Most people can tell intuitively whether a customer experience is good or bad.
A technical support representative who hangs up on you, a barista who forgets about your order or a website that hooks you in with a free trial only to charge you the moment you hit subscribe. These are all negative experiences that are guaranteed to leave a bad taste in customers’ mouths.
Meanwhile, we also know, by instinct, when we’ve had a good customer experience. We come away from an interaction with a business feeling happy, informed, valued or, sometimes, all three.
In broad terms, customer experience can be defined as how consumers perceive a brand. This perception is created through the many interactions consumers have with a company.
Customer experience is a term for the many things brands do to put customers and their needs first.
In this article, we dive into:
• The Importance of Customer Experience (CX)
• How a Customer-Centric Content Can Improve Brand Interactions
• Different Types of Customer-Centric Content
• Start Leveraging Customer-Centric Content for Better Results
All, Not Just First, Impressions Last
Our interactions form the basis of how we view a business. And in many cases, it only takes one interaction to cement our view of a brand. A rude barista can make customers stop going to their favorite coffee shop. Meanwhile, a friendly, cheerful and supportive fitness trainer can encourage customers to keep their gym memberships.
In the digital space, there are several points of contact between a business and its customers before, during and after a purchase. Consumer touch points include:
• Your social media posts
• Blogs
• Paid online ads
• Conversations with the company’s representatives
• Product feedback surveys
These potential touchpoints present countless opportunities for brands to improve customer experience. However, it’s essential to do it right. Otherwise, these touchpoints could also be opportunities for customer dissatisfaction.
Positive customer experiences offer many advantages that can be leveraged in your content marketing strategy. According to a report by PwC:
• Customers are willing to pay up to 16% more for products and services if they’ve had a superior experience with a brand.
• Customers are more likely to recommend a brand’s product or service on social media and make repeat purchases if they’ve had a positive experience with it.
• Customers are more likely to give other services or products from brands a shot if they’ve provided a great experience.
• About 63% of consumers stated they’d be more willing to share their data for a service or product they valued.
On the flip side, negative experiences drive customers away quickly, leaving brands little time to rectify the situation. The same PWC report found that:
Approximately 59% of U.S. consumers will stop patronizing a business or product they love after several bad experiences, while for 17%, all it takes is just one bad experience.
Improving Customer Experience Through Customer Centric Marketing
There are approximately 33.2 million small businesses, according to a report by the Small Business Administration (SBA). The sheer number of companies vying for customers’ attention can make standing out seem like a Herculean task.
But it doesn’t have to be. With a content strategy that has customer experience at its core, you can set yourself apart from the competition and attract new customers while retaining the old.
Brands often make the mistake of focusing on themselves: How great their products or services are, how unique their businesses are and how different they are from other businesses. While some of this is necessary, particularly at the final stages of the buyer’s journey, you should take a more client centric approach. Your CX marketing strategy should primarily focus on establishing a relationship with your customers and meeting their needs.
Content can be, and should be, customer-centric. In fact, content marketing can only truly be effective if you understand your audiences, their pain points, needs, values and goals.
As part of a CX marketing strategy, your content provides the solutions your customers need, answers their questions and makes their lives easier by solving their concerns or helping them overcome their challenges.
Only by incorporating customer-centric content into your content marketing strategies can you improve customer experience and ensure that the content you deliver not only meets but even exceeds their expectations.
We’ve established why customer-centric content is a must to improve customer experience. However, here’s the catch: Creating, implementing and tracking content marketing strategies focused on customer experience is time-consuming and challenging. What’s more, it requires content writing expertise and experience in taking a client centric approach to content.
This is why brands should consider hiring a content marketing strategist or content marketing service provider to help them leverage customer-centric content. A content marketing strategist can create a tailored content marketing strategy and oversee the management, creation, editing and publishing of your client-centric content. The help of a content marketing service provider will make it easier for brands to improve customer experience through touchpoints that involve content.
Types of Customer-Centric Content
Here are some types of content you can integrate into your customer centric marketing strategy to make it more customer-centric, as well as some tips on further capitalizing on these materials.
Reviews
Collecting reviews, and showcasing how much you value customer feedback, helps you become a more customer-centric organization. On the users’ end, reviews provide value as they help provide a clearer picture of what your business is about, what it offers and how you treat your customers.
Reviews have other advantages for brands. They help boost credibility, providing social proof of their legitimacy. What’s more, data gathered from reviews helps you better understand your customers. In turn, this empowers you to tailor your content marketing strategies to best appeal to and satisfy them, therefore improving customer experience.
How To Leverage Reviews To Improve Customer Experience
In a 2021 report by Podium, almost nine in 10 consumers reported that reviews play a role in discovering new businesses. Furthermore, a BrightLocal survey found that 49% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they do recommendations from friends and family.
#1. Review Generation
Your target audiences want to read reviews about you, and the best way to ensure you have enough to meet their needs is to include review generation in your customer centric marketing strategy. Review generation is the process of actively getting customer testimonials instead of waiting for them to write feedback on their own.
With review generation, you need to convince previous customers to leave customer testimonials. There are many ways to touch base with customers regarding your need for reviews, such as by sending reminders via email and text. You can also create a landing page specifically for reviews to make giving feedback easier for your customers.
#2. Review Response
When you do receive customer testimonials, be sure to respond to each one. How fast and how well you respond tells them a lot about how your company treats and values its customers. However, remember that modern consumers can tell when a response is templated, and they don’t like it. Personalized, friendly answers that consider the content of their reviews are preferred.
Now, responding quickly to feedback and writing nuanced, helpful responses takes time and writing talent. To save time and ensure the best possible results, consider hiring a content writing agency or content writing service provider to do this for you.
While the content marketing strategist is in charge of your customer experience strategy as it relates to content, a content writing agency takes on the task of replying to your customers’ feedback. At the same time, the content writing service provider will ensure that all responses made in your company’s name align with your guidelines, brand image and tone.
Customer Surveys
To give your customers a great experience throughout all their interactions with your brand, you need to know which approaches work, which need to be tweaked and which need to be eliminated from your customer experience strategy. A tried-and-tested way to get this information is by sending customer surveys.
Customer surveys allow you to put your finger on the pulse of customer satisfaction. They allow you to capture information on your customers’ thoughts and feelings about your brand and offerings at various touchpoints in their journey. This valuable data can be used to fine-tune your customer experience strategy.
Additionally, customer surveys help you identify your “brand promoters.” Including the Net Promoter Score (NPS) question in your survey lets you pinpoint customers loyal to your brand and who are likely to recommend you to others.
The standard NPS question is: “How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” Customers can then rate their answers on a scale from one to 10.
Promoters are those who answer nine or 10. Passives, or customers who feel happy with your services but may switch to a competing brand, rate seven or eight. Meanwhile, detractors, or customers who have had bad experiences with your business or offerings, rate your business six or lower.
The NPS question also helps you forecast the likelihood not just of referrals but also of repurchases.
To help increase the chances that your customers will read and respond to your email survey request, consider hiring email marketing experts. They will help you create a customer experience strategy for email that improves customer satisfaction and gives you the data needed to strengthen your CX marketing.
Designing a CX Survey
There are many free survey templates available online. However, it’s still best to tailor your survey to your goals. First, you’ll have to ask: “What does my brand need to know about my customers’ emotions and thoughts?”
• Some questions you may want to include in your survey are:
• How often do you use our products and/or services?
• How was your experience with our customer service?
• How well did our products or services meet your expectations?
You can also ask your customers to indicate how satisfied they are with specific aspects of your products and services, such as quality, value for money and reliability.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Creating a page for frequently asked questions and answers is essential to enhancing customer experience. A FAQs page conveniently gives customers the option to search for a solution themselves before calling customer service. This is especially helpful if your target audiences belong to the Millennial and Generation Z demographics, as both are notorious for disliking phone calls.
To ensure your customers’ experience remains positive once they land on your FAQs page, consider applying these best practices:
List Questions Your Customers Usually Ask
It’s best to keep from over-cluttering FAQs pages, as too much information can confuse and turn away users who want answers fast. Instead, consider what questions your customers typically ask and address those questions as clearly as possible. An added benefit of including direct answers to your FAQs is it increases the odds that a search engine will pull a question and answer to use as a featured snippet.
Leverage Content Writing Services
A content writing service provider will help ensure your FAQs are concise and easy to understand without missing important information. What’s more, a content writing agency can optimize your FAQs page for search engines, such as by incorporating keywords into the copy and writing meta descriptions.
Rely on Thrive’s Expertise To Boost Customer Experience
Taking a client centric approach to digital marketing requires putting the customer at the center of all your marketing activities. With the help of Thrive, this is possible.
Thrive offers email marketing, reputation management and content writing services to help ensure your customers have a positive experience with your brand at all possible touchpoints.
Our content writing team, led by a skilled content strategist, will ensure all copy – from social media posts to long-form blogs – aligns with your CX marketing goal. Meanwhile, our email marketing experts ensure that your customers receive emails they want to read while helping your business achieve its objectives.
Additionally, our reputation management services include review generation and response. You can rest assured that your brand gets a consistent influx of feedback, and your customers get fast, friendly and personalized responses that enhance their experience.
To learn more about our reputation management and content writing services or consult one of our marketing experts, reach out to us today.
