3 Major Customer Experience Challenges and How to Solve Them

The customer experience (CX) is now more important than ever. Statistics show that investing in CX services can potentially double your revenue within 3 years. By the end of 2020, customer experience will overtake prices and products as key brand differentiators. In order to stay in the game and set your brand apart, here are three major CX challenges, and how you can solve them to improve your brand’s customer experience.

Challenge #1: Delivering a personalized experience

Depending on the size of your business, it can be tough to deliver a completely unique experience for each customer. However, it’s still worth the effort to invest in personalization.

Today’s customers do not like speaking to robots. They want to be treated as individuals with their own personalities, so you must strive to build your relationships with your customers while consistently delivering value. Many businesses miss the mark by not personalizing their interactions, causing high churn rates, low satisfaction levels, and decreased loyalty.

Here’s how you can solve this challenge and get your business to personalize interactions:

Build personas for each of your target customers

A customer persona is a fictitious model of your ideal customer. This usually includes demographic data (gender, age, location and occupation) and psychographics (likes, dislikes, motivations and pain points).

Creating fictitious people based on your ideal customers’ attributes helps to clearly define and segment them for your customer service team. By training your team to interact with personas, you can create conversation scripts and presentations custom-tailored to your customers. The number of personas you’ll need to create depends on the scale of your business. While a large company like Sony would need dozens of personas, a smaller business might only need 3 to 5.

Build brand advocates on social media

Make sure to engage with your customers on social media. If someone is raving about your service, acknowledge them. Reply to comments or even send a personal email to your advocates showing your appreciation. Doing so can create dozens of brand advocates who will greatly assist your PR efforts and improve customer experience.

Challenge #2: Understanding How to Measure CX Improvements

If you decide to enhance your customer experience, it can be tough to measure how it’s improving. The good news is, there are several metrics you can use to measure customer experience.

Most large organizations with a revenue of more than $1 billion use more than 50 CX metrics, but they can be boiled down to five main types:

1. Customer satisfaction (CSAT): This is the most traditional metric that can involve either responses to survey questions asking about satisfaction, or implicit metrics like product review ratings, on-time delivery statistics, or mystery shopping scores.
2. Customer loyalty/retention/churn: Metrics in this category are retrospective or predict the likelihood of customer retention. Data includes figures such as average tenure, purchase frequency, loyalty program participation, average order size, repeat orders, and product return rates.
3. Advocacy/reputation/brand: These metrics determine the level at which customers are willing to recommend or endorse a product or organization. Good examples include sentiment scores on social media, trust ratings, price sensitivity and event participation.
4. Quality/operations: This is a set of metrics that gauges whether a product or service meets customer expectations or requirements. If requirements are not met, the customer experience will be poor no matter what actions are taken to remediate the issue.

5. Employee engagement: This set of metrics is used only in about 10% of CX initiatives. A Gartner survey identified employee engagement as a major concern in delivering CX improvements with 86% of organizations ranking it as having an equal or greater impact than other CX challenges.

After deciding which CX metrics you’ll use, it’s important to present a consolidated view of all your data. This means constructing a dashboard with all your metrics included that covers the customer experience across all departments, not just the customer service team. Each department will see how they are impacting the CX and what metrics they are accountable for improving.

For example, repair and maintenance staff working within the field service department will be able to see the average wait time for customers in the contact center and plan for irritated customers if times are higher than average. If metrics reveal the customer service team is lacking, it could also prove beneficial to revisit best practices to improve efficiency.

Challenge #3: Using Multiple Channels to Deliver a Consistent Experience

Today’s customers will use multiple channels to interact with your business. One of your customers might first send you an email, and then when unanswered, they’ll call or chat with someone on your website. Your customer’s frustration will increase if they don’t find the same information across multiple channels. Making an effort to deliver a consistent experience across channels will prevent this issue.

You can create great multi-channel experience by focusing on:

1. Improving mobile experiences
   

Creating a good mobile experience is, surprisingly, often ignored. More and more customers are searching and buying on mobile, but 90 percent of customers report having a poor experience when seeking support on mobile devices.

Taking steps to create a mobile experience that is easy to navigate, loads quickly and provides helpful search results will put your CX ahead of many other companies.

2. Improving social media response times
   

Another solution is to improve your social media response times. Thirty-two percent of customers expect an answer within 30 minutes, but the average response time of many businesses is 157 minutes. Only 8 percent of businesses respond in the expected 30 minute time frame, and a full 12 percent of businesses don’t respond to customer messages on social media at all. A quick response will show customers you care about them, and provides them with the information they need to make a purchase.

3. Enabling text communications

 SMS is a great tool for customer service across industries. Fifty-two percent of consumers say they would like to be able to reach out to support agents through text, while 47 percent say that texting would improve their overall customer service satisfaction. A good SMS experience is a surefire way to enhance your CX.

4. Optimizing email communication

Taking the time to optimize your email services is still worthwhile today, as 38 percent of consumers prefer communicating online or through email about simple customer service issues. Businesses should also take note that customers still expect a fast reply to emails. Providing fast, reliable email communication will satisfy many of your customers.

A Great Customer Experience Pays Off

It’s a fact: 86 percent of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Organizations that take the customer experience seriously will set themselves apart and win over higher spending, loyal customers.