The need for businesses to invest more in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to evolve their customer success strategy continues to grow in parallel with customer expectations when interacting with apps and products. Imagine if that customer were a loyal user whose lifetime value (LTV) is now at risk because of a poor customer experience (CX).
Whether your business is B2C or B2B, developing a solid CX roadmap will positively impact your customer loyalty and satisfaction levels. Think about it, when your business shows you that you care, the more your customers trust you and are more willing to continue purchasing from you.
This article will cover:
- What is Customer Experience (CX)?
- Why is CX important?
- What makes up for a good CX Roadmap?
- How to Improve the Customer Experience
What is Customer Experience (CX)?
Customer experience or CX refers to the strategy developed to improve every touchpoint between your business and customers throughout their consumer journey. From the awareness stage to advocacy, it aims to improve all actions taken related to your product or service. Additionally, a CX strategy should also account for how customers feel about your product.
With the advent of technologies based on AI and Augmented Reality, a new term has emerged, known as immersive CX. An example of an immersive experience would be a user who takes a virtual tour of the hotel room they’re about to book. E-commerce is also benefiting from this by allowing customers to shop after interacting with a 3D product on their screens.
Why is Customer Experience important?
CX is a critical concept for all businesses, but it has become crucial in software products. Why?
Let’s say you’re looking for automation software to increase productivity levels in your team. Chances are you’ll soon get lost among the thousands of options and will find it even harder to decide, as most features are similar. What will make you decide between one or the other? You guessed it, the overall experience. We no longer buy products based solely on features, but also on how effortlessly we can interact with them.
It’s not just about the interaction with your product; customers’ perception is determined by every single encounter they have with your business. It’s understandable that customers will invest in businesses where they feel supported and respected.
All of these reasons (and more) are precisely why a good CX strategy needs to be thought through to consider every single touchpoint. This is what we know as a good CX roadmap.
What makes up for a good CX Roadmap?
1. Feedback should be organic and genuine
There are one-on-one methods that lead to more organic or genuine feedback, such as focus groups or interviews. Here, your customers can freely talk about their experience with your service or product. And note, we said “freely”. This means designing questions to make them as objective and bias-free as possible. There are other methods that may be even more objective as they won’t be aware of the fact that they’re being heard. For example, product flows where the user can interact with your product and provide insights into its usability.
2. Not all feedback requires immediate action
How can you tell whether customer feedback is a priority or not? For example, let’s say a customer has left a comment in a survey stating that your website doesn’t have an attractive font. Although this may affect their experience, it’s an aspect that will not impact your bottom line, especially if this comment is coming from one single user. However, if this same customer were to comment on the responsiveness of your website, and is joined by other users on this remark, then it’s definitely an issue you need to pursue and fix.
3. Map the journey across every stage
Once you’ve collected and patterned out all feedback, it’s time to map your customer journey. This requires being able to answer questions like “How did they learn about your business?”, “Which touchpoint helped them convert to the following consumer stage?”, “Did they find the purchase process easy?”, etc. You must define pain points in every phase, so you can anticipate needs or issues in the future and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty levels.
4. Set SMART Goals
Now it’s time to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Once you’ve identified the pain points that need to be addressed, it’s time to draw up a roadmap. This means identifying what must be improved, which resources can be used, and by when to expect results.
5. Understand your CX metrics
If you don’t establish metrics, you won’t be able to tell if your roadmap works. Any new CX initiative will yield results, but it’s important to understand whether it’s a positive result or not, and then what led to these results. Don’t forget that you can only manage what you can measure. Establishing benchmarks for your CX strategy is just as important. For example, what customer satisfaction score (CSS) or net promoter score (NPS) are you working towards? As you progress, you can revisit them and tweak your strategy as needed.
6. Have an open and transparent database
As we mentioned in a previous article, “Customer value is everybody’s business”. Gone are the days when the marketing and sales teams worked separately, especially with the amount of powerful integrated software available. The more aligned your departments, the more beneficial it will be for your customers’ experience. More importantly, you need to have an open and scalable database that can incorporate new user behavior trends.
7. Acquire the right CX tools
The right CX tools can be found in customer success platforms or product-led software. These integrate multiple channels and are also extremely scalable, so you won’t have to switch to another platform when your customer base grows. For example, FROGED integrates over 2,000 customer success apps. As a result, most of our customers are able to maintain the apps they were already familiarized with. It’s also built around an intuitive and no-code interface, so you won’t need to spend any extra time training your staff.
How to Improve the Customer Experience
If you’re getting ready to draw up your CX roadmap it means you’ve understood that every single touchpoint is key to achieving sustainable business growth. The first step toward developing a successful CX roadmap is to have a system to collect organic and genuine customer feedback. Product Success Platforms like FROGED now offer powerful and intuitive features to help you collect, analyze, and monitor customer feedback. Moreover, they provide a two-fold advantage. First of all, the method of gathering is genuine and more subtle than focus groups or interviews. Secondly, everyone in your company can have access to these insights. For example, Product Flows can be used to test the usability of your product and monitor the user experience at every stage of their consumer journey. In parallel to focus groups or interviews, this is another organic and genuine way to gather customer feedback on your product.
To learn more about how FROGED supports your business with sustainable growth, read our blog post on How FROGED promotes Product-Led Growth.
