Consumers are more connected and demanding than ever. Always looking to take center stage in their relationship with companies, they want innovative experiences and expect brands to know more about their tastes and needs.

With the arrival of the internet, it has never been easier to compare products and services, check out other people’s experiences, and bad-mouth a brand that didn’t measure up where everyone can see it.

In this context, innovating in the interaction between company and consumer is extremely important to surprise customers and build a strong brand image today. Can you believe it’s possible to win over customers and earn their loyalty with their very first purchase? This magic has a name: Customer Experience! It’s the ideal tool for winning customers through memorable experiences.

In this post, you’ll learn more about this retail strategy and, above all, the importance of putting the user at the center, along with how and why stores should use it. Keep reading!

Customer Experience: concept and definition

Before talking about Customer Experience, we need to understand how the idea of what a customer is has evolved for companies in general over time. For a long time, a customer was simply someone who consumed a company’s products and services, with a somewhat limited approach, such as the VIP services that were so common in the past.

Today, however, companies in the digital age are far from skimping on customer loyalty strategies, since they don’t limit their products and services to a certain number of people with a particular consumption pattern. Instead, they put these strategies into practice at every touchpoint with the public.

Customer Experience involves the actions taken to optimize every interaction between the consumer and the brand throughout the buying process (pre-sale, during the sale, and after the sale), winning consumers over through the shopping experience. These experiences include physical, psychological, rational, and emotional sensations.

So the relationship between the consumer and the brand should be positive from the very first conversation — whether online, over the phone, or in person — up to the moment they show interest and consider closing the deal.

The importance of Customer Experience lies in the fact that its strategies make it easier to build customer loyalty right from the first purchase and greatly increase the chances of referrals. In fact, when everything is well planned, loyalty can develop even before the sale.

Applying Customer Experience

Applying Customer Experience requires the company to understand the consumer profile, but it also calls for changes in the mindset of the organization and its employees. That way, interaction with the customer becomes more genuine and can be optimized.

Below, take a more detailed look at the steps for applying Customer Experience in your company and achieving success!

Build a culture within the company

It’s important to talk with everyone involved in the company about how much the company intends to value its customers and how it wants them to interact with the brand. An easy way to establish these goals is to draw up a set of rules that serve as guiding principles.

These principles will guide your company’s behavior. Everyone involved in the project should know these guidelines, and managers should present them in every training session.

Understand who your customers are

The next step is to understand the profile (or profiles) of the customers who interact with the company. After all, you can only understand customers’ needs by focusing your attention on them and being in tune with the problems they face every day.

A very smart and effective method is to create personas — that is, characters built from research with real customers to help the company better understand who its audience is. From there, your team will be able to recognize the profile of each person who gets in touch.

Listen to your customers

Knowing whether the experience you offer your audience is actually worthwhile is essential. One way to listen to your customers is through automated post-sale surveys, which provide real-time feedback. It’s also important to offer a dedicated channel where customers can send suggestions and complaints.

Train your team

Training your team on an ongoing basis is crucial to ensuring an excellent customer experience. In other words, you need to understand the relationship between Customer Experience and your employees so you can count on a skilled team that can respond to any complaint or question and is prepared to handle all kinds of situations — this can prevent unnecessary conflicts.

Analyze your processes

After completing the previous steps, you can already understand how customers perceive the services you offer through Customer Experience. The next step is to find out which aspects need to be optimized.

Even if the team, or just one member, needs to improve in some area, the most important thing is to focus on learning. Always offer support if they need to refine their approach, and provide group training. Holding talks focused on the daily routine of customer service staff is a great way to reinforce ideas and lighten the mood.

Who should be responsible for applying Customer Experience in your company?

When customers are at the stage of buying a product or signing a contract, it means they’ve already gone through other departments and people in the company. For this reason, everyone who is part of the company is responsible for Customer Experience. Take a look below.

Development team

The development team is in charge of creating solutions and should take the customer experience into account to ensure the best possible interaction for the target audience when they use the solution.

Marketing team

They are responsible for creating the company’s image and delivering the initial message, improving communication with consumers. It works like this: when someone signs the first email, they become the point of reference for the lead. The lead then expects the following messages to be sent by the same person or department. This becomes the first step toward a future customer experience.

Sales team

This team answers any questions a potential buyer may have and is also the one that begins closing the deal.

Finance team

The finance team steps in when the consumer confirms the purchase, handling the payment procedures. This step is very important for Customer Experience, since it needs to go flawlessly to avoid drop-offs at the moment of closing the deal.

Support team

Support for any issue or question from the consumer is essential. Only through it can you raise satisfaction levels. This team is therefore also responsible for showing consideration and empathy.

As we’ve seen, the customer experience depends on everyone from the development team to those in charge of support. That’s why it’s more necessary than ever to develop a people-focused organizational culture.

Using your first results to evolve

To improve Customer Experience, we have a very important tip: customer journey mapping.

This is a widely used practice in which the company keeps a record of the customer’s entire journey with its brand, from the reason that led them to close the deal, to obtaining the product/service, the interactions that took place, and awareness of the solution delivered, all the way to the factors that could turn them into a loyal customer.

Creating a journey map enables two types of analysis:

• a complete overview of a specific stage carried out with the customer;

• a big-picture view of the entire interaction with the customer, fostering a genuine relationship that increases the chances of retention.

It’s a good idea to create an overall map of the process with customers that includes the most common flows and friction points. That way, you can understand which stages can and should be improved to optimize the consumer experience.

Customer experience as a differentiator

In Customer Experience, the customer’s experience comes first. So, great service combined with greater interaction with the brand is what makes it stand out in the market. That’s why the relationship between the brand and the consumer must be flawless, so that the experience delights them and builds a bond of trust and security.

Below, check out the innovations that make Customer Experience a differentiator in the market.

Innovative service

Customer service as we know it today is going to disappear, because consumers’ lifestyles and preferences have changed. They no longer just want to buy; they want engaging experiences that make them feel valued.

Brands realized some time ago that simply serving customers is no longer enough, and it has become easy for people to spot companies that don’t invest in Customer Experience.

Omnichannel experience

Customer service channels must adapt to customers’ needs and convenience to increase overall engagement with the company. Omnichannel service is essential when you want to deliver immediate responses that connect all the communication channels in use.

This approach creates unified service in which every path leads to the same destination. For example, when a customer gets in touch via email, ideally they should be able to complete the interaction through another platform, such as chat, an app, or whichever one they prefer. That way, they don’t have to explain or give context every time they reach out.

Adopting technology

Technological innovations can be used at the POS to catch consumers’ attention, since they make spaces more interactive and allow service interactions to be turned into sales opportunities. It’s also worth noting that human interaction should not be eliminated—what should happen instead is a shift in the roles of customer-facing staff.

Some examples of POS technologies that enhance customer interaction and put customers center stage are digital storefronts, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. Digital transformation has become an ally that empowers both companies and customers, and businesses that offer hybrid service are the most successful.

Learning from mistakes

Working with Customer Experience takes dedication, courage, and a genuine desire to please customers. When implementing this approach in companies, leaders tend to make a few recurring mistakes that need to be avoided. Below, you’ll discover what to learn from the three most common ones. Check it out!

Thinking that customer experience is built in just one stage of the journey

As mentioned earlier, customer experience is the responsibility of every team in a company. So it’s wrong to think that only the relationship with the salesperson needs to be satisfying, for example, since poor after-sales service can undo everything. In short: experiences should not be viewed in isolation.

Ignoring comments and criticism

Even though Customer Experience is all about listening to customers and delivering the best possible experience, some companies may think they know more about their customers than the customers themselves. As a result, they don’t give the criticism they receive the attention it deserves.

This is a very serious mistake, and it should be addressed with a simple but effective practice: listening to what customers have to say.

Confusing Customer Experience with Customer Service and Customer Success

This confusion undermines the performance of customer experience strategies, because it mixes up concepts that seem like the same thing but aren’t. Below, see the difference between these three concepts so you don’t get them wrong!

As we’ve seen, Customer Experience is proactive and focuses on the customer’s interactions, feelings, and journey. Customer Service, on the other hand, is more operational; it is reactive rather than proactive by nature.

Finally, Customer Success is responsible for the customer’s success and is also seen as a methodology that aligns strategies with leadership and spreads the company’s vision.

What is the impact on the brand and the business?

Investing in Customer Experience brings a number of benefits to the brand and the business. See what they are below.

Customer loyalty

The experiences and innovations that Customer Experience offers strengthen communication between the brand and the customer. As a result, the target audience becomes loyal to the brand, and the brand becomes better known, mainly through referrals. This makes it a benchmark in its market and helps it outsell its competitors.

Resource optimization

When you know what consumers like and don’t like, it’s easier to figure out which areas and products the company should direct its investments toward, right? That way, you can optimize what already works, adjust what needs improvement, and drop what adds no value for either customers or the company.

Boosting revenue

When aligned with internal processes and all of the company’s available resources, Customer Experience can be highly profitable. Focusing on the consumer and avoiding wasted resources is what will generate results for customers and also for the company, which sees its revenue grow.

The era of the empowered user: what does it mean?

To understand user empowerment, we need to go back in time a little, to the days when companies focused all their attention on the products and services they offered.

Pushy, insistent salespeople were common and held all the negotiating power. There were no strategies to help consumers get to know products, understand what they were for, what problems they would solve, or why they needed them at that moment.

Today, however, the growth of the internet provides broad access to information, and consumers can thoroughly research a product, evaluate the purchase, compare it with competitors’ offers, weigh the pros and cons, and go to the brick-and-mortar store just to place the order. In fact, the customer may even know more about the product than the salesperson does.

The power that access to information has given people has changed consumer behavior, making consumers much more demanding. They no longer judge just a product’s attributes; they also choose the best experience. In other words, the brand that delivers the most positive feelings wins their preference.

This shift in consumer behavior has led companies to change their focus. Marketing stopped concentrating solely on the brand’s products and services and began paying more attention to consumers’ needs and to meeting their expectations.

It’s very important for brands to show that consumers have a voice in the company and that this voice is heard and acted upon.

How and why should you give this protagonist more of a voice?

The goal of every company is to attract customers, make its brand stand out, become a market leader, and close good sales. However, the process needs to be constantly evolving to truly succeed.

After the internet broke down the market’s physical barriers, competition between companies grew much fiercer due to the rise and success of e-commerce. Today, people are no longer tied to the brick-and-mortar stores near their homes; e-commerce lets them shop from anywhere in the world, with major advantages.

This shift in the way people consume has brought both upsides and downsides for companies. From the customer’s point of view, there are many more options and buying advantages. That’s because they have greater access to information and can make better-informed decisions. On top of that, negotiating with brands has become possible.

The advantages for companies are also significant, since their target audience has expanded thanks to the ability to use digital channels to reach customers remotely. And we can’t forget that the impact on business costs has been positive as well. However, the battle for consumer preference has become extremely competitive.

Since consumers have more buying options, it’s much harder to create strategies that build customer loyalty to the brand. That’s exactly why you need to think about the entire customer experience, not just the product or service the company offers.

A good experience with the brand helps increase the number of customers who are loyal to it and its products. That’s why the reason for putting consumers center stage is to build a good relationship between the parties involved and generate loyalty. Sales are treated as a consequence of this process.

Since the goal will be achieved if the customer and the brand communicate well, the first thing to do is create these contact channels. After all, no potential customer wants to be left waiting for a company to respond about a product they’re interested in — if the answer doesn’t come quickly, they’ll look for another company offering the same solution.

A successful interaction on social media between the consumer and the company can build trust and has a good chance of resulting in a sale. This is a very interesting concept we experience firsthand, called micro-moments.

The interactions companies seek can start on any contact channel at any time. That’s why they should always assess what information their audience is looking for, the kind of language that resonates with them, their culture, needs, and desires.

Companies that manage to combine digital and in-person strategies are usually very successful. It all starts at home, within the company, and with its employees. When everyone is motivated, they always strive for the best results, showing the public that they care and putting the brand in the spotlight.

The impact of Live Marketing initiatives

Live Marketing creates initiatives designed to optimize the audience’s experience with the brand, using a variety of communication channels to drive engagement and interaction between the parties. As such, these initiatives are part of Customer Experience. Below, see the impact these Live Marketing initiatives can have on your brand.

Greater brand awareness

In the digital age, information spreads from person to person very quickly and can reach millions of people in minutes. Twitter is an example of a widely used social network where communication is direct and fast, making it a great way to interact with your audience.

This makes it very easy to spread your company’s message and boost your brand awareness, reaching thousands or even millions of people.

Greater credibility

When a company relates well to the public, showing concern for their satisfaction, handling their requests, and answering their questions, it creates an atmosphere of credibility that benefits both sides. Consumers trust companies that are fully available and present on communication channels more than those that don’t keep in touch with consumers.

Creating a sense of belonging

When a Live Marketing campaign goes viral, many other people take an interest in it because they want to be part of it. This feeling of identification with the brand makes consumers engage more deeply with the company’s strategies, bringing financial and credibility benefits and improving its image in the market.

It’s human nature to want to belong to something bigger, like a group or a community… Live Marketing taps into this sense of belonging in the best possible way!

In short, Customer Experience may be the ideal way to put the user center stage and solve problems related to customer loyalty, engagement, and other factors that hold a company back. In this way, it helps strengthen the brand name while improving the consumer’s shopping experience.

Want to know how to use Customer Experience in your company? Then get in touch with us and secure your place in the market with this strategy!