3 Things You’re Doing Wrong in Your Customer Experience Strategy

Customer experience is a relatively new term, but there’s some confusion about what it entails. Often, businesses think its the same as customer service but it’s so much more…

Customer experience is all-encompassing. It’s any interaction between the business and the customer for the duration of the relationship.

Assume customers are paying attention all the time. Not just when they’re waiting on the phone for a representative, exchanging emails with your sales team, or reading your blog posts.

In fact, there’s no single department that’s in charge of customer experience. This means the details can negatively impact your relationship with customers.

This is how to ensure your customer experience is well representative of your brand:

Typos and Poor Design

Customers are generally willing to forgive a few errors. Especially if your online presence is so enjoyable that they want to spend more time on your site.

Too many errors, however, can quickly turn a user off. If you have spelling and grammatical errors in addition to poor UX, then flaws in your customer experience will be glaring.

The same goes for your account dashboard’s look and usability. Customers who are accustomed to logging in and spending a considerable amount of time on a platform can’t be bothered with a “save changes” button. We’ve become accustomed to auto-saving.

As marketers, we understand the importance of creating content that is easy to read and digest on any device. This is why you can’t ignore the aesthetic of your web pages, blog posts, and emails.

But the same care that we apply to the pages we control needs to be applied to the pages and content that are the responsibility of the web development team as well.

Mixed Messaging

Consistency in your company is essential to your customer experience. If a prospect talks to a sales rep at a trade show, they should get the same answers as if they were to call your customer service department.

This means more than ensuring everyone in the company says the same thing to potential leads and current customers — It also means everyone in your company has to want the same things for customers.

Let’s say you have a lead that loves your blog posts and whitepapers. They comment and share often. The content your company’s marketing team creates is a great source of information to solve their problems and have moved through your funnel with enthusiasm.

But once they contact your sales team, something feels different. They don’t feel like they’re being heard and even though they’re not really sure if your company offers the solution they need, your sales team keeps pushing.

Now that they’ve interacted with another part of your company, their experience is different, and not necessarily in a good way. You could argue that they’re technically not a customer yet, and so this isn’t a customer experience. But if one lead has this series of encounters, you can assume it’s an experience your paid customers are familiar with.

Using a One-Size-Fits-All Customer Experience Strategy

There are other places where muddled or mixed messages can impact how customers feel about your company, like with your emails.

Sending the same message to all of your customers and clients is another area where it’s easy to manage the customer experience. Here’s where segmentation can help you create and cultivate great emails and landing pages that resonate with your leads.

Personalization is another key to building your customer experience strategy. If your potential customers don’t feel like you know or care about who they are, it will be much harder to turn them into actual customers.

One-size-fits-all tactics can be just as bad as targeting the wrong buyer persona at the wrong time with the wrong offer. Unknown leads might be okay with a blog post that is really a long landing page for a downloadable white paper or PDF, but your leads further down in the funnel.

While you and the rest of the marketing team might be good at this already, your sales and success teams need to know who your buyer personas are and what level of service they expect.

Anything can impact a customer experience: a partnership with a company that holds controversial political opinions, a distasteful tweet sent out by someone on your design team, or a bad call with your customer support team. Any of these can impact your customers differently. You have to make sure you have complete visibility on every client-facing aspect of your business.

The implementation of Maropost for Marketing will improve poor landing page and email design, mixed messaging, and enhance the overall customer experience.

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