A happy customer is a loyal customer. How you keep them happy is up to you. There are different Customer Experience examples we can give but first, Customer Experience (CX) is quickly becoming the key differentiator in a market filled with clones providing similar services and products.
CX encompasses the entire range of experiences your customers will have from interacting with your helpdesk to using your website and products. It is a constantly evolving and competitive aspect of commerce (both e-commerce and traditional brick and mortar services and products).
5 Customer Experience Examples:
Looking for more ways to improve customer experience? Here’s a tip.
1. Site Navigation and Design
Customers need to find what they are looking for and fast. Much like the huge department stores of the 1960s you must be able to find exactly what you need and fast. Otherwize your users and customer will flock to a competitor.
Tabs need to be clearly laid out, key filters provided (price range, products), and most importantly the in-site search bar needs to be optimized with products being recognizable by multiple keywords (searching for men’s jeans should give you all the ‘denim’ in the database).
Amazon and Zappos are giants in the e-commerce field with good reason. Finding what you are looking for in seconds amongst millions of products is the result of good site design and search optimization.
Customer Personalization on the home page and saving recent search data are also customer experience examples that provide a feeling of personalized use and engender continued use.
2. Product Information
Your customer can now find what they are looking for, good job. Now, they need information about the products they are looking at. Apple does a great job of delivering non-cluttered product descriptions and giving clear tables of included features across their line of products.
Simply put, if your site is not doing a good job of informing customers on the basic features of a product and giving guidance on which product is appropriate for each customer, then your site is failing and churn will abound.
Real Customer Reviews are another trusted source of product information that gives reliability to a product and helps to sell it. Amazon again has one of the most trusted customer review systems integrated into the product descriptions of each product. Complete with ratings and the ability to filter comments.
3. Talk to Customers
On a very basic level, customer, support lines need to be open and available in multiple channels (phone, email, social media). All sites should also include short and easy to fill out surveys to gauge the customer experience and determine sticking points and areas you can improve. Some sites also opt for a simple survey bar that is always available and provides an easy outlet for customers to give feedback about whatever they want.
Live chats are very useful customer experience examples in the case of specialized products that may require technical expertise. Lenovo provides live chats to help you pick the right computers. “Build.com” gives professional advice on designing your home DIY build projects.
4. Seamless Checkout
Amazon and Zappos again have mastered the checkout. It is easier than ever to shop and find exactly what you need. Whether customers are on an Amazon Prime binge, and buying random products or buying a new laptop with research and care, the ability to go quickly from finding the product to the purchase is integral in actually converting the sale.
Confusion along the way when navigating a new site can lead customers to a competitor.
5. Cross Channel integration
Having the ability to purchase online and pick up in-store is a common feature that you can find nowadays at Best Buy or Apple. This integration between websites and brick and mortar locations is important for all business.
An example of poor integration that I have is from personal experience with a sports ticket reseller. Aside from trouble alone on the website with locking down certain seats to be purchased with different credit cards, when I arrived at the stadium, the ticket reseller bar code was not recognized by the stadium and I was directed to a long line of people with a similar problem in order to get my ticket printed out. I missed close to the first half of the game. This customer experience example is certainly not promoting any kind of customer loyalty on my part.
When talking about CX I am always reminded of the Maya Angelou quote “People will not always remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel.” I feel similarly that we will not always remember the particular products we bought, but we will remember how the Customer experience made us feel in deciding to go back or not.