What is customer experience (CX)?
Customer experience is a term used to describe how customers feel across every potential interaction with your brand.
It takes in everything from your logo and advertising, to your website, newsletters, social media, shipping policy, and customer service. If there’s something out there that relates in some way to your brand, then it contributes to the customer experience.
“A brand is defined by the customer’s experience.” Shep Hyken, CX Expert
The biggest and the best firms in the modern age have taken the importance of the customer experience and made it central to everything they do. Take Amazon, for instance.
They have got a hefty product range and they offer competitive pricing. But we could say the same for a lot of brands. Amazon has also introduced a range of measures, all geared towards polishing the experience for its customers.
Its search-function is far more advanced than many similar sites. Its reviews system is so in-depth that it acts as additional content, as well as a try-before-you-buy device.
And its algorithm recommends products that are relevant to previous browsing and purchasing behaviour with pinpoint accuracy. Such an approach is a CX benchmark from which all brands can learn.
Creating a great CX is central to Vibetrace’s philosophy. We understand that every single touchpoint a potential customer has with your brand matters. So we designed our marketing solutions with this in mind. We work at personalising the journey for your potential customers right from the advertising stage, through to your website, and even after a sale.
It’s this kind of granular approach that helps to optimise the experience for customers, and really makes you stand out from your competitors.
Does CX matter?
Research has shown that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience. In the ultra-competitive modern world of business, the choice between one brand and another so often comes down to the experience itself. How?
Well, customers are no longer limited to the contents of their local High Street. Shopping is now a global affair when searching online, and shoppers are spoilt for choice.
The internet revolution has handed the power over from brands to consumers. Given that ecommerce or B2B companies can easily match price and product ranges, the point of difference comes down to who can best manage customer expectations. Customers demand the best, and if your brand can’t provide it, they’ll simply find another one that will.
Studies show that one in three people will leave a favoured brand after just a single bad experience. The modern age doesn’t grant many second chances, and businesses are becoming wise to the fact.
45.9% of businesses are now making CX their priority, compared to 20.5% still focused on pricing, and 33.6% on product. Those pushing the customer experience to the fore are reaping the benefits.
With online giants such as Amazon selling pretty much anything and offering a range of shipping options at lightning speed, there’s only one way for other brands to compete. And that’s by delighting customers in every way possible.
What is customer experience management?
Customer experience management is the process of overseeing all potential customer touchpoints with your brand. Initially, you’ll need to be aware of what these touchpoints are—and there will likely be a lot.
Once you’ve identified all the ways you can potentially connect with your customers, then CX management should look at how to improve them. Every touchpoint should go some way to increasing satisfaction, with a view to attracting and retaining customers, building customer loyalty, and increasing revenue.
If this sounds like a gargantuan task for even the smallest of brands, you’re not wrong. Keeping track of every single customer interaction with your business isn’t something humans were made for. The best methods of customer experience management include data analytics, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and software aimed solely at improving interactions.
Gartner found that nearly half of all consumers desire tools and services that save them the mental hassle of researching and picking items. So even a beautifully laid-out website isn’t enough for 47% of users. Gone are the days when clear site navigation guaranteed a great customer experience.
To meet this consumer need, Vibetrace’s software provides guided selling. Using previous browsing and buying behaviour, Vibetrace’s platform can identify customers the moment they land on your site and begin to track their activity without needing them to log in. It can then serve up a series of short questions, aimed at finding what that user is looking for. Alternatively, it can suggest products they may be looking for, all based on personal user data.
Customers are given a personalised, in-store user experience online, and even the need to browse is removed. It’s this level of customer experience management that can help put your brand above and beyond the service offered by your competitors.
Essential tips for CX management (CXM)
Business leaders need to look at the bigger picture when it comes to CX management. Working on solutions that increase the likes of traffic numbers, sales figures, and customer satisfaction levels are commonplace to all marketers. But CXM encompasses all of these things and so much more.
Effective CX management will directly lead to increased traffic, more sales, and higher satisfaction levels, but often through different means than a marketer may be used to. A brilliant marketing campaign or promotion may still have its place, but it’s in learning how it fits into the customer experience that will bring the greatest rewards.
Know your brand
Just as your brand’s logo should be easy to identify wherever it’s found, your message should also be consistent. Some brands are famous for the quality of their products. Others for their customer service or their innovations. Customers should know what to expect from you, and even feel a little warm and fluffy inside when they see your name.
Business leaders should have a clear sight of how they want their brand to be conceived, and how it’s being conceived (if these differ). This is an important consideration when it comes to analysing the quality of the experience you’re providing for your customers. If you set expectations, you can exceed them.
All businesses should create a brand playbook, outlining their philosophy in detail and ensuring that all employees can deliver a consistent message, no matter what field they’re working in.
Your playbook is a completely different entity to your business plans and marketing strategies. It should make clear the tones and styles that your brand should be operating under. You could include the reasons behind your brand’s existence, the problems it was invented to solve, and who it will solve these for.
Go into the nitty-gritty and cover image style, colour palettes, and anything else you can think of. Remember this is a document that should be reviewed regularly.
Know your customers
How can you please your customers if you don’t know what pleases them? Different generations have different expectations and ways in which they like to be treated. Startups should create customer personas—semi-fictional character sheets that detail the likes of age, wealth, family-size, geographical location, and hobbies.
These should be refined over time once you have sufficient buyer data, and put into differentiating segments. It’s also important to gather regular feedback from customers, including their overall levels of satisfaction and their views on your website, shipping process, and product range.
As a rule, it’s far easier to manage the customer experience if you know their expectations. This knowledge enables you to look at your brand with a customer’s eye. Research shows that 58% of customers are receiving product recommendations that they would never buy, so simply knowing your base on a more personal level gives any brand a distinct advantage.
Build a strategy
Given there are so many different facets that make up the customer experience, no approach can be half-baked. You’ll need to be aware of all of the areas in which your brand connects with customers, and delegate areas of responsibility to different departments.
In an ideal world, a business would have a customer experience team overseeing operations, and CX reps within each department. But that’s only viable for large-scale operations. However, it’s important for any firm to get as much of the workforce involved as possible.
Different departments experience customers in different ways, so it’s essential to get front-line feedback when building a CX management strategy. Feedback management is just as important as the data itself.
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Be reactive
Being reactive to change is a hugely important consideration. Business leaders and marketers need to be prepared to change their tactics at the drop of a hat. After all, consumers are human, and they can change their minds in an instant.
When it comes to managing the customer experience, it’s vital to never get complacent. Even the most loyal customer—and we’re talking years—can suddenly disappear when they see a better offer on the horizon.
Remember that what’s relevant in 2021 may be old hat by 2022. It’s hard for even the most experienced marketers to predict the future. No one could’ve foreseen the impact that the internet had on the shopping industry. And we certainly didn’t see a global pandemic on the horizon.
How to build your CX management strategy
To build your CX management strategy, it’s best to start at the very beginning. After all, as Rodgers and Hammerstein once pointed out, it’s a very good place to start.
All business leaders should be thinking of the customer experience before they’ve even given their enterprise a name, or committed to a product range. CX should always come first, and by using this philosophy, everything else can slot in around it, like the pieces of a jigsaw.
Create customer personas
We touched on this briefly above. It’s essential to know your customers well, and creating personas will set you on your way. When it comes to creating adverts, website content, images, and even contact centre channels, these need to be matched to specific consumer needs.
A one-size-fits-all approach to marketing simply won’t work in 2021. Those from Generation X have a completely different set of expectations to Millennials, and this goes for every age group. Personas will help you see exactly who you’re trying to please.
With more than 4.7 billion internet users and just 1.83 billion websites to serve them, personalisation, personalisation, and more personalisation is the key to attracting attention. 88% of marketers have reported seeing measurable improvements when personalising their strategies, so grab your dancing shoes and join the party.
Refine these through data
Given that customer personas should be created at the very beginning of a brand’s life, there’s always some guesswork involved. Once you start getting website traffic, conversions, and even customer feedback, you can refine the personas and make them more accurate. Connecting with customers is the key to winning sales.
Over time, you’ll be able to break these into segments, or in layman’s terms, different customer types. These segments may be down to average spend, geographical location, age, gender, or other similar factors.
Given that the best customer experience is always the most personal one, segmentation allows you to target different types of customers with different offers or promotions. And with the right software in your arsenal, you can even personalise content and feedback forms through the use of sentiment analysis—picking up on actual customer needs and devising solutions to match them.
Create content to match search intent
Modern web visitors use the internet as a solution finder. Given Google’s advanced algorithm, complex queries typed into the search engine can be linked to specific, targeted content.
In fact, Ahrefs discovered that of keywords with over 10,000 monthly searches, 29.13% have three words or more. This makes for a huge number of queries that your content needs to provide answers to. Fail to do this, and your customers will simply go elsewhere.
“Matching keywords to searcher intent is critical.” Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz
Queries—or pain points—can be discovered through the likes of Google Adwords Keyword Planner, as well as by researching competitor sites, and seeking customer feedback. There’ll be different queries from all stages of the sales funnel—from those almost ready to convert, to those tentatively asking a few preliminary questions.
It’s essential to cover every potential topic in order to encourage brand loyalty.
Map the customer journey
A customer journey is the route a user takes from initial contact, to landing page, to checkout. If you’ve created useful content for all stages of the sales funnel, this journey should be clear and straightforward to anyone landing on your site from Google’s search results. Users should be able to find what they want, and make a purchase in just a few clicks.
Be sure to analyse your website data and act upon it. Using the likes of Google Analytics can help you see where your business is succeeding and failing. Look at traffic figures, conversions, bounce rates, and exit rates, among other metrics. This will help you see if your customer journey is working, or the pages where users are dropping out. With this information you can start looking at the changes required and act upon them.
Gather feedback
Your customers know what they want, so why not ask them?
Seek feedback on every possible touchpoint. Are they happy with the number of emails they receive from your brand? Do they find your website easy to navigate? How can they help you improve your product range? And which channels do they prefer to contact you through?
These are just some of the touchpoints that you can gather feedback on. Make sure you act upon the results as soon as possible, and let your customers know when changes have been made. Your consumers are more likely to willingly fill out feedback forms if they know they’re being listened to.
Seek feedback on the customer experience from your employees, too. Sales reps, call centre agents, and marketers all have different perceptions of your customer base, and they’ll all have ideas for improvement.
Remember, not all customers will complain if they have a problem—many will simply disappear, never to return to your business. So, you need to be proactive by solving problems before they grow too large.
Consider CX software
Given the importance of providing a great customer experience, brands need to look for any advantage they can get. There are a number of software solutions available which can help automate the process of CX management, and sift through data 24/7, offering customer insights and solutions in real-time.
It’s an important consideration, given that making changes too late can result in a decreased customer base. The best CX platforms can offer a personalised solution for both brands and their customers.
Imagine a solution that can replicate the in-store experience online, and that can grow and learn over time.
What is customer experience management software?
Customer experience management (CEM or CXM) software comes in many forms. The most advanced solutions are cloud-based and can be tailored to an individual brand’s requirements. On-premise software is also available, but this may be limiting given the benefits that remote working options can bring to a business.
Using data gathered from Google Analytics, a brand should be able to see where their problems lie. A great customer experience management platform can then be programmed to solve them.
Some CX management solutions can also help a brand to gain insights into browsing and purchasing behaviour. Or to automate their feedback processes.
Solutions such as those at Vibetrace can be employed on multiple levels, from personalising the customer journey through the use of our Digital Assistant, to Marketing Automation, and survey distribution.
Marketing automation tools are a must in the modern age—they can decipher text analytics more quickly and with greater insight than even Tina the Tech Expert is capable of.
Top six considerations when choosing customer experience software
The modern business owner having less free time on their hands may be tempted to jump in on the first SaaS (software as a service) solution they come across. But they could be very, very wrong to do so.
Just like hairstyles, cocktails, and football teams, customer experience software should be a personal thing. When it comes to choosing your software, take the following considerations in mind and be sure to research, research, and research some more. Your business—and customers—will thank you for it.
What are your goals?
It’s important to have clear goals in mind when choosing customer experience software. It’s an obvious thing to say, but different solutions cater for different problems. Diving in and buying the first platform you see, might not be of any use to your particular needs.
Are you looking to personalise your online customer journey? Are you looking to increase traffic and/or conversions? Do you need a dedicated platform to empower your customer help desk? Are you looking to boost the number of customer survey replies that you receive?
These are just some of the potential goals that software could be utilised to perform. Once you have your goals in mind, then it’s time to start browsing
We can use our case study with Swedish brand Cervera to illustrate this point. Their own goals were highly specific. Customers were engaging well with their website, and the customer journey was largely being followed.
Their problem came in the last-gasp form of abandoned shopping carts. Users had no problem getting from landing page to basket, but hurdles kept appearing at checkout time.
Having analysed the data, we employed an email remarketing campaign. All those who abandoned their basket received a personalised follow-up email containing that basket, as well as product recommendations based on their previous browsing behaviour. Users were given a second chance to buy, and the brand gained a sale for every 10 emails sent.
Which surveys are available?
Given the need for personalisation in marketing, you should be looking at software that provides a range of surveys, relevant to your needs.
Surveys can loosely be split into two categories: Transactional and relational.
Transactional feedback includes the likes of customer satisfaction surveys (“how happy were you with the service you received today?”). These can be used across a variety of different touchpoints from customer service to after-sales.
Relational feedback surveys are less specific, and related to the amount of love a customer feels for your brand overall. These include net promoter score (NPS) surveys, and questions such as “how likely is it that you would recommend (brand) to a friend?”
Your chosen software should encompass both types, and a good range of questions within them. Ideally, you’ll be able to survey different customer segments with different surveys.
Bespoke survey options are a must. Poor responses equal poor data, and a lack of opportunity to change the customer experience for the better.
Which channels are available?
The omnichannel approach is increasingly being seen as an essential part of any great customer experience.
Omnichannel means providing a multichannel offering with an equally-high level of service throughout. All channels should also be integrated, so every customer contact is recorded. Today, customers use an average of nearly six different touchpoints when buying an item, with 50% regularly using more than four.
From your previous market research, you should know which communication channels your customers prefer to use. When shopping for CX management software, make sure that it’s available for the channels you need.
For example, can customers give feedback through their preferred social media portal? There’s no point parting with your hard-earned cash if you can’t gather data on the channels your customers require
User interface & usability
Whichever software you choose, the user interface needs to be accessible to non-techies. There’s no point in buying a platform that also requires you to hire a team of expert coders to set up and manage.
Consider a user interface that your current workforce—and yourself—can manage with ease. If it’s too difficult to navigate, valuable time will be wasted that could be better spent elsewhere.
This is something Ve specialises in. Our platform comes complete with its own experts to not only set up but to manage the software for you. Once we’ve discussed a solution and implemented it, all you need to do is sit back and wait for the results to come in.
Integration readiness
Most brands will be using software for something or other, from human resources and CRM platforms like Salesforce or Clarabridge, to chat apps and video conferencing. Make sure your chosen software will work in tandem with whatever software you plan to keep utilising, and that you don’t need to keep switching windows to gather vital data.
Service equals value for money
CX management software ranges in price from a few pounds to the cost of Richard Branson’s hair products. There’s a solution for all business sizes and industry needs, and it’s important to consider return on investment (ROI).
Is the price worth the estimated benefits? Can the capabilities of the software grow as your business expands and you need more features? Is there a minimum term and additional costs for the number of users? And given the global pandemic, is it possible to operate it remotely, from anywhere in the world with an internet connection?
Must-have features of your customer experience software
Now you’ve got an idea of where to begin in your quest for customer experience software, dig a little deeper and be prepared to reject any provider that fails to include the following features.
We’re not being picky or elitist here, by the way. Miss out on any of the following and your business will already be falling behind.
Omnichannel data collection
As we mentioned above, the omnichannel approach is central to any customer experience strategy. Customer retention is 90% higher for brands using the omnichannel approach over a single channel one.
All channels should have an equally-high service level, be it via email, SMS, voice calls, mobile apps, or social media messaging. And it’s essential to be able to collect data from every possible customer touchpoint.
“Omnichannel is viewing the experience through the eyes of your customer.” John Bowden, SVP of Customer Care at Earthlink ISP
A crucial part of the omnichannel philosophy is to collect everything in a centralised database. If data from different channels is being stored and analysed on different platforms, it’s much harder to gather accurate findings from it.
Multiple survey execution & distribution
Remember we talked about customer personas and segmentation? When it comes to providing a personal service for customers, multiple survey execution is a must. Different customer segments have different desires, after all.
The average business will likely have customers on the brink of leaving. It will also have a high-spending segment, and those so in awe of your products that they’ll happily become brand ambassadors. All three groups—and there may well be more—need to be treated as individuals, and that goes for the surveys they receive as well.
The issue of distribution also takes us back to the importance of having an omnichannel approach. Many customers prefer to complete surveys on a mobile device, and there are over four billion active mobile internet users, so it’s essential to offer choice when it comes to survey requests. Fail to do so and you’ll miss out on some truly vital data.
Full control & customisation
The best software enables business leaders to pick and choose the information they have to hand. Software that only offers a one-size-fits-all approach may deliver everything you need it to, but it may also churn out data that’s of no use to your particular organisation whatsoever.
A customised solution ensures you’re only tracking the information you need, and aren’t bombarded by reams of figures that are ultimately of no use to your brand. All data may be interesting, but only some of it will be valuable, and it’s this you need to focus on.
A customisable solution will be geared towards realising your goals, and it should be clear to see whether it’s having an impact or not.
Useful dashboard
The most efficient systems offer a single view, but allow supervisors to customise these for different departments. As we’ve seen, the customer experience is felt differently from sales reps to service agents and marketers. All have specific data that’s only relevant to them, and too much data can lead to distraction.
Business leaders will likely find having their own bespoke layout of use; perhaps one that gives them a complete overview of the software’s findings as a whole. Like a digital asset management system, your dashboard should aim to store all of the information you need in one place.
Automatic response based on data
Most businesses collect data, but it’s those who act quickly upon it that enjoy the best results. If you’re trawling through monthly figures and then making changes, it could be too late.
Saveable customers may already have left, never to return. To keep customers on side, it’s essential to do everything you can, as soon as you can.
The best software not only analyses your data for you, but will automate responses too. Let’s look at how Amazon manages their response to non-arriving parcels. If a customer gets in touch with their online chat service, a second parcel is automatically dispatched, no questions asked, covering all postage costs.
Ve’s Email Remarketing platform gives us another example of an automatic response. Should a customer fill a basket online and fail to checkout, the software doesn’t just provide you with this info and leave you to figure out a solution.
An email containing the basket is automatically dispatched within the hour, reminding customers what they’re missing out on.
Integration capabilities
Even if you’re running a small business, it’s unlikely that your customer experience management software will be the only software that you use.
Most companies run a CRM system with a built-in ticketing system to highlight issues. Larger enterprises may also use automation to streamline their HR workflows, and communication apps within businesses are growing in popularity due to the rise in remote working.
Integration is a vital consideration when it comes to choosing CX software. Having to flit between screens and access different platforms for different data is simply not cricket. You need to be able to collate data in one place, in order to see the bigger picture.
Let’s imagine your business has a physical store as well as a website. Suddenly, your website traffic goes down by 50% overnight. Your website data gives no logical reason for this. Unbeknownst to you, store footfall has shot up by 50% during the same period. It’s hard to draw logical connections when you have to dig into different data platforms to find this out.
Check the integration capabilities of any software before you buy it. If your existing platforms are not on the integration list, does it come with an open application programming interface (API)? This enables wizened developers to perform the integration for you.
Given that there are so many facets that make up the customer experience, it’s essential that you can manage them from the same portal. It’s CX optimisation, in a nutshell.
How can Vibetrace help cultivate your customer experience?
Now it’s time to look into the specifics, and what Ve can do for your own organisation. Our entire philosophy is customer-experience led, with solutions built to fix specific needs and take your brand into (ahem) brand new territory.
Personalisation
Vibetrace helps you to improve your CX by personalising all customer interactions, whether they’re part of your existing fan-base or not.
Through Connected Media, Vibetrace can help increase the efficiency of any ad campaign by delivering sequential messaging when a customer that has seen an ad is ready to purchase.
Once you’ve attracted users to visit your site after seeing an ad, they’ll be served the same product, offer, or content they saw in the ad, so they can get straight to the items they’re interested in, thanks to our Digital Assistant. There’ll be no need for a customer to even browse. Instead, they’ll be guided to the precise product they’re looking for.
Given that customer acquisition is five times more expensive than customer retention, it’s vital that you invest real time and effort into nurturing your existing customer base.
The algorithms behind our Digital Assistant allow it to improve over time. Product recommendations are based on customer interactions, behaviours, and purchases. So, the experience gets ever-more-personalised with each visit.
Customer feedback
The best way to find out how customers are feeling is to ask them. Instead of sitting back, watching customers come and go, and treating the process as a fact of life, brands need to be proactive in keeping their customer base intact.
Ve’s Digital Assistant allows you to create a variety of surveys to cover all potential customer touchpoints. Generic surveys regarding satisfaction levels hold an important place, but you’ll receive even more valuable data by tailoring feedback requests to previous customer behaviour.
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO
Some surveys could concern website functionality. Others may target specific products and how they may be improved. You could push things a step further and ask for feedback on how your entire range could be better.
Seeking the voice of the customer can actually help you provide them with the solutions they’re looking for, and introduce products to your range that you never previously considered.
What about brand perception? Every company needs to have a philosophy, and image is all-important when it comes to procuring new customers. If your image isn’t coming across to your existing customers in the way you intend it to, it could harm your future growth.
Remember, once you’ve acted on feedback, let people know. Customers will be more likely to fill in surveys if they believe a genuine change is possible. This little move in itself further contributes to providing a memorable customer experience.
Support all steps of the sales funnel
It’s important to give customers the support, guidance, and inspiration they need at every step of the funnel. Those at the beginning of the funnel need encouragement to return to your site for further information. And those close to making a purchase need assistance in “getting over the line”. A gentle nudge, as it were.
No matter where customers sit within the sales funnel, Ve’s Digital Assistant helps to keep them on a clear path. It’ll not only lead them to the information they need, but it’ll also make it easy for them to progress to the next rung of the ladder. We can achieve this through carefully-chosen content, appearing just when customers need it.
Such strategic content helps to keep customers engaged, and remind them why they landed on the site in the first place. It can help prevent page drop-outs and complement the customer journey. Our Smallable case study shows how this can work.
Our first step for the Parisian fashion brand was to create a detailed site map, based on their customer personas. When different users landed on the site, they received a different experience, tailored to their previous browsing and shopping behaviour.
Dynamic interactive content panels and intent-based questioning made for a smoother customer journey and heightened user experience. The result? A 28% increase in Smallable’s conversion rates!
Elevate the customer experience
Remember the days when we relied on physical stores for our shopping? If you’re of a certain vintage, maybe you can recall the precise reasons you kept going back to store X for your magazines, or store Y for your underpants.
There’ll have likely been something in the quality of the products, and the pricing range, too. But think deeper and there’ll probably have been something about the specific store experience that kept you going back.
Perhaps they had the lighting just right. Maybe a smile from that friendly cashier always brightened your day. Or perchance the self-service checkouts always worked and never complained about unidentified items.
Were the store assistants always on-hand when you needed them, while never getting in the way of you and your browsing? Hey, maybe they even knew your name and bid you “good day!” upon store entry, time after time after time.
It’s these little touches that give brands the advantage when it comes to providing a great customer experience. And this is what our software can bring to online shopping.
By bringing the in-store vibe onto your website, you’re instantly looking at a more helpful, user-friendly experience for any lucky visitor.
Our Digital Assistant welcomes users from the moment they land on your site, just like a smiling in-store assistant, ready to help. By reading customer cues and understanding their behaviour, it’ll then provide solutions by guiding users to the section of your online store that they desire, elevating the customer experience from start to finish.
Better engagement
Vibetrace’s platform leaves a positive, lasting impression, by engaging with customers throughout their user journey. It’s like you’re right there with them, helping to guide them on their way. It’s much easier for users to engage with a brand if the journey from landing page to checkout is smooth and free from speed-bumps.
We worked with German IT experts AfB to create better customer engagement, helping online customers to find what they needed as effortlessly as possible.
By reading user behaviour, our Digital Assistant was “on-hand” as soon as visitors landed on the site. AfB was able to read the current context of each visitor, displaying relevant and timely content to save browsing time and enhance the buying journey. The path to customer satisfaction—be it specific information or even a sale—never ran smoother.
Deeper data
Our software helps brands to dig below the surface, uncovering and responding to the explicit context behind site visits.
Now, all brands collect customer data. Metrics gathered from the likes of Google Analytics include traffic figures, specific page views, bounce rates, exit rates, browsing devices used, and how visitors landed on a certain page. Did they come directly, through social media, or even by clicking on an ad?
All these metrics are vital when it comes to getting to know your customers. But all business leaders should know that it’s not enough to simply harbour such data—it’s how you react to it that counts. Brands that utilise their data wisely, instantly have an advantage over their competitors. Vibetrace helps you go one step further.
Our Digital Assistant doesn’t just monitor website performance. Based on data findings, it looks at specific problems, and tailors specific solutions. Let’s look at our case study with leading jewellery brand Claire’s.
Data showed a high bounce rate on the site’s basket and checkout pages. Instead of working blindly and guessing at usability issues on these particular pages, we introduced promotional messaging on both pages, based on previous user behaviour.
The result saw clicks soaring to nearly 5,000 over the next three months. Following extensive product development, Vibetrace and Claire’s built further on that immediate success. The result was a 30,000 gain in clicks and an average order value rise from £24.60 to £25.68.
All down to digging a little deeper and making data work harder!
Customer segmentation
We’ve talked about the importance of knowing your customers by creating personas, and then using data to group them into segments. At Ve, we understand that different segments require different treatment, from advertising to tailored pop-ups, special offers, and feedback requests.
We can achieve this in real-time, reacting to customer responses as they happen.
After all, there’s simply no point in bombarding a low-spending customer with countless offers related to high-priced goods. Instead, we can help you identify crucial moments where “micro-narrative” messaging or tailored interactions can actually meet specific customer needs.
Let’s say a particular customer segment is more likely to convert when offered an instalment payment plan. That’s the offer they’ll be served up.
Or perhaps a different segment responds well to offers of 10% off. Whatever behaviour customers exhibit can be used to refine your segmentation and tailor your brand’s every interaction with them.
Better targeting
As with gathering feedback, asking specific questions is the best way to get specific answers! Our problem solver feature is a unique solution that allows a brand to not only understand a user’s individual needs, but to provide an immediate response.
Given those specific needs have just been discovered, we’ll serve up a response to match them.
The example above shows the kind of meaningful interaction we can provide between a brand and their customers. In most industries, the choice of products is beyond gargantuan.
Go to buy a pair of trainers and the numbers available are off the chart. Maybe you’ve honed it down to running shoes—still, you’ve a choice of several million. So where to start?
Such targeting as found in the image above helps to hone in on consumer needs, paying attention to the likes of specific purpose and even price-point.
Customers are so often faced with looking for needles in haystacks given the amount of choice on offer these days, and Ve can help provide them with the magnet they need.
Conclusion
It’s pretty clear in 2021 that providing a great customer experience isn’t just an important facet of marketing—it’s the key to success. Improving your service offering across your entire business can help nurture existing customers, attract new ones, and boost your sales figures.
Using software and management tools to help manage the customer experience is a must for any business looking to compete. The level of data insight gathered can trounce the work of even the most dedicated human analyst, and the very best software can also be a real-time solution, making your CX approach as proactive and reactive as possible.
Ve’s Digital Assistant and Connected Media services aren’t an out-of-the-box, one-size-fits-all approach—that type of thing just won’t work in the customer experience scenario. Instead, we work with your company to conjure up a tailored solution that’s right for you, your industry, and most importantly, the specific needs of your customers.
Don’t take our word for it, request a demo today!
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
What is customer experience management?
Customer experience management (CEM) is the process of overseeing all potential customer touchpoints with your brand. As a starting point, business leaders and marketers need to work out what these touchpoints are.
There will likely be a lot of them, including advertising, your website, customer service, and after-sales customer support. CEM looks at how you connect with your customers, and how these touchpoints can be improved.
Why should I use customer experience software?
Given the global marketplace that customers can choose from in today’s digital age, the only way to compete is by providing a better customer experience than your competitors. It’s easy to match a product range or pricing point, so it’s going the extra mile for your customers that makes you stand out from the crowd.
Customer experience software makes it a whole lot easier to manage the process. It’ll track and analyse data much quicker than a team of humans. You’ll be able to track successes and failures as they occur, and make changes in real-time, giving you far more chance to please and win back disgruntled customers
What should I look for in customer experience software?
Try to find customer experience software that matches the specific needs of your brand. Be aware of what you want to achieve, be it more traffic, a smoother customer service process, or a better feedback system.
Check if the software can expand in line with your business growth, and whether it integrates with your existing CRM platform. Once you’ve found your perfect match, is it easy for you and your team to use? Consider all of the above and you’ll be sure to get the most from your investment.
