Originally published March 9, 2022

What was an experience as a customer that has stuck with you?

Maybe an employee went above and beyond to help you out. Perhaps you had an exceptionally smooth buying experience. Or maybe you had a complaint that the business fixed immediately.

A positive customer experience can stick with us just as much as negative ones. As businesses, our goal should always be to curate an experience where customers feel heard, and their needs are met.

Ensuring your customers have a positive experience is easier when you're in person. However, the majority of transactions are now happening online. And unfortunately, eCommerce and digital marketing can quickly become impersonal and irritating for customers.

So what do you do?

We've found three ways to improve your customer's digital experience.

Customer Journey Map

Sometimes, a digital transformation is necessary to improve customer experience and evolve your business as a whole. In this case, it's important to consider your customers' user experience. 

User experience, also known as UX, refers to the process of enhancing a user's journey with a specific product or service by studying and optimizing the user's interaction with that product or service. The core of UX is predicting your customers’ behavior and anticipating their needs to create a seamless experience. 

It's extremely frustrating when a digital platform's design is confusing, and things like slow loading, convoluted design, and poor accessibility can make someone click out of your website in less than a second. A negative digital interaction can greatly impact customer retention, while a smooth digital experience can give the customer a reason to use the platform again. 

Creating a customer journey map can set your business apart from the rest. 

The best apps and websites are meticulously designed after the design team has carefully mapped out the customer journey from start to finish to ensure a smooth digital experience. 

Customer journey maps can:

• Improve the design and copy of your digital channel(s)

• Utilize customer feedback, improving customer satisfaction

• Predict customer needs by recognizing common actions and/or pain points your customers often encounter 

• Help interpret analytics and customer data to impact business initiatives and improve your platform's usability 

Digital tools like Canva or Figma are great places to build out your customer journey map and share it with your team. 

Social Media

Don't stop at your website or app. One of the best ways to improve a customer's experience with your brand is to provide entertaining, informative, relevant, and engaging content through any digital channel, especially social media.

Social media is a powerful tool for businesses to communicate with their customers. It can be used as a customer service channel, marketing tool, and sales channel.

In addition, it is an inexpensive and effective way to interact with customers, conduct market research, and build brand loyalty.

Some ways that businesses can use social media to improve customer experience are:

• As a customer service channel, responding quickly to complaints and questions and providing the best possible customer experience

• As a sales channel, offering something valuable in return for following, such as discounts or coupons

• Encouraging customers to share customer feedback on social media

• By creating a community of like-minded people on social media

• By posting relevant content on your company's social media channels and engaging with followers to build brand awareness and customer loyalty

Use different types of content across various channels. For example, you can use videos on YouTube, share your blog posts on LinkedIn, and photos on Instagram.

However, it's no secret that there is an overabundance of social media channels, which can lead to burnout for your social team. When mapping out your digital strategy, choose the channels that have your target market in mind. We have a handy download that can help you choose your social media based on demographics and content. 

Part of your market research needs to include research on the current trends and economics of the industry; one of the best ways to do this is to work with people who can do this work for you, like Chris Nicak.

Artificial Intelligence

As a small business, we know the restrictions that having a small team puts on your resources. We can't all have a 24/7 contact center or constantly monitor our inboxes. 

One way to improve customer experience is to use AI-powered chatbots. Chatbots are computer programs that simulate human conversations via instant message or chat.

Chatbots can be used in various contexts, such as customer service, education, and marketing. They're also interactive, meaning they can engage in conversations with customers on any topic they want to discuss.

Chatbots can:

• Answer questions

• Solve problems

• Provide information about products or services

• Collect customer feedback 

• Provide a personalized experience.

There are two main types of chatbots:

Chatbots controlled by humans are also known as dialog bots or interactive bots.

Chatbots that interact with humans without any human input are also known as autonomous bots.

They can either help your customer service employees or take the more mundane tasks off their shoulders so they can focus on the more complicated problems.

Chatbots can walk customers through your inventory, answer questions, and do anything else you program them to do.

Conclusion

In an ideal world, we could personally guide each customer through buying, catering to their every need, and tending to their every want. But as I'm sure you're well aware, this isn't the reality for most businesses.

Luckily, social media, content, and AI help you create a buying experience your customers will rave about.

If you want to use content to connect with your audience and have them seek you out, PFC can help! Our team creates content tailored to your business's unique needs. So don't wait—check out our instant blog package options today!

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