Three Steps for Improving Customer Experience and Retention in 2022

Customer experience should be at the top of your priority list for 2022 and beyond. Businesses, small or big, cannot afford to ignore CX because customers no longer base their loyalty on products or services alone. CX is a tangible differentiating factor for which customers are willing to pay up to a 16% price premium. 

Esteban Kolsky, a think-tank focused on customer strategies, shares that 72% of customers will share their positive experiences with 6 or more people. However, a majority of customers don’t talk about a poor experience. Only 1 in 26 customers will complain if they aren’t happy with the experience. The rest just switch to competitor brands. 

In fact, a PwC survey found that 92% of customers will abandon the company after two or three negative experiences. Hence, customer experience is all the more critical for small and medium-sized businesses who cannot afford to lose customers. 

While it's common for marketers and revenue leaders to include customer experience in their overall growth strategies, it’s all-too-easy to overlook foundational approaches and tactics.  In this post, we will share a few of the most essential of these so that you can anchor your CX strategy with a solid foundation.

Leverage lifecycle marketing and automation to drive customer closeness

Creating engaging experiences is core to converting and retaining customers. Marketers can support this by adding customer marketing into your overall Inbound strategy. The process doesn’t need to be cumbersome either. HubSpot and other automation platforms allow for evergreen lifecycle campaigning that can help drive more customer closeness, renewals and expansion. Here are three foundational principles to anchor your strategy:

All marketers have goals and objectives associated with their net new acquisition efforts. Far fewer put this same level of rigor toward customer expansion and retention campaigns. Work with your business leaders to identify clear-cut retention goals, identify your best-fit customer segments, and market to them as you would your most coveted prospects.

HubSpot reporting is often underleveraged. While reports and standard dashboards often focus on typical “funnel metrics,” tools like HubSpot’s new attribution reporting and campaign analytics makes it possible to better identify how your customers are engaging with your brand on a deeper level. Pull out these insights and leverage them in QBRs and monthly reports to ensure your customers’ voices and experiences are consistently reflected in reports.  This process will push your team and your business to be more customer centric, which will in turn drive a better customer experience.

Consider adding a Self-Service Portal 

Customers want answers to their questions and prefer finding it themselves without any interaction with company representatives. 

A research paper from Harvard Business Review shares that 81% of customers across industries attempt taking care of matters themselves before reaching out to a representative.

Nearly 9 in 10 customers expect brands to offer online self-service portals. In fact, looking into the growing trend, by 2022, 85% of all customer service interactions will start with self-service.

Hence, going forward, business leaders need to empower customers to easily find the content and information themselves. This will not only improve customer experience but also bring immediate benefits like cost savings and improved productivity. 

Self-service tools can be a highly effective avenue for this type of strategy. Here are a few good examples to consider: 

A knowledge base includes a huge database of browseable and searchable information. It could be articles, blogs, how-to videos, tutorials, and other relevant data customers are looking for. It could also include a FAQ section to answer customer questions and concerns. 

Forums encourage knowledge exchange and open discussions between customers at similar stages of the buying process. Getting active on forums empowers customers to find real-world solutions to their concerns. 

Digital assistants like chatbots play a critical role in offering instant self-service to customers. The recent advancements in AI and Machine Learning have made digital assistants ever more effective in streamlining customer experiences.  

The modern digital customer doesn’t want to wait for business hours to interact with a brand. They expect personalized interactions and want to engage with the business 24X7. 

That’s where a self-service branded client portal can help. 

Count on cloud-based CRMs with a client portal. For example, vcita offers a customizable client portal that allow clients to engage with a business at any time they like. Clients can manage their own appointments, share files in absolute confidence, pay for services, download back invoices and receive personalized offers based on purchase history.

This richly-featured app lets your clients see all the information they want in one place. For instance, they can view upcoming appointments, fulfilled service orders, outstanding invoices, and any new messages from the business.

Monitor and measure your customer experience

Besides executing and managing your clients’ customer experience campaigns, it’s important to track their progress using several metrics. 

Here are four key metrics to track and analyze. 

NPS or net promoter score is a CX benchmark that measures how likely your customers are to recommend your business to a friend. To determine this, a survey needs to be sent to the customers, asking them how likely they are to recommend your client’s services to their social circle. 

The score is measured on a scale of 0-10. 

With this score you can instantly tell how many of your client’s customers are satisfied enough to become brand ambassadors. 

HubSpot’s Net Promoter Score Calculator can help work out your client’s NPS.

Besides, NPS survey builders like Typeform, SurveySparrow, and Zonka Feedback can help you create and customize stunning surveys and feedback forms for your client. These tools also allow you to study responses, draw conclusions, and determine the further course of action. 

The CSAT or customer satisfaction score is a straightforward measure of CX. It measures customer satisfaction for each interaction through a survey. 

A customer journey “map” can provide a helpful visual representation of how your customers move through the buying process. Map every potential customer touchpoint and overlay potential pain points, needs, major touchpoints, and motivations at each stage. The extra effort will pay off by illuminating key communication gaps and opportunities which you can address with specific marketing or customer service outreach.  

The best way to understand what customers want or think of a brand is to talk to them directly. This can be done through surveys. 

Besides measuring NPS and CSAT, there are several other objectives of conducting surveys. For instance, you can ask customers to share their views of a specific product or service feature.

Wrapping Up

Thanks to the advancement in digital technologies, the modern customer is empowered like never before. They expect superior brand experiences and are willing to pay a premium for them. 

No wonder, superior customer experiences are becoming a point of differentiation for brands. Hence, investing time into customer experience is a primary focus for businesses. 

If you are looking to up your game in the CX world, the tips and tactics shared in this post will help. Go ahead and implement these tactics to take yours and your client’s brand to the next level.