You only get one chance to make a first impression. But customer experience optimization gives you countless opportunities to impress and engage your customer base.
In today’s digital landscape, customers can connect with your business through a variety of touchpoints, and each one is a chance to boost customer acquisition and revenue. In fact, more than 42% of customers are willing to pay more for a positive service experience, and 37% who rate their experience as good are more likely to recommend the company.
Investing in the customer experience is investing in customer lifetime value—what makes customers happy is also what’s going to keep them coming back. Here’s how to optimize customer experience, with insight from Jen Menchaca and Lisa Hickey, cofounders of the apparel brand perfectwhitetee.
What is customer experience optimization?
Customer experience optimization means ensuring your consumer has a positive experience with your brand across its many touchpoints. That includes every interaction that existing and potential customers have with your brand throughout their customer journey. Optimization efforts are part of an ongoing process to enhance how shoppers perceive and engage with your business throughout the entire customer lifetime.
What makes customer experience optimization important is that while a positive customer experience can go far, so too can the reverse. A single bad encounter can be hard to recover from. According to a Zendesk trends report, roughly half of consumers will switch to a competitor after one bad experience.
Types of customer experience optimization
Customer experience optimization helps customers feel valued and builds customer trust through:
Web experience optimization
Web experience optimization means enhancing your website to better cater to customers and increase website visits. This includes developing effective navigation, design, usability, accessibility, and performance across both your desktop and mobile sites.
“Really making sure that your home page is true to your brand and your brand aesthetic is super important,” Lisa told the Shopify Masters podcast. For Lisa, this meant designing a distinctive brand logo to set a clear brand message across the site and ensuring that it’s “extremely easy for your customers to navigate your website.”
Product experience optimization
Product experience optimization means improving the relationship between your customers and your products to better meet customer expectations. This often involves enhancing functionality, ease of use, and overall quality, as well as ensuring proper customer service channels are in place.
At perfectwhitetee, Jen says optimizing for product experience involves collecting feedback from the company’s geographically diverse audience to inform product mix and the timing of ad placements. For example, what works for one shopper in the Midwest (clamoring for fleece come October) might not work for someone in the Southwest (still keen for tank tops and lightweight t-shirts).
“Find the combination of things that can appeal to everybody, in all temperatures and all climates,” Jen says.
Messaging experience optimization
Messaging experience optimization means finding the best ways—through tone, timeliness, and consistency—to use communication platforms and chat tools to engage customers with brand updates, new products, and other important business messages.
For example, a cosmetics company geared toward Gen Z might use weekly SMS text updates for a customer base that’s glued to their phones. A skin care line geared toward an older generation may opt for monthly email messaging.
How to optimize your customer experience
- Get to know your customers
- Personalize your interactions
- Create customer journey maps
- Embrace omnichannel
- Provide great customer service
Here’s how to make the most of your customer experience optimization efforts:
1. Get to know your customers
You can’t optimize your customer experience without truly knowing your customers. Conduct comprehensive market research on your target audience to better understand what motivates their purchasing habits. This includes a mix of quantitative data—like average order value (AOV), conversion rates, customer satisfaction scores, and website traffic—as well as qualitative data, like behavioral data and anecdotal feedback from polls, surveys, and social media engagement.
At perfectwhitetee, Jen regularly consults direct feedback from her customers on the company’s website and social media platforms to help directly inform operations and products.
“Now that the consumer is coming directly to us, telling us exactly how they feel, we love it. We love having that consumer that can tell us right away, ‘Hey, this is a hit,’ and they’re leaving reviews and comments and they’re letting us know,” Jen says.
2. Personalize your interactions
Personalized interactions rely on customer data (such as purchase history and repeat purchases). Depending on how much data you have, you can show recommended products, address customers by name, and offer customer loyalty discounts for birthdays or anniversaries. A personalized approach can be an effective customer experience optimization strategy, helping drive customer satisfaction among your target audience while attracting potential new customers.
3. Create customer journey maps
In today’s digital age, customers can engage with your brand through countless channels like social media platforms, streaming services, email, SMS, and websites, making it essential to identify and understand each one.
Creating a journey map can help you visualize possible customer interactions, making it easier to improve communication, address pain points, and meet your customers’ preferences. Your map tracks a customer’s needs and mindset at each stage of their interaction with your brand, from initial awareness and consideration to purchase, product experience, and loyalty.
4. Embrace omnichannel
Given the vast array of customer touchpoints, it’s not enough to optimize just one part of your brand’s digital experience. To connect effectively with your customers, maintain brand consistency, and meet their needs across all channels.
Customers expect positive experiences no matter where they’re engaging with your brand—whether they’re browsing your website, engaging on social media channels, visiting a physical store, or speaking to a customer service associate.
For example, your direct-to-consumer (DTC) dog food company’s brand experience should be engaging and accessible across all platforms, with a strong user experience and cohesive branding. If a customer messages you on Instagram about a product that made their dog sick, they should be able to seamlessly continue the conversation through your website or customer service chat.
5. Provide great customer service
Getting to know your customers is an ongoing process. In addition to collecting real-time customer feedback to improve their experience, ensure you have a reliable and effective customer service program in place to seamlessly meet customer needs when issues arise. This may involve hiring a team of support agents or employing chatbots to solve issues as quickly as possible.
Customer experience optimization FAQ
What defines an optimal customer experience?
An optimal customer experience is defined by a strong web, product, and messaging experience. True customer experience optimization ensures a positive experience across all major digital touchpoints for a brand; it encompasses multiple channels where customers interact with your brand.
What are the qualities of bad customer service?
Poor customer service is often defined by inattentiveness, long wait times, lack of empathy or personal touch, and inaccessibility. Customers want to feel heard and see their concerns addressed—anything less can quickly lead to a poor customer experience.
How do you measure the customer experience?
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to measuring customer experience, regularly conducting surveys and requesting feedback from your customers can help you identify pain points and areas for improvement across the customer journey.
