Customer experience is everything. It’s a mantra every brand should know. You should be customer-centric in the 2020s.

We understand that customers interact with brands online and offline just as much as they do with the products.

It all comes down to experience

Recent research shows that companies with great customer service outperform those who don’t. A Mckinsey study showed that customers who had positive experiences purchased more, while those who had negative ones purchased less.

Customer experience is an essential part of customer service. How do you define a great customer experience? A study found that 88% of customers believe businesses deliver “super experiences”, but only 80% of businesses claim they do. This is a clear disconnect.

You need to know what your customers want, feel, and how they perceive your brand and the services you offer. This requires a lot of data and accurate analysis.

Listen to customers and lean in

These days, businesses can access a huge amount of customer information from their customers and can listen to their customers’ messages as long as the data is properly analyzed.

They can also understand customer behavior in the past. They can learn what customers think about the company, its products, and its competitors. They can also find out how they feel at any given moment, their intentions, and what motivates them. They have the opportunity to deliver a great customer experience and build brand loyalty and trust by analyzing.

Brands face the challenge of ‘joining all the dots’ and tracking customers seamlessly through their journey, regardless of device, channel, or touchpoint. This allows them to align every business activity, from customer service to brand promotion and advertisement.

Tracking the journey across devices

It can be difficult to understand how customers interact with a brand. Customers might visit the website from their desktop browser. Later, they may switch to mobile and download the app. Finally, they can go to a store to try the product in person.

It was difficult to track this multi-device journey using Google Analytics (GA). Two tools were required to track multi-device journeys with Google Analytics (GA): Google Analytics for Firebase and GA to measure web engagement.

Google introduced Apps + Web + offline analysis in 2019, which allows cross-device tracking in GA. This gives marketers a clearer, more user-friendly view of how consumers interact and interact with brands.

Cross-device technology allows brands to identify weak points and make improvements. This technology is a valuable addition to your customer experience toolbox. Elespacio has been using a holistic approach to customer journeys with clients Nespresso, and Victorinox. This technology is especially powerful when it’s combined with other artificial intelligence technologies that make business lives easier, including sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analysis makes you feel good

Data mining or sentiment analysis uses an algorithm to detect the tone in the text. This can be done for any type of text: a social media post or product review, blog post, or entire document.

The algorithm uses machine learning and natural language processing to determine whether the writer feels positive, neutral, or negative about a topic, brand, or product. This powerful tool allows businesses to automate the process of sorting through messages and finding out what’s working well, what’s not, and what customers think about their competitors.

It can be applied in many different areas. Marketing efforts are one example. Companies can monitor customers’ reactions to social media campaigns or events. This allows them to learn and refine their marketing strategies.

Sentiment analysis is a tool that can be used to determine which customer reviews are negative or positive. This allows the team to prioritize customers who have negative reviews. Businesses can also use positive reviews to help them understand what makes customers happy, and then create a benchmark.

And the customer support team can use sentiment analysis to sort through inbound tickets and prioritize them based on the email’s tone of voice (the most dissatisfied-sounding customers being top of the list).

Happy customers can be made through social media

Humans love to communicate with other people when they need assistance. When it comes to customer service, the phone is still the most preferred channel, especially if the problem is complex.

Social media is the most popular way to get customer support in the online world. Brands quickly understood the potential of this channel as a marketing and advertising tool. However, consumers quickly saw its potential as a way to ‘talk back to brands via private messages or public posts.

Consumers prefer social media over email and web chat to solve their problems. In the US, 37% say that they use social media for customer support. Social media is the best medium to provide customer support as brands can respond quickly and it is important for creating a positive customer experience. 

Social media offers a great opportunity to be a customer-centric brand and improve customer relationships. Businesses need to seize this opportunity with both hands and not as a marketing tool.

How to convert customers into friends with active social listening

Social media can also be useful as it allows customer support teams to be proactive and not reactive via social media. They don’t need to wait for customers to email them with grievances; they can listen to the complaints on social media and offer assistance.

Many brands already use ‘active social listening to find out if they are mentioned on the internet. This is done using tools like Hootsuite and Buffer, Mention, Sprout, Mention, and Sprout. These tools are a natural step for customer support and could lead to a significant improvement in customer satisfaction.

It’s impossible to predict customer behavior accurately at all times. Instead of relying on channels to predict how customers will behave, brands need to be proactive and find out where each customer is at the end of their purchase journey.

Only then can companies tailor the experience to customers in a way that engages them, converts them, and makes them feel valued by the company.