Tips and Technologies That Will Help Improve the Customer Experience

The notion of customer experience has always been hugely important, but it does feel that lately, its importance is bigger than ever. Perhaps it’s the changing customer expectations – expecting speedier deliveries, more personalized experiences, and so on. Or maybe it’s because of the biggest millennial brands – like Airbnb and Uber – that are all about ease, speed, and convenience. Whatever the cause/s may be, one thing is for sure: you need to constantly improve the customer experience in order to keep and stand out.

In this blog post, I’m going to share top tips and technologies that will help you improve the customer experience.

Improve customer service and customer experience with chatbots

Every year there are a few buzzwords that everyone is talking about in the world of business, retail, and marketing.

This year, one of those buzzwords is “chatbots”. It’s not that it’s that new of a technology – it’s just that the technology has grown enough and businesses are really starting to see the value in using chatbots. There are fewer cases of “I’m not comfortable talking to a robot” and more of “I really need my questions answered. Now.”

Not only do they help save you time and money as you won’t need as many people to be available for live chat, but they also help improve the customer experience overall:

• You’ll be able to offer customer service every day of the week – at any time
• They help the customer – or potential customer – find the information they need faster and more easily so that they can make an informed decision about whether they want to buy from you or not
• Customers won’t have to wait to get their questions answered – which means less frustration
• You can implement chatbots on the platforms your customers use most: social media (Facebook, Twitter, and more), your website, and other apps like Skype or WhatsApp

This makes for a much better customer experience overall – if you have a good chatbot.

There are different types of chatbots available; one type is the “simple” one: chatbots that deliver prepped responses based on the keywords the person uses. These can lead to some mistakes and bad experiences especially compared to AI-powered chatbots. These types of chatbots use artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand and process more complex conversations – some can even simulate human intelligence quite successfully.

There are also ways to really enhance the customer experience with chatbots in fun, original ways.

For example, Whole Foods came up with a very interesting idea to engage their customers via their Messenger chatbot; among other features, users could select a food emoji like a fruit or vegetable and then see what recipes they could make involving that recipe.

Casper are another great example of unique chatbots; since they are a mattress company, they thought up a chatbot for those who can’t sleep, called Insomnobot3000:

As you can see above, this ingenious chatbot give insomniacs a place where they can talk about their problems going to sleep and generally, help them get through the long sleepless night.

This might not provide a real service to Casper customers or potential customers necessarily, but it does provide a fun experience that can result in funny conversations that are perfect for sharing on social media!

Improve your delivery logistics

When it comes to e-commerce businesses, retailers, and other similar businesses, logistics are incredibly important to the consumer – especially delivery logistics.

Customers’ expectations have changed a lot when it comes to deliveries – it’s safe to say Amazon probably had a big say in this change.

So what exactly has changed in terms of customer expectations for deliveries? Well, in short, customers want more control over their deliveries.

In other words, they want a free and speedy delivery – and if they have to pay for the delivery, then it better be amazing service. But it’s not just that; they also want to have complete control over when and where they receive their packages and as much as possible, to be able to change those details if needed.

Basically, you want to be as much as possible like Amazon and offer an improved delivery experience by implementing things like free deliveries, next-day deliveries by certain times, precise delivery times (people are busy and they’re at work – they want their packages when they’re home to receive them), 7 days a week deliveries, and so on.

How do you compete with that? With a giant this huge, delivering such a good customer experience (most times)? Not only are they dominating markets all over the world, but they’re also delivering packages faster and more efficiently, which is definitely changing customer expectations when it comes to deliveries.

Improving deliveries though is hard work and can get very expensive. Or, you can leverage a platform like Bringg, which is a delivery logistics platform that helps businesses match the Amazon delivery model and improve the customer experience.

Implement personalized marketing for better user experiences

Most of what we’ve covered in this blog post shows how important personalized experiences really are for today’s consumer – both with chatbots and with deliveries. The more you can personalize the experience for your customer, the better – unless we’re talking creepy levels where you know (and share) too much about your visitor or customer.

Personalized marketing is not about that kind of intrusive data – rather, it’s a way to deliver personalized experiences through personalized content by leveraging technology.

Once again, Amazon is one of the top examples of personalized marketing strategies in action – not only that but their personalization strategies have clearly had a massive effect on their success.

Like how they make you buy just a couple more things than you initially planned by including a list of companion products under the product you’re currently buying. Or like how they constantly send you personalized recommendations via email based on the products that you’ve bought in the past and similar purchases from other buyers.

But these methods aren’t just about upselling or making more sales directly, but also about improving the customer experience – and improving sales indirectly as well.

So, how do you implement a personalized marketing experience?

First, you need the technology to do this; tools like Pure360, Evergage, and Fresh Relevance which allow you to implement personalization across your business:

• Deliver personalized content on your website or app, by displaying only relevant content and products based on user behaviour and past purchases
• Send emails with personalized recommendations and content which, like earlier, is based on the users’ past purchases and behaviour on your website

Many businesses already implement some form of personalization – for example, with marketing automation tools – but true personalized marketing is much more than that. A true personalized experience can do wonders for your business and have a massive impact on the overall customer experience.

Conclusion

It’s getting more and more difficult to compete with the biggest brands in the world; they have the money and the manpower to implement new technologies faster and more efficiently, so it’s imperative to keep up with new trends, new technology, and customer expectations in order to compete with the likes of Amazon and other giants in the business world.