While conventional firms concentrate on distinguishing themselves through product innovation and improved features, many are beginning to learn that it’s an exceptional experience that attracts consumers and elevates crucial business KPIs. Experience optimization has gained attention as a result of this thought process.
What is experience optimization?
The term “experience” refers to the complete user journey a customer has when engaging with a business across all touchpoints. The effectiveness of these encounters, whether on a website, app, tablet, mobile device, created by a bot, or in-person, has a strong impact on the loyalty and purchase decisions of your consumers.
Optimization is the scope of improvement to strike a balance between what customers want more of and how the business can deliver it.
Combining the two key elements, experience optimization is the technique and skill of luring, retaining, and enriching a website visitor’s journey throughout their lifecycle while establishing or preserving a brand’s reputation in today’s quickly changing, customer-centric online market.
What is customer experience optimization?
Customer experience optimization is the process of strengthening vulnerable areas in the customer experience in an attempt to enhance brand impression and loyalty. It is an ongoing practice of leveraging data to enhance all of your interactions with customers.
Improved customer experience results in higher conversions, revenue, and growth. There are several ways to enhance the customer experience, such as:
- Exceeding customer expectations
- A surge in customer engagement
- Surprising users in a positive manner by providing unusual or new experiences
- Providing unique and customized experiences
- Enabling faster user navigation to the desired location
- Accelerating business transactions
- Confusion free interactions
Why is customer experience optimization important?
In addition to influencing consumer demand for your brand, the customer experience also has an impact on consumers’ loyalty and purchasing behaviour. Therefore, improving the customer experience results in happy customers which is crucial for:
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Improved business KPIs
- Boosting customer retention and acquisition
- Increased sales
- Boost in revenues
Strategies to optimize customer experience
There isn’t a secret optimization technique or method that can instantly enhance your customer experience. The best course of action is to adopt a comprehensive strategy including monitoring, evaluating, and A/B testing a range of data to increase overall customer satisfaction. The following suggestions are by no means all-inclusive, but they do offer a good place to start for your attempts to improve the client experience:
- Gather data to know your customers
It’s important to note that utilizing customer data is the key to the most effective customer experience improvement techniques. It’s simple to assume your customers’ preferences based on their behaviour while using a product, but asking directly and using tools makes it easier to understand customer actions. VWO Insights provides a comprehensive list of tools to get user data:
- On-page surveys
- Heatmaps
- Session recordings
- Form Analytics
Create and order a testing roadmap based on the information you have gathered.
- Outline the customer journey and create journey maps
Make a list of all the areas where your clients may come in contact with your brand. For your sales team’s benefit, keep records of every Instagram remark, support ticket, marketing email, and ping.
Create a map of the path taken by your typical clients using the information provided here. You can start to optimize and enhance each stage of their journey if you have a clear understanding of how every stage influences what they think of your brand.
- Identify customer problems that require solutions
You now have all the information you could need about your company and your clients. Now is the time to form a hypothesis!
Evaluate all the data you have and ask questions such as:
- Are the business KPIs going haywire?
- Why are customers dropping off?
- What are the common queries coming to the service desk?
- Why or why do not customers return for repurchase?
Form a judgment based on the answers and make a list of improvement areas.
- Make an improvement plan and test
Now is the time to plan all improvements. Additionally, you must continually assess the success of adding new features, integrating existing ones, and developing the overall system.
Plan attainable weekly “sprints.” that make solving problems one at a time rather than all at once more efficient.
- Solutions to implement
Once the plan is in place, its time to implement some solutions such as:
- Effective chatbots
- A knowledge centre
- Improved FAQ section
- A better tech stack
- Reasonable actions on customer feedback
- Accept technological changes
- Invest in customer service staff training
- Streamline the UI/UX
- A/B test on various planned improvements
- Encourage inter-departmental communication
- Consistent multi-channel experience
You are aware that you require brand presence across channels to compete in today’s market. Additionally, it is crucial that your customers have a positive and consistent experience everywhere they interact with your brand. For example, they should feel the same way whether they navigate from your website to Facebook.
- Focus on mobile performance
Customer experience optimization extends beyond the web. Customers should not have to guess where to go to perform things they frequently do on their laptops because the experience on mobile and desktop should be the same.
It can seem insignificant, but it’s crucial: Customers won’t suggest a company with a badly designed mobile website 57% of the time. Therefore, pay attention and enhance the mobile user experience.
The VWO Experience Optimization Platform is an all-in-one platform that improves key business metrics by empowering you to discover insights, test ideas easily, and improve engagement across the entire customer journey.
VWO is a connected platform that allows you to:
- Quickly test your website and in-app experiences
- Know what your users want
- Create and manage your optimization roadmap
- Deliver personalized experiences based on customer data
Take an all-inclusive free trial to learn more about how VWO can help you optimise your experience.
