Customer Experience is Key: Growing Sales, Marketing and UX Together

There are many ways to build grow a business, but when it comes to building and scaling a business in 2019 and beyond, one key thing stands out:

Customer experience.

But while brands in general are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of customer experience, there are many that still don’t fully appreciate the value in making their CX the best it can be.

That means bettering your customer experience is an easy way to gain an advantage over your competitors. It gives you an invaluable USP in a world in which most markets are completely saturated.

Unlike many other strategies commonly used to build businesses – content or social media, for example – it’s hard to replicate. You can’t just look at a competitor’s blog or Instagram profile and steal their ideas. In fact, it’s almost impossible to fully understand how a company approaches CX, even if you are a customer, simply because every customer’s experience will be different.

A great customer experience starts with attracting the right kind of customer to your business. Marketing analytics and automation software like AdStage.io helps you optimize advertising for prospects that are relevant to your business and more likely to convert into real customers.

In other words, anybody can copy what you say, but they can’t steal your customer experience.

So What Does Good Customer Experience Look Like?

Many factors contribute to a good customer experience, but whether you’re offering a good, bad, or great one generally comes down to one factor:

How successful you are at getting customers to do whatever they’re trying to do.

Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done.

We all have limited resources to work with. We all have to handle customers who are facing roadblocks with our products.

More worryingly, we don’t help ourselves when we let teams that should work closely together operate in silos. To offer the best possible CX, getting sales and marketing working together is essential.

But let’s backtrack for a minute and see some examples – here are three brands that are renowned for their commitment to customer experience.

Amazon

There are many reasons for Amazon’s complete and total dominance of ecommerce.

It’s not their state-of-the-art website (they don’t have one), and it’s not the company’s values.

What’s made Amazon so successful are things like:

• Brand loyalty
• Price
• Product selection
• Customer service

In other words, customer experience.

Amazon puts the customer before anything else. If you’re not happy, they’ll do whatever it takes to change that.

They’ve even said it on the site:

“We seek to be Earth’s most customer-centric company.”

Zappos

Zappos (now, somewhat ironically, owned by Amazon) is renowned for being a great company to work for, and to buy from. To say they go the extra mile for their customers is an understatement.

They’re 100% committed to responding to customer inquiries as fast as possible. They have a 365-day return policy. They surprise customers with unexpected gifts.

Perhaps their biggest USP when it comes to CX, however, lies with the targets they set for their staff.

Staff aren’t expected to handle X customer queries an hour, or hang up the phone within four minutes. They’re encouraged to give each and every customer all the time they need (even if this extends to the better part of 11 hours).

Nordstrom

They may now have a significant presence online, but Nordstrom made their name through their unbeatable, hands-on customer experience – something they continue to offer customers that visit their stores today.

Their staff will track items down for you, make sure clothes fit, and fetch different sizes. It’s a lot of work, but it’s what makes them money. When so much shopping happens online these days, brick-and-mortar stores have to offer something extra-special to get customers through their doors, and Nordstrom knows this.

How Do You Create a Good Customer Experience?

It’s all well and good to understand what a good customer experience looks like, and what other companies are doing to offer it. But you’re not Amazon. Or Zappos. Or Nordstrom.

You can learn from what these powerhouses do, but you don’t have their reach, their resources, or their budget. You’re approaching customer experience from a very different standpoint. So let’s talk about how you can create a good customer experience.

Figure Out What Your Customers Need to Be Successful

This is customer service in a nutshell. If you can figure out what your customers need to be successful, you can get ahead of them. You can start making positive changes to your CX, even if your product is still buggy.

So how do you do this?

You Identify Pain Points or Friction

Most of the time, the problems that prevent your customers from being successful are right under your nose. Once you know what those pain points are, you can proactively get ahead of them and offer help. You can hold their hand through getting to grips with your product (digitally, not literally).

This is key to our customer experience at Mailshake, my email outreach tool.

At Mailshake, we want people to write emails, send them, and get leads. Unfortunately, when it comes to that last one, we know that many of our customers struggle to succeed.

We also know that when customers don’t succeed, the problem is usually external.

They’re typically sending poorly-written copy, or failing to match their product to prospects who are likely to actually care. The issue is rarely with the tool – making Mailshake as easy to use as possible was a huge focus of ours from day one.

So what are we doing about this?

• We partner customers with people who can help them get the best from the tool, before and after they start using it.
• We created Email Analyzer, a tool that highlights issues with the readability of emails or things that might get them flagged by spam filters.
• We deliver content to every audience that uses Mailshake in order to help them improve their prospecting, write better emails, and see better results.

I also recently acquired another tool you might be familiar with: VoilaNorbert.

Voila Norbert is primarily a tool for finding email addresses; however, since its acquisition, we’ve added a number of features including email verification, lead enrichment, and integration with a number of other popular marketing tools.

A lot of our customers are recruiters, salespeople, and marketers, but they all use the tool differently.

This presents a problem when it comes to providing a universally high-quality customer experience.

The solution?

We determined how to tailor the experience to each type of customer, in order to give different customers different ways to leverage the tool.

You Make It Very Clear How People Can Get Ahold of You

Brands that hide their contact details are not being smart. They’re not reducing complaints and taking weight off their customer service team. They’re destroying trust, and – without a doubt – driving potential new customers away.

Make it as easy as possible for customers to contact you. Offer them a phone number, contact form, email address, and live chat.

This is one of the quickest, easiest, and most effective tactics you can employ to improve CX.

But don’t just make these things available to customers – encourage customers to use them. Say “If you do get stuck, here’s how we can help you. Here’s where you can go. Don’t wait to contact us because we want to help you out.”

Automating Customer Experience

Ask a consumer about automation and customer experience, and they’ll probably reference a frustrating experience with an automated call center queue or self-service supermarket counter.

Their frustrations are understandable, but the ways in which businesses can leverage automation to improve customer experience are getting steadily more sophisticated all the time.

It’s now really easy to automate things like:

Upselling

Upselling is something brands do to benefit themselves, right?

Nope. Not solely. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

Upselling should not be an entirely selfish act (for brands that care about customer experience, anyway).

Upsells based on recent customer behavior can, and should be, just as beneficial to the customer as to the company doing the upselling.

Let’s say you offer SaaS with tiered pricing to suit everyone from individual users to enterprise companies.

An email that encourages a customer to upgrade, and highlights the benefits of doing so, could be automatically fired off when they reach their account limit. A special offer, personalized to that customer, could help sweeten the deal and add to your overall customer experience.

You can do something similar with an upgrade to an annual contract. If a customer’s been with you for 9 or 10 months on a monthly contract, they’re obviously happy with the product.

They reach 11 months. An email is automatically triggered that invites them to renew on an annual contract that saves them money over the monthly rate. This potentially benefits both them and you.

Adding New Features and Functionalities

So you’ve added a new feature or functionality to your product. Your current customers are given instant access. That should be something which is triggered automatically. But you shouldn’t stop there.

Following that, customers should receive the same support and guidance they were given when they first signed up.

There’s little use in just telling them “Hey, here’s this new thing. You can use it. This is what it does.” They need to be shown how to use it (or at least be given the information and resources to figure it out). Sometimes the color you use can be enough to improve their experience.

Enriching Data

The more information you have about customers and potential customers, the better you can tailor your UX to their unique pain points and needs. This in turn can help you convert more leads into customers, and improve your customer satisfaction and retention rates.

While it’s important to make signing up – whether to a mailing list or as a customer – as simple as possible, you should prioritize enriching customer (and potential customer) data, post sign-up.

So what does this mean in practice?

It means you might offer someone who’s signed up to your mailing list an extended free trial if they answer a few questions. You can also encourage new customers to complete their profile so you can tailor your product and the service you offer them to their requirements.

Alternatively, tools like Voila Norbert’s Enrich will crawl the internet and enhance email lists with information including job title, company, and location.

Leveraging Usage Data

Usage data can be invaluable to onboarding and customer retention. You can send customized messages via marketing automation to trigger a sale, entice users that have abandoned your product to return, or help new users get a handle on different elements of your tool.

In all cases, your overarching objective should remain the same: be proactive, and stay one step ahead of your customers.

Leverage automation to gather data that helps you read your customers’ minds and in turn, be more proactive in nurturing leads and supporting customers.

Tools That Can Help

Intercom

A super-sophisticated instant messaging platform designed to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes.

Drift

An easy way to speed up the process of connecting with qualified leads.

Customer.io

An email messaging platform built specifically for brands wanting to utilize triggered emails and segmentation.

Encharge.io

A marketing automation platform that helps SaaS companies create email onboarding experiences that convert free users to paying customers.

How Sales and Marketing Can Support Customer Experience

If you want to offer the best possible customer experience you can, the work of your sales and marketing departments should not end when a customer signs on the dotted line. Not only should both teams be working together, but they should be playing an integral part in your post-sales customer experience, too.

So how can sales and marketing support customer experience?

Tie Marketing Content to Customers’ Pain Points

Marketing content should be used for much more than targeting potential new customers – it should help your customers get more out of your product and improve their experience, too.

Your content needs to answer customer questions, fill knowledge gaps, and help solve pain points.

What’s more, you need to get it in front of your sales and customer service team.

They talk to customers all day. Not only can they pass on queries that you can turn into content, but they can leverage your existing content to help customers when they’re unable to.

Of course, to do that, your sales and customer service staff needs to know your content inside and out. Failing that, they need a means to search for relevant content quickly. You can tackle that using a spreadsheet tagged with keywords that reps can scan quickly, or via an alternative mechanism used to share content internally.

Increase LTV, Upsells, and Referrals

Referrals are one of the easiest ways to get new customers. Referred customers are also known to stick around longer and spend more.

Your sales and marketing teams can work together to help increase referrals, simply by communicating who’s happy, who’s acting as an “advocate” for the company, and who should be asked if they know anyone else that might benefit from the product.

Sales and marketing can support upselling in a similar manner. Marketing can monitor customer activities, and refer appropriate accounts to sales for upselling (assuming the upsell isn’t automated).

That said, this all comes full circle. You’ll only be successful at upselling and gaining referrals if your customer experience is on-point. That’s why sales and marketing should be focused on much more than brand visibility and new business. They should be helping you create the best possible experience for your customers, too.

So Why Is Customer Experience Key?

Everyone has a problem they’re trying to solve. If you can identify that problem and solve it, you create an advocate. That advocate then becomes a repeat or long-term customer and, perhaps more importantly, tells other people that might like your product about it, too.

Before long, your sales and marketing pretty much take care of themselves, simply because you’re offering a customer experience worth shouting about.

Do you have any other tips for creating a customer experience that drives sales and supports marketing? I’m always keen to hear your thoughts – if you have a moment to share them, comments are below:

Image: Pixabay