer feedback solution is a great tool that enables you to send digital surveys to your customers post-purchase and allows them to easily provide their thoughts on their phone or computer. Depending on the features of your solution, you can design simple or advanced surveys with various functionalities. However, the prime goal of a customer feedback solution is to gain data about the customer’s experience and detect what other expectations or wishes they may have that would increase their satisfaction, which you can use in your customer experience optimization plan. Also, it can act as an ideation source you can use to find better or new solutions to how the customer experience can be optimized specifically for your business.

Internal performance reviews of processes and technical solutions

Combining your business intelligence data with customer feedback data will enable a holistic view of where your processes are working at optimal capacity and perhaps where they need to be more efficient. Not only will this be helpful to monitor how to increase the value for your customers, but it will also provide you insightful information on whether your efforts are performing at expected levels or if new adjustments are triggering any improvements.

A simple example of how you can use internal performance data with customer feedback is to identify information that may highlight the same problem or inefficiency. Imagine that your customers call to book appointments, and you have limited staff resources to tend the phone, and your customer feedback includes information that the phone lines are always long. Your staff is stressed about the long phone queues and struggle to attend to all customers and fill in all available time slots. In this scenario, you have observed an internal process inefficiency as well as customer feedback that presents a poor experience with long phone queues, where both sources reflect the same problem from different angles. A solution to this problem would be to assist your staff with an appointment scheduling system where your customers can easily book their own appointments at a suitable time through your website or a mobile app. This way, your staff could focus on customers who prefer calling to book appointments or have questions about their appointments. Your customers don’t need to wait in long phone queues anymore when they can book their appointments in a few easy steps online. Increasing your internal performance rate and work environment, as well as enhancing your customers' experience by providing a solution that fixes their problems and makes their interaction more efficient and independent.

Tools to use to optimize customer experience

A customer journey management system can help you keep track of internal processes and provide business intelligence while enabling you to integrate customer feedback solutions to collect valuable insights from your customers. As mentioned above, collecting information and observing factors that consider the product and service experience, digital and physical experience, brand experience, and staff experience when working with customer experience optimization is important. A customer journey management system can help you observe all these perspectives under the same roof.

If you are interested in finding out more about how to improve customer experience and what to consider when optimizing it, you can read and download our customer experience management guide.