In a world where digitization leads the way in almost every sector, customers have developed a lean toward engaging online rather than visiting establishments to get their needs.

The primary reason for this shift is the convenience – the smooth relay of information and options. Businesses must take a more customer-centric approach nowadays if they want to retain or gain new customers.

Customer experience is the most important aspect of this approach. Customer experience is how a customer feels after interacting with a brand throughout each stage of the customer journey. The better the customer experience, the more likely a customer is to revisit a brand's website, store, app, and so on.

Ventures that have a fluid and positive customer experience outperform their competition by a huge margin. This is primarily because the customers can get the service they are looking for anywhere on the internet. 

What makes customers step out and visit your establishment is how well they are treated and how fruitful their customer journey was with your establishment. 

How to use customer experience to supercharge sales

Customer Experience is a “make or break” element for any business and can considerably help in elevating the brand image of your venture, as well as propelling sales. According to McKinsey and Company, businesses can increase their revenues by up to 10 to 15 percent by improving their customer experience.

5 ways to help your brand's customer experience reach its peak 

Here’s five tips to help your brand's customer experience achieve new heights.

1. Make the buying process about the buyer

One of the most overlooked strategies of achieving optimal customer experience is the buying process. Designing the sales process according to the customers’ needs rather than the needs of the sales will not only heighten customers’ willingness to engage with your business, but drastically improve the chance of customers buying your products.

This process, once developed, can be put into place with the help of customer satisfaction tools. 

A customer experience software helps in developing the sales process in the following ways: 

1. Monitoring the implementation of the process,
2. Evaluating the areas of improvement, and
3. Analyzing customer feedback.

The sales process sets up the expectations of a customer and determines how interested the customer is in moving their customer journey forward with your business.

For instance, more than 75 percent of customers agreed that having a sales associate with proper knowledge of the products they are selling made them more willing to engage.

2. Refining touchpoints in sales

The next step in the process of leveraging customer experience to boost sales is refining touchpoints.

Touchpoints are where some form of interaction takes place between the customers and sales. It can involve both content and humans. If a customer is engaging with your business, chances are that they will get either confused or lost with what they want to buy from you at some point. Touchpoints for customers are meant to be interactive, informative, and supportive.

Guiding customers through a wide variety of products and giving them options to explore that would be more beneficial to their needs improves customer satisfaction.

Customer experience software helps in taking valuable feedback from customers after touchpoints through simple and precise surveys. These surveys are a simple two-step feedback procedure that ask the question in the compass of “Were you satisfied with your interaction,” offering a simple answer of yes or no.

This can help your establishment determine the type of interactions customers prefer over various parts of their customer journey.

More than 73 percent of customers preferred to re-engage with brands that provided a seamless interaction at touchpoints to improve their customer experiences.

Following this step can significantly help your business in boosting sales through the medium of customer satisfaction and improved brand image, which are both good selling points in advertisements.

3. Responding to customers

Organizing your management in a way that it always heeds customer requests and complaints is imperative. Complaints or additional requests from customers are a very common thing for businesses, but how they are handled determines customer retention.

Implementing customer experience software in your system, you can easily make it easier to convey their requests or complaints through a customer experience app.

Customer experience apps allow a system to easily put put into motion, providing a resolution for the customer as quick as possible.

• Customer can convey their complaints or request through the app.
• The app instantly sends a notification to management.
• Management responds to the customer as soon as possible.
• The customer’s problem is resolved before they leave.
• The customer is happy with the resolution. 

The use of a customer experience app can also be implemented at check-ins and check-outs of customers, making the process even more convenient for the customers. 

More than 86 percent of the customers who had their complaints or requests listened to and worked on before leaving were likely to re-engage with the business and spread good word about it.

This shows that an optimized approach to providing a refined customer experience can not only boost sales, but also provide good word-of-mouth about your business.

4. Tracking customer-centric metrics

Metrics are a major player in determining the brand image of your business. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are the two most prominent customer-centric metrics that determine how your business is perceived by existing and potential customers – and even potential investors or collaborators.

Tracking every customer journey through a customer experience software and keeping tabs on the potential areas of improvement with feedback from the customers can help improve customer experience.

Another important metric that you must keep in mind is distinguishing the types of customers that engage with your business. Identifying repeat/regular customers is an easy task with the help of customer experience software.

Not to mention, devoting ample time to repeat customers' journeys helps in boosting sales. This, in turn, helps in analyzing the change in buying patterns of these customers and gives insightful data about customers’ needs. 

5. Personalization

When a customer engages with any venture, they do it in a good faith that the venture will provide them incentives to engage with it again.

Personalizing the customer experience is the final milestone in achieving a complete customer-centric sales process. Who doesn’t like offers?

Giving your new customers an incentive to engage with your business again is the best approach to retaining them. Moreover, it encourages them to spread this information in their circle, bringing in more customers.

Most customers are willing to repeat business if provided with offers or discounts. So, personalizing customer experience is not just about offers.

Another effective approach is providing your customers with updates about upcoming offers, availability of similar products that they purchased, any functions, or newsletters to let them know that they are valued.

However, there is a very thin line between making it seem like they are valued and making it seem like you’re spamming them. 

These steps will help you to stay on the right side of the line: 

Showing customers your effort and making them feel important is the oldest and most effective notion in improving customer experience.

Using CX software to improve sales

The goal of any business is growth. Making customers a part of the journey may seem like a daunting task, but it is easily achievable through a customer-centric application of the sales process.

Employing a customer experience software helps you in achieving optimal customer satisfaction conveniently, and, additionally, provides much-needed support in evolving new strategies according to changes in the marketplace.

Here are some features of a good customer experience software that provide a helping hand in improving your sales:

• Customer management: For tracking customers’ details and quickly accessing feedback.
• Teamwork and collaboration: Facilitates information related to the services needed, which helps in assigning the relevant staff to the tasks.
• Reporting and analytics: Provides proper business intelligence and analyzes areas of improvement.

Keeping tab of all customer data, analyzing it, and providing detailed reports is the main function of a customer experience software, which helps in driving sales. Hence, customer experience software has become an important tool for businesses all over the world to improve their sales.

Conclusion

Customer experience has become a necessary tool to growing sales in today's market. To peak your customer experience and, in turn, increase sales, make the buying process easier, refine touchpoints, respond to customers, track customer-centric metrics, and personalize the customer journey. 

Track how end-users experience your brand with digital experience monitoring (DEM) software today to start improving your brand's online customer experience.