The role of customer experience in outperforming industry peers

Customer experience is how your customers perceive their interactions with your company. It should be both usable and enjoyable from the customer’s point of view.

This year, we observed an 11% decline in trust globally, with only 71% of people admitting they trust consumer brands. Trust has changed, and customers no longer want to be told what to buy. They want to get to know the company behind the product and behind the service, which can only be achieved through a transparent and trustworthy customer journey.

According to Econsultancy, optimising the customer experience is one of the most exciting opportunities for businesses in 2020, with 24% of companies ranking it at their top priority this year.

Did you know that 50% of consumers are more likely to do business with you again in the future after a positive customer experience? Creating a seamless experience ensures that visitors are enjoying interacting with your business at every touchpoint of the journey. By focusing on creating amazing customer experiences, you’re showing the desire for your company to go above and beyond to please every single customer.

There’s no doubt it is getting harder and harder to differentiate yourself from other businesses when consumer trust is going down and every brand is sharing great content online. But a competitive advantage is huge, and customer experience is the perfect tool to help you stand out from the competition.

In this article, we’ll discuss ways you can improve your user journey to deliver better customer experience and power your business forward.

Providing a smooth voice search experience

Google has suggested multiple times that it intends to grow from a search engine to an answer engine. And with the rise of Google Home, traditional SEO has already radically transformed, and will continue to do so in years to come.

Rather than providing different search results and leaving the user a choice, an answer engine provides the user with one answer only. This makes finding facts much easier for the user, but makes it much harder for companies to stand out and feature as a definite answer.

Small companies have an advantage - by testing and identifying profitable queries, they can focus on getting ahead of larger businesses. That’s why it’s important to focus on smaller benefit-oriented searches by rethinking the website interface and optimising it with long-tail keywords.

This makes it more likely for smaller companies to reach and maintain position 0. Position 0 is the first result, often displayed in the answer box above the other organic results. Although Google is still experimenting with position 0 results - whether they’re answer boxes, knowledge graphs or Voice Assistant results - search engines’ constant investment in voice search suggests this shift is here to stay.

Businesses that start implementing voice search into their customer experience strategy are the brands that will dominate online tomorrow.

If you’d like to learn more about voice search, SEO and answer engines, check out our webinar recording:

Re-imagining the customer experience with artificial intelligence

Every time Amazon recommends a purchase to a consumer, that’s artificial intelligence at work. In the world of customer experience and customer service, we’re experiencing the rise of digital assistants, chatbots, and robots answering basic queries.

Welcome to the future.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines. It has the ability to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings.

Did you know that AI can increase business productivity by 40%? These days, most businesses use AI for data analysis, on-site personalisation, content, and email marketing.

Companies are also turning to AI to automate repetitive tasks and personalise user journeys to build better relationships with their customers and offer seamless experiences.

KLM uses AI on Messenger. After booking a flight on their website, KLM lets the customer choose whether to receive their booking confirmation, check-in notification, boarding pass and flight status updates via Messenger. This makes travel information easy to find in a single place.

Bonus? Their AI system also lets the user ask any question they may have on Messenger, 24/7. All messages are personalised and friendly, making it look like the customer is chatting to another human being.

Delivering personalised content

In order to trust a company and their products or services, shoppers can go through a considerable amount of research before deciding to buy online. Shoppers can make up to 9.5 visits on a retailer’s site before making a purchase, and that doesn’t take into account other sites they may go to as part of their customer journey.

This year, most industry peers have been personalising their customer experience with insightful and relevant content like offers, podcasts, blogs, videos, or even events.

Personalising the customer experience to offer relevant pieces of information creates better brand awareness and loyalty, encourages customer relationships, and can elevate your business into a thought leader.

So how will you deliver the most relevant content and authentic experiences to your audience in the moment?

How will you build the personal connections that inspire customers to invest in your business? Where do you start?

Delivering the right content to the right person isn’t easy, but it’s certainly necessary. And it all starts by getting to know your customers. Divide your audience into groups using your existing data, and build profile types.

Develop personalisation strategies using automation and classify your content. What content is relevant? At what point?

Once your audience and content are both classified, delivering personalised content through the whole journey is easier.

When you personalise the customer experience with smart relevant content, you’re creating value for your audience and delivering better experiences.

Building trust earlier in the journey

Online reviews are still one of the best ways to build trust and transparency at any point of the customer journey. Indeed, 89% of global consumers check reviews as part of their online buying journey, and 49% of global consumers consider positive reviews one of their top 3 purchase influences.

Today, consumers are relying more on online reviews than they have in the past 2 years, making feedback a powerful tool to convert visitors into customers and to reduce customer hesitation.

Indeed, including customer feedback as part of customer experience is a way to help do their research directly on-site and make smarter choices.

How? Online reviews tend to boost customer confidence and often eliminate doubt because they answer most questions consumers have as they move through the purchase journey, and provide third-party validation.

In a world where word of mouth travels fast, your customers are almost certainly already talking about your business. To deliver great experiences, you must identify and understand your customers’ needs and wants, which is why it’s essential to listen to the voice of the customer.

By agreeing to manage your online reputation, you’re likely to collect consumer insights, identify areas of development, and improve your visitors’ experience in the long run.

"Trustpilot was (and is) such an important tool in the wider Travel Money Group customer experience strategy. We've been able to learn more about our customers and our brand than ever before. We had no issues getting our customers to leave reviews on the platform either, which shows it's a valued tool for not just businesses, but customers alike."

There’s no doubt customer experience is an important aspect of the user journey. There are many ways a business can work on its customer experience, but starting with consumer insights can help you better understand which aspect of the journey you need to work on to increase overall customer satisfaction.

To find out more about consumer insights and how they can help you improve your customer experience, click the link below.