How to Improve Customer Experience In 2021?

In this post, learn how to improve customer experience and build long-term relationships with your customers by understanding their needs and solving their problems.

Technology advances and the rapid growth of customer touchpoints mean that customer experience strategy will change and become more complex. Tactics and approaches that worked last year, might not deliver the same outcomes today.

For users in 2021, a seamless and intuitive experience on the website or app is a must and one of the key indicators in their willingness to recommend a certain product.

Here’s a short test that will help you find out whether your product provides a good customer experience.

1. Did the users achieve their goals after interacting with the product?
2. Was the process intuitive and pleasurable?
3. Did users enjoy interacting with the product?

If the answer to all the questions is “yes”, you are on the right track. But it’s important, to be honest with yourself.

CX in 2021: Statistics & Facts

Yes, customer experience is still king, but it’s evolving. Consider this:

According to a recent survey, business professionals name CX their number one priority for the next 5 years.

Source

• CX drives over two-thirds of customer loyalty, more than ‘brand’ and ‘price’ combined. (Gartner)
• 48% of consumers have left a website without purchasing because they felt it was poorly curated for them. (Accenture)
• 75% of people expect to get immediate info when they use their smartphone. (Google)
• 76% of shoppers use their mobile phones to shop because it saves them time. However, only 12% of shoppers felt it provides them the most convenient shopping experience (4x less than desktop). (Dynamic Yield)
• 64% of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand to others if it offers simpler experiences and communications. (Siegel+Gale)
• By 2023, 25% of organizations expect they will integrate marketing, sales, and customer experience (CX) into a single function. (Gartner)

Customer Experience is more important than ever to consumers. Thus, customer expectations are rising; they want every interaction with a product to be a great one. With the pandemic and its impact, customers’ priorities and expectations have changed. They want a seamless and consistent experience across a variety of communication channels and a highly-personalized customer service.

Let’s make it clear the good and bad of customer experience in 2021:

GOOD CX

• Customer-centric
• Personalization is the king
• Friendly, empathetic experience
• Value-delivery at the right price
• Product improvements according to the customer feedback
• Technology is not the priority but a way to enhance the experience

BAD CX

• Ignoring customer feedback
• Compromising customers’ personal data
• Unresponsive and slow support
• Poor website/app navigation
• Ignoring “mobile-first”

So, what’s happening in customer experience in 2021 and beyond? Let’s find out.

How to Make Customer Experience Better In 2021?

Unfortunately, many companies still believe that creating a quality product equals providing an exceptional customer experience. That’s not always the case. You can create a bug-free product, using the latest technologies, but fail to manage a particular communication channel and as a result, make it harder for customers to communicate with your brand. In this case, we’re talking about digital customer experience or DX. While CX is how your customers perceive all of their interactions with your business, DX is how they interact with your brand on digital channels (websites, apps, and emails). It’s worth noting that we no longer live in a world where customers separate their experiences in digital and non-digital terms. They want to easily access products in any possible and most convenient way.

So, let’s take a look at a few steps that will help you to improve customer experience:

• Adopt mobile-first approach
• Use of emerging technologies
• Embrace cloud solutions

1. Adopt mobile-first approach

Ok, let’s admit it: we can’t live without our smartphones anymore. Gone are the days when the desktop and PCs were the most popular ways to access the web.

It’s easy to see how much you use your device daily for your business and personal tasks. So imagine how your customers are using them to find businesses like yours. If you’re not using a mobile-first approach for your marketing and customer service, then you’re seriously falling behind.

In fact, 57% of customers won’t recommend a product with a poorly designed website on mobile. In addition, if a website isn’t mobile-friendly, 50% of customers will abandon it, even if they like the business.

Mobile-first is often discussed in the context of a future requirement. But the future is already here. Think about how much you use your smartphone for your business or personal tasks. So do your users. As a customer, would you rather have them try to zoom the content on your smartphone screen or have a seamless mobile-first experience?

Source

Mobile-first is often considered to be a design-focused project. But it goes far beyond it. You need to consider everything that can enhance the mobile experience and improve customer experience.

• Make navigation friendly with easily clickable buttons
• Compress and resize images
• Address your page load speed
• Ensure everything is easily readable
• Don’t forget about the voice search (Siri, OK Google)
• Ensure videos are responsive

Even Google ranks websites higher when they take into account a mobile-first. So if you’re still not adapting the mobile approach, you can count on it being lower to rank.

2. USE EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES TO IMPROVE YOUR CX

The CX landscape is getting more competitive. To stay relevant and ahead of the competition, many companies embrace technologies like AI, chatbots/voice assistants, VR/AR to enhance the personal experience of their customers.

To know more about improving your CX using emerging technologies and embrace cloud solutions — read the whole article by the link.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below ⬇️