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Customer Experience

What Is Customer Experience Optimization? Strategy Guide

November 18, 2021
96% of unhappy customers don’t bother complaining about the service that they received. Instead, 91% will leave and never buy from the company again. Even more surprising, a third of people say that they would consider switching companies after one bad experience.

What does this tell you? You get one chance. 

The key to keeping your customers interested in customer experience optimization (CX optimization). If you want to create a better customer journey through CX efforts, keep reading.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience optimization involves bettering the relationship between a business and its customers. It’s a great tool for any business looking to improve its business. The key is that they need to optimize their customers’ experiences using personalization.

This individual may expose themselves to any element of your marketing strategy:

  • A brand
  • A website
  • A product
  • A service
  • A social media post
  • A direct message
  • An email
  • A chat message
  • A notification
  • An employee

As you can see, any kind of customer interaction matters.

What is customer experience optimization?

As the name suggests, ‘customer experience optimization’ refers to improving the relationship between a business and its customers. It’s a great tool for any business looking to improve its business overall. The key is that they need to optimize their customers’ experiences using personalization.

One of the most important elements to focus on is the digital customer experience. There has been a revolution in online shopping, buying, searching, and communicating. Because of this, perfecting your customers’ online experience is more important than ever.

When it comes to creating an online environment, you need to make sure that you’re making a space that makes your visitors feel welcome. It’s all about customer satisfaction. At the same time, you need to give customer value.

The three facets of customer experience optimization

Customer journey mapping reveals three, major ideas. These will fuel the relationship between a company and its customers:

  1. Web experience optimization
  2. Product experience optimization
  3. Messaging experience optimization

Each facet is important to the growth of your business as it contributes to your customer experience strategy.

  1. Web experience optimization

Web experience optimization refers to changes within a business’ website. These changes bring businesses closer to their customers. Given the recent and large shift to online marketing, the digital experience is more important than ever.

In fact, digital experience optimization may be the most important.

There have been advancements in website analytics and machine learning. Marketers can have a deeper understanding of customer behavior with analytics. This makes creating a more entertaining web experience easier than ever before.

At the same time, there is more than enough competition to keep businesses busy as they’re navigating the online landscape.

Here are some steps you can take to optimize your customers’ website experience:

  1. Look into your current visitors’ behavior on your website
  2. Make notes about areas in which you think user experience could improve
  3. Look at the channels that visitors are using to get to your website
  4. Come up with experience-enhancing features for your website
  5. Run experiments and see what features work for your target audience
  6. Launch the successful features on a wider scale throughout your website

You should also take the time to focus on loading speeds and seamless website design while evaluating your analytics. If either of these components makes it difficult for the customer to navigate your website, you’re likely to lose them.

Sometimes, there are inconsistencies in the mobile and desktop formats of websites. You should ensure that your website is optimized for mobile devices. After all, more than 40% of transactions take place online.

If you’re unsure where your website’s weak spots are, consider measuring customer experience using tools like visual heatmaps or conducting session recordings. Customer data like this can provide actionable insights.

website heatmap example using leadbrights homepage
  1. Product experience optimization

Of course, your customer cares about the product/service that you’re going to provide. They’re paying for this item or service and have certain expectations about what kind of feelings they’re going to have about the item.

If you fail to meet customer expectations, you’re likely to lose future eCommerce sales.

So, it’s not enough to have a flashy website ridden with promises to your customers. You need to make sure that you’re meeting your promises and providing your customers with more than they expected.

The best way to see how your customers feel is by surveying them and asking for reviews on products and services.

  1. Messaging experience optimization

The employees that you hire have a big impact on customer experience analytics. It may not seem like one employee can rid your business of hundreds of customers, but it’s true.

A poor employee experience can make a huge difference in your customers’ experiences.

Your marketers should have a system or platform for monitoring messaging.

Zendesk-dashboard-screenshot as an example of a customer support platform to help improve the customer experience

You should also have sample scripts and phrases for employees to follow for common issues and questions. But, you should leave room for personalization when talking to customers.

You should also start an omnichannel experience by incorporating your social media platforms.

Why is customer experience optimization important?

A meaningful, lasting customer relationship benefits both the customer and your business. You should be creating a mutually beneficial relationship that gives value to both ends of the equation.

But, why should you care about that? Customers only care about the quality and price of the product/service, right?

Wrong.

In fact, 79% of today’s consumers want a brand to show that it cares for them before they would even consider buying something from that brand. This means that you need to reach out to your customers rather than wait on them to come to you.

How to improve customer experience strategy

Alright, you get it. Customer experience optimization is important. But the question still remains: how do you improve your customer experience strategy?

If you’re new to this customer-focused branding, you may be at a complete loss for how to begin coming up with customer experience strategy ideas. You could always follow the latest customer experience trends but let’s go over a few strategies and best practices for your marketing team to focus on first.

Basing business goals on visitor expectations

Believe it or not, your visitors have expectations before starting an interaction with your business. Even if they’re opening an email or clicking on a website, they have an idea of the value they’re about to receive.

If you don’t meet this expectation, your visitors are likely to click off. In fact, 40-60% of website visitors click off of content websites within 15 seconds of clicking onto them.

Today’s consumers have a very small attention span. To learn more about their attention, you should pay attention to KPIs and metrics.

Focusing on persistence and retention

Focus on creating more opportunities for improving the overall consumer experience. Of course, you should look for existing opportunities and fill those gaps. But, there is always room to improve elsewhere.

By this, we’re referring to the fact that you should always be focusing on adding value and presenting said value to the customer journey.

Don’t wait until you receive negative customer feedback. Address it ahead of time.

Think from the perspective of the customer as if you were going through the customer journey map. You want to keep that customer interested and make them feel compelled to come back for more.

Be persistent and maintain your vision of an increased customer retention rate. Even just a few additional seconds on your website or social media page can make a difference in a customer’s opinion of your brand. It also contributes to brand loyalty.

When in doubt, include personalization whenever and wherever you can.

If you are looking for more ways to improve, check out our other article on 6 Ways to Improve Customer Experience.

Evolving with today’s customer experience strategies

Over time, the idea of customer experience improvement has become more well-known. Companies have been transforming the ideas of customer engagement. At the same time, they’ve been reaching for customer loyalty.

This means that there has been an overall shift towards a customer-centric business process. It’s no longer about how the customers can find the business. Rather, the businesses are focusing on finding customers.

Today’s world moves too fast for consumers to look up every business they see in an advertisement on television. They aren’t going to go out of their way to call the number on the screen or go to the website that you’ve displayed.

Because of this, businesses have been shifting to automated content. Strategies like these give them more time with their customers faster.

Businesses have recently taken the plunge towards convenience along the customer journey. Make it easier for customers to get into contact with your business.

Honing in on digital customer experience

Great customer experience optimization is more important than ever. This is especially in the digital world.

Customers aren’t settling for anything less than the best these days. So, you’ve got to show that your company is giving its all.

Are you a B2B company representative who is looking for lead generation and content automation help? If so, look no further than our experts here at Leadbright. We have designers, developers, algorithm gurus, and SEO experts. Our team is prepared to help you with customer experience management.

Get started with our experts today!

Author

Greg Tucker