Customer experience (CX) is all about how your customers perceive their interactions with your brand. A positive CX can turn casual browsers into loyal customers, while a negative one can send them straight to your competitors.
Now, enter social media — your secret weapon. It’s more than just likes and shares. With billions of users worldwide, it’s an invaluable channel for real-time interaction, customer care, feedback and engagement.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to build a winning customer experience strategy. You’ll also find actionable tips on harnessing the power of social to shape these experiences.
In today’s highly competitive market, delivering an amazing customer experience is a key differentiator between companies. Research shows that nearly 90% of customers say experience is as important as products or services.
So how can you stand out and wow customers? While every business is unique, these 10 proven best practices form the foundation of memorable customer experiences.
1. Make It Personal
Treating each customer as an individual is the heart of great service. Personalization makes people feel valued, not just like another transaction.
Ways to personalize the experience include:
- Using names – Address customers by name in communications.
- Tailored recommendations – Suggest products based on past purchases and preferences.
- Segmented campaigns – Send emails or offers tailored to customer profiles.
- Loyalty programs – Provide exclusive perks and special treatment for VIP customers.
Even small touches like using custom greetings or offers can make a difference. The goal is to demonstrate you truly know and care about each customer.
2. Provide Self-Service Options
Though personal service is ideal, many customers prefer self-service for simpler needs. In fact, 50% of buyers want the ability to independently resolve product issues.
Effective self-service options include
- Help centers – FAQ databases, how-to guides, and troubleshooting.
- Account dashboards – Self-manage preferences and payment info.
- Chatbots – Automated assistants guide users to solutions.
- Community forums – Crowdsource answers from fellow customers.
Self-service gives customers independence while freeing staff for high-touch interactions. Just ensure options are user-friendly and accessible.
3. Make It Seamless Across Channels
Delivering consistent experiences across channels is essential today. About 80% of customers use multiple channels during their journey – online, mobile, in-store, etc.
To connect the dots:
- Maintain the same branding and tone across channels.
- Allow customers to start activities on one channel and finish later on another.
- Share purchase histories and preferences between channels.
- Give staff tools to access customer data from all touchpoints.
Remove channel silos so transitions feel natural. This omnichannel approach prevents customers from having to repeat themselves.
4. Actively Listen to Feedback
Listening to customer feedback provides invaluable insights into pain points and opportunities. Yet shockingly, 42% of customers feel brands generally don’t care about their feedback.
Ways to act on feedback include:
- Surveys – Solicit reviews and suggestions after purchase.
- Community forums – Monitor discussions to identify issues.
- Feedback buttons – Add buttons onsite and in communications to submit comments.
- CRM tracking – Log support calls to spot trends.
- Analytics – Assess metrics like churn rate and NPS.
Implementing feedback demonstrates you value customers as partners, not just transactions. But listening is only the first step – taking action is key.
5. Empower with Information
Customers today are used to having information at their fingertips. Equipping them with the knowledge they need for smart decisions shows respect.
Some examples include:
- Product descriptions – Detailed information on features, specs, and usage.
- Comparison tools – Make it easy to compare products side-by-side.
- Usage guides – How-to content, manuals, and video tutorials.
- Community Q&A – Let customers share product expertise.
- Interactive tools – Product configurators, virtual try-on, calculators.
Arming customers with information helps them self-serve, while also building trust and credibility for your brand.
6. Deliver Seamless Service
Few things sour a customer relationship faster than frustrating service interactions. Ensure each step is seamless by:
- Setting clear expectations – Provide timelines, terms, and requirements upfront.
- Minimizing hand-offs – Reduce transfers across departments.
- Enabling self-help – Offer tools to independently find answers.
- Tracking history – Log all past interactions in one place.
- Closing loops – Follow up on service requests until resolution.
A seamless experience demonstrates value for a customer’s time and effort. Small annoyances add unnecessary friction that pushes customers away.
7. Surprise and Delight
Going above and beyond expectations is an opportunity to surprise and delight customers. Think outside the box with extra touches like:
- Free gifts – Send small tokens of appreciation.
- Exclusive perks – VIP access, special offers, and upgrades for loyal buyers.
- handwritten notes – A personal thank you card shows you care.
- ridiculously good service – Empower staff to fix issues and grant requests.
These wow moments spark joy, excitement, and appreciation. Just ensure delightful extras align with the brand so they don’t seem gimmicky.
8. Make It Effortless
Convenience is a huge driver of satisfaction today. Avoid unnecessary hassles like complicated instructions, repetitive data entry, and convoluted navigation.
Some best practices include:
- Simple menus and forms – Cut clutter and steps.
- Smart defaults – Pre-select optimal options to reduce effort.
- One-click purchase – Save payment details for faster checkout.
- Account-based experiences – Pull up purchase history and preferences automatically.
Look at each touchpoint through the customer’s eyes. Remove anything confusing or inconvenient to streamline the journey.
9. Proactively Solve Needs
Today’s customers expect you to know their needs, not vice versa. Leverage data to deliver proactive solutions:
- Website popups – Offer help based on browsing history.
- Cart abandonment – Send reminders and perks if items sit too long.
- Usage alerts – Notify customers when products need replenishing.
- Churn signals – Contact customers showing leading indicators of cancelling.
- Preference-based offers – Provide choices aligned with interests.
Proactivity increases retention by showing you value the relationship beyond the transaction. But avoid overt salesiness – the focus should be on providing helpful service.
10. Foster Community
Building connections between customers helps foster brand affinity. Consider avenues like:
- User forums – Encourage discussions to share product knowledge.
- Referral programs – Incentivize customers to share your brand.
- Reviews and ratings – Let customers evaluate products and service.
- Loyalty programs – Provide elite status for top fans.
- Social media groups – Host spaces for customers to connect.
Community activates passionate fans to engage with and promote your brand. Just ensure proper moderation to maintain a positive tone.
Make Customer Experience a Priority
Delivering exceptional experiences requires an organization-wide commitment and customer-centric culture. But the substantial benefits make it a smart investment.
Amazing service earns loyal repeat customers. It also creates brand advocates who drive referrals and social buzz. This directly bolsters the bottom line – research shows CX leaders grow revenues 4-8x faster than competitors.
While every business is unique, these 10 best practices provide guideposts to connect with customers in meaningful ways. By truly listening and empowering people, you transform transactions into relationships. That bond is the competitive advantage that leads to lasting success.
Practice proactive customer service outreach
Gartner predicts that by 2025, outbound customer engagement interactions will outnumber inbound.
By combining rich customer and social data, businesses can identify opportunities to proactively support customers through messaging platforms. When done effectively, this will minimize customer effort, reduce service tickets and demonstrate that your brand is attuned to your customers’ needs.
Keep in mind that when a business sends an outbound message—whether that’s an ad or something more transactional like a receipt—the customer can respond in the same conversation thread about anything at any time.
Tools like Sprout Social and Zendesk, which sync message history and customer data, will help ensure that your team isn’t caught off guard and has the context to engage with individual consumers in consistently meaningful ways.
What is customer experience (CX) strategy?
A customer experience (CX) strategy is your blueprint for delivering positive and memorable customer experiences. It’s a long-term, data-driven plan for shaping every interaction your customer has with your business — from the first click to the final purchase, and beyond.
A great CX strategy aims to exceed customer expectations at every touchpoint. This helps create loyal customers who not only repeatedly choose your products but also rave about your brand to their friends and family.
And that’s not all. Time and again, customer experience research has shown that superior CX can drive high retention, Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), revenue and growth for your business.
Quick, convenient service contributes to a positive customer experience (CX), but 80% of consumers also expect businesses on social to interact with their customers in more meaningful ways. Through social messaging, brands have an opportunity to meet those rising expectations, but marketing departments can’t do it alone. Companies that build a coordinated approach to social messaging stand to transform their customer experience in a way that increases loyalty and drives revenue.
The Top 4 Customer Experience Trends In 2023
How do you provide excellent customer experiences?
You can’t provide excellent customer experiences without knowing your customers and building personal connections with them. Speak with them directly and frequently at all levels of the organization—not just through the customer success team—and drill down for candid and honest feedback about your company’s work.
What are customer experience best practices?
We also share 10 customer experience best practices that will help your product exceed customer expectations and retain them long-term. Customer experience (CX) refers to all customer interactions with a brand, covering every touchpoint from initial discovery to renewal.
How do you build a customer experience strategy?
Creating and fine-tuning your customer experience strategy is an ongoing process. But one way to set solid foundations for your CX strategy is by implementing user feedback early in the process. Embrace an iterative approach to building your customer experience and involve beta users to test your progress.
What are the features of a customer experience strategy?
The features include: User segmentation. Custom event tracking. Funnels. Paths. Trends analysis. Retention analysis. Custom dashboards. Userpilot dashboard. A customer experience strategy ensures you optimize all customer journey touchpoints and consistently engage customers.
