Thought Piece | Thought Piece
Why it’s time to future-proof your business with MACH technology
by Liam Springate-Jones
The customer experience is crucial to the long-term success of any business. It’s how customers perceive and interact with your company, and the best experiences can drive loyalty and more revenue. According to Acquia’s 2022 CX report, 94% of marketers say their organisation changed its digital CX strategy over the past 18 months, which shows how important prioritising customer experience has become.
To compete in what has become an incredibly crowded market, businesses need to make customers the focal point of all decisions related to their services and products. This is known as customer-centricity – which means putting the customer at the heart of your organisation. Below, we’ve outlined some of the most important ways that businesses can create memorable customer experiences.
Utilise data and insights
One of the best ways to improve the customer experience is by identifying the customer needs through tracking and utilising key metrics. This includes:
Repeat visitors returning to your site and purchase histories, both of which show who are your loyal customers and the power of your brand.
Engagement data – signalling how your content is being received and responded to.
Behavioural insights, which can help you figure out how to connect with your audience.
User experience information, in other words – a lens through which you could strengthen and optimise your UX.
Gaining customer insights provides businesses with a holistic perspective while collecting an inventory of current customers. This way, businesses can learn if any gaps need to be filled and analyse profiles to deliver a more personalised customer experience.
Build a genuine connection
When a customer trusts a brand is using its data in meaningful and intentional ways, rather than for purely sales purposes, they are more likely to provide more data to that brand and invest further time into the brand experience. That’s why brands must build genuine and authentic connections to create a memorable customer experience. This includes transparent communication and being open about their products, services, and prices, as well as focusing on individual customer needs. Brands must understand their customers so they can continue to provide them with valuable and trustworthy information. By utilising channels such as email and social media, brands can build new relationships and reignite connections with existing and former customers.
Maintain a consistent tone of voice across all channels
A consistent tone of voice across all channels means that the brand is reliable and authentic and that the business has a well-defined brand image. Maintaining a consistent tone of voice helps establish trust and it delivers a cohesive, seamless experience that serves as a differentiator from other competing businesses. It also helps build brand loyalty and creates steady, recognisable interactions across all channels, which makes for a much more memorable experience for customers.
The way a brand communicates has the power to influence a buyer’s decisions and it’s an important part of brand management - which is about relentlessly protecting the image and ethos of your brand. Therefore, tone of voice provides a consistent identity that can have a positive impact on the customer experience.
Focus on customer journey mapping
Customer journey mapping illustrates customers’ needs, processes, and perceptions throughout their interactions with a brand. By understanding the different stages of a customer’s journey, such as their first visit to your website and how they progress towards making a purchase, you get a better grasp of your customer experience and can use visual maps to make improvements. A customer journey map allows a business to implement CX initiatives based on customer journey mapping data, which ultimately serves to help improve the overall customer experience.
There’s no doubt both customer experience and customer-centricity will remain crucial in the future. Delivering the best customer service requires focusing on creating positive digital experiences for the customer, using personalisation and strategy to drive retention.
So, what should be your next steps?
Our partner Aquia is a digital experience platform for building and delivering optimised experiences. If you’d like to find out more about customers’ experiences, read Acquia’s article on building unified customer intelligence.
For further information and details on how Splendid UNLIMITED can transform your brand, contact our New Business Director & Strategic Partner Manager, Stuart Hobbs. Our team offers digital transformation, strategy, and product design to realise business outcomes.
