Marketing

Tailoring customer experiences in 2024: Going beyond basics

When used to build relationships with customers, surveys and opt-in management show that your brand cares about each individual’s experience.

Photo: Adobe Stock

June 26, 2024 by Tara Kelly — CEO, Founder and President, SPLICE Software

Customer experience has everything to do with how long a customer will stay loyal to your brand and what percentage of wallet share you'll ultimately receive. This starts with understanding and knowing the role of product placement, as well as customers' current needs and desires. However, this alone will not win retailers the war for wallet share, especially as 73% of American shoppers will abandon a brand after only one poor customer service experience.

Keeping a loyal customer is worth more than earning a new one since it can cost brands up to five times more to gain a new customer. Retail customers want many things and better communication is one of them including text messaging, chat, emails and calls. With this in mind, customer experience matters now more than ever. Before retailers can think long-term about how to ensure customer loyalty, they must first know what their brand stands for and how it's being communicated to their customers across all channels online or instore.

This is where surveys can be your retail brand's superpower. From understanding how your brand is portrayed to how customers rate their experience in-store or online, surveys empower retailers to go above and beyond the basics to maximize the value of existing customers.

Who's managing your chatbot?

Surveys need to be deployed wherever customer support is happening. The two leading places for customer support are in-store and through chatbots online. 80% of sales take place at brick-and-mortar locations, so customer interactions and discussions are occurring largely in-person with staff who are trained to deliver a positive customer experience. There's likely a manager on-site who can help facilitate these conversations, as well.

But who's training or managing your online chatbot? It's critical to build sentiment analysis surveys, which use open-ended questions to identify what a customer's feelings and emotional connection are to a brand, into these interactions. Knowing how a customer feels during and after their shopping experience ensures they're receiving the best possible customer service and helps you pinpoint potential problem areas. There's no better time to implement these surveys, especially as online sales are expected to reach 23% of total retail sales by 2027.

When it comes to chat tools and the surveys brands use, relying on AI alone is simply not enough. While retailers can recognize the leaps and bounds AI technology has made in automating communication, these tools still need to be trained to properly portray brand values and voice to customers. This is where sentiment analysis survey data can help you train AI tools based on positive or negative customer feedback.

Going beyond a rating system

Ultimately, brands need to start by considering where customer interactions are taking place and develop a process to deploy a survey no matter the type of interaction. Surveys are no longer just for quick phone or in-store interactions where most retailers have adopted a simple, press-a-button format to track customer experience. They need to go beyond surface level questions like, "How was your service today?" and "How clean are the bathrooms?" Using emoji faces to rate interactions won't cut it when it comes to identifying where your customer experience stands and exactly how you can improve.

Instead, brands need to imbed surveys into all customer touchpoints to truly understand what the experience is like and establish a benchmark. This helps brands compare against both live and automated interactions. Whether you're popping a survey into the chat tool after a customer's first time making an online purchase or launching a survey via text or email after an ongoing, long discussion that involved a supervisor, collecting this data is critical for comparing the baseline of these interactions. It also helps retailers track the ROI of their customer service initiatives by showing if and how new investments in AI or staff training exercises are actually improving interactions between your brand and customers and providing a seamless experience?

All surveys aren't created equal

Every customer is different, so depending on your company's buying journey and the different experiences your customer will have along the way, you'll have to determine what kind of survey will be most effective for collecting feedback. Oftentimes the classic Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey asking customers if they would recommend your brand to their family and friends is the go-to option for retailers, but there are additional ways to determine customer sentiment toward your brand. Fortunately, there's no shortage of survey options to deploy.

Once you've found the right survey for your brand, whether it be an NPS survey, sentiment analysis survey or even a survey that measures the customer's effort level while interacting with your brand, make sure you're reaching your customers in their preferred channels via text, app or website chatbot, emails or phone calls.

The easiest way to find that out? Simply add a question about preferred communication channel into your survey. You can also use this data to compare customer experiences across your various communication channels, which will give your brand yet another competitive edge when it comes to meeting customers where they are and creating an experience your brand can be proud of.

Using opt-ins to build relationships and trust

A key aspect to a successful customer experience is building a relationship based on trust by using two-way dialogue and asking for consent. Whether you're communicating via email, text or over the phone, you must ask customers for consent to communicate with them — and how you ask can make all the difference. Instead of sending these asks in isolation through a one-off message, think of the process of gaining consent holistically by working surveys into existing conversations. This is a more genuine way to show you care about what their experience and level of effort was like interacting with your brand, and how your brand can make improvements.

As you begin to ask customers questions about their experience with your brand, make sure to ask for their permission not just for that instance, but to keep the dialogue going in a follow-up conversation. By asking for ongoing consent, you're asking to be a larger part of customers' lives where you have an opportunity to proactively meet their needs and build a larger customer profile. However, don't forget customers can give and take consent as they see fit, so it's crucial to respect these decisions across all channels.

When used to build relationships with customers, surveys and opt-in management show that your brand cares about each individual's experience. By asking whether a customer would refer your brand to a friend or what her effort level was during the buying process, you gain important insights into what the entire customer journey looks like and where you can maximize efforts to increase loyalty and wallet share.

Ultimately, these tools will ensure no customers are left behind at the checkout counter or with a chatbot as the customer experience continues to evolve.

About Tara Kelly

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