How can superior Customer Experience help Marketers ace Customer Acquisition

We are past the point where having an online presence for a business only meant setting up an informative website (and in recent times, a mobile app). Today, customers who browse the internet for information expect much more from the brands – they expect brands to deliver a great browsing experience. As a result, the importance of a top class digital CX solution is being felt more than ever. Customers are showing a growing preference to interact over digital platforms such as social media, chatting apps, and other mobile apps rather than via calls. Moreover, customers are spoilt for choices when it comes to brands, and this has made them more demanding than ever before. They now expect faster responses over internet as well as greater personalization of browsing experience, along with easy interactions with the brand and quick grievance resolutions.

Why is customer experience important for your brand’s success?

Before we delve into the specifics on how a good CX can benefit the brand, here’s one easy point why you cannot avoid it – your competition is already investing in it. And you certainly would not want to give your rivals an easy win over you in the digital arena, right? However, that isn’t the only reason why it is essential to have a good CX. Here are some more:

• The quality of digital CX as well as electronic word-of-mouth had a significant positive impact on brand image. 
• As per a survey by Salesforce, 85% of consumers conduct online research before making a purchase. A good CX will ensure that you have a higher level of customer engagement, leading to a higher propensity to make a purchase. Thus, it will ensure a higher conversion rate, which will not just increase sales by volume and revenue, but will be the first step towards generating product experience.
• As per Bain & Company, a 5% extra customer retention can result in an increase in a company’s profitability by 75%. And as per a Gartner Report on Creating a High Impact CX Strategy, the quality of CX is responsible for over 2/3rds of customer loyalty, which is more than brand and price combined.

Thus, CX has a bearing on every goal you would seek to achieve as a brand marketer.

Data points on the impact of better CX for customers

Having seen why it is important for brands to invest in CX, let us see some customer-specific factors that good CX impacts. As per the Future of CX report by PwC, customers are willing to pay between 7-16% price premium  for brands which provided a good CX. Thus, not only do you get to convert more customers and get to retain more customers through good CX, you also get them to happily pay more for your brand.

What’s the flipside? The same PwC report quoted earlier says that 32% of customers will stop doing business after one bad experience, even with a brand that they loved. Remember the point about your competition? 57% customers tend to switch brands if a competitor provides a better CX. Thus, if there is one thing that could cause sleepless nights for you as a marketer, it has to be some online touchpoint creating a bad CX or a competitor eroding your loyal customer-base just through delivering better CX.

Few steps to improve your CX Game

The following are some points that you can follow when it comes to building a strategy for enhancing the quality of your CX:

1. Understanding your Customers

To be able to serve good CX to your customers, you would need to know what they want, prefer, and need. You could get to know all of these with the use of advanced MarTech tools to track their journey over your digital touchpoints, analyse their past orders, as well as run surveys and polls.

2. Decide on KPIs for CX

It would be easier to create a CX strategy once you are clear about what goals you seek to achieve through it. This could be a greater click-through rate, higher time spent on website or app, greater cart size, higher conversion rate, higher revenue per customer, more frequent purchases, and so on.

3. Keep personalization at the core of your CX strategy

A customer is bound to feel more valued when the experience that he or she receives is more tailored to their requirements and desires. Thus, once you set up a mechanism to understand your customers on an individual level, the next step to think about is how you can personalize their experiences on different digital platforms by leveraging this information. Avenues for this include:

• Website and app appearance
• Intelligent product recommendations on digital storefront
• Smart replies by ML-powered self-learning chat-bots depending on past interactions with individual customers
• Personalized e-mails, SMSs, gift cards
• Customized product offers based on analysis of preferences/loyalty points

How we can help

It is established that quality digital CX holds the key for the brand’s growth, not just in terms of sales but also in terms of perception. PennyWise Solutions has had a fantastic track-record of over 17 years in enabling brands to deliver a great customer experience on digital touch-points. Our expertise with technologies such as Sitecore, Acquia, .NET, Ruby on Rails, and Java allow us to create bespoke experiences for our clients’ target customers using customer journey analytics. We follow an integrated approach towards e-commerce, website and app development to provide a consistent as well as personalized omni-channel CX. A good CX can help your brand to the next level, and we would love to help you achieve this.