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Andrew Dennis
Customer experience is becoming an increasingly important aspect of managing customer relationships. With advancements in technology, customer standards and expectations have risen. Customers expect fast, personalized, and seamless experiences when interacting with your business. Underdelivering on these experiences or failing to meet customers where they are can result in decreased loyalty and damage to your brand’s reputation.
To meet rising expectations surrounding customer experiences, you must first understand the common challenges organizations face.
Customer experience (CX) refers to the overall perception and impression a customer has of a brand or company based on their interactions and engagements throughout the customer journey. It encompasses all touchpoints, from initial awareness and consideration to purchase, onboarding, product usage, support, and beyond. CX is a critical factor in building and maintaining customer loyalty, satisfaction, and advocacy.
From ever-evolving customer expectations to the challenges of digital transformation, there are numerous hurdles modern brands have to navigate. Here are thirteen of the most common CX-related challenges facing organizations:
User research is critical for CX success, since it helps you determine which products to develop and UI and UX options that cater to your major customer personas so that you can personalize your product experience for a wide segment of users. But, depending on your team’s size, you’ll run into issues sourcing accurate data, managing changing customer expectations, and measuring the right metrics during the user research process.
For instance, inaccurate or incomplete customer data can lead to misguided insights. Data may be outdated, contain errors, or lack context, making it difficult to make informed decisions about customer preferences.
Likewise, your product analytics and behavioral analytics data might be scattered across several platforms (e.g., your CRM, ERP, website analytics platforms, etc.), making it challenging to build a 360-degree profile of your customers to understand how they interact with your product and common pain points.
Whether your customers are dealing with long wait times, poor UX (on your website or application), billing and payment issues, areas of high dropoff and user friction, or difficulty reaching support, you need to first:
Create contextual user onboarding flows, drive adoption of new features, and make in-app announcements with Whatfix
Whatfix is a no-code digital adoption platform that enables product managers to create contextual in-app guidance, product-led user onboarding, and self-help user support – all without engineering dependencies. With Whatfix, create branded product tours, user onboarding checklists, interactive walkthroughs, pop-ups, smart tips, and more – all enabling customers and users with contextual guidance at the moment need. With Whatfix, analyze, build, and deliver better user experiences.
Apart from 1:1 user interviews, most of the CX optimization workflow can be fully automated. But, it can be a nightmare choosing a CX software platform out of the sea of options available (e.g., G2 has 522 and 281 software tools listed under live chat and customer self-service respectively), training your team to use it to its maximum capability, and integrating it with the rest of your stack.
Even after purchasing expensive customer experience software (CRMs, helpdesk software, live chat platforms, etc.), many organizations are surprised when no improvements follow, simply because their employees weren’t trained to make the most of their new stack. Likewise, your organization’s customer experience will always be limited by the level of your team’s knowledge of your services, how to fix common issues, and customize your product for customers.
An organizational silo exists when an individual or team has (essential) information that isn’t shared with other teams of individuals—and according to Dimension Data’s 2020 CX benchmarking report, 54% of organizations report that their customer experience operations are operated in silos.
In practical terms, this means that:
Prioritizing your organization’s customer experience will often require investing heavily in CX software, retraining your workforce, and rolling out assistive technology such as guided onboarding and personalized product tours. Without securing buy-in from leadership, the efforts will be dead on arrival, and you’ll never get the budget or approval to make lasting changes.
A one-size-fits-all approach to customer experience might speak to a large potential customer base while ignoring the needs of your ideal user persona who are more likely to support your product, pay a premium, and eventually become brand evangelists promoting your product for free.
Without a personalized CX experience, you’ll record consistently poor retention, high churn, and a long time to value as your customers will struggle to pinpoint features relevant to their specific use cases.
This point ties back to No. 5 (breaking down organizational silos) since it’s hard to communicate with the rest of your organization why CX initiatives matter when every department operates completely independently.
As a result, your customer experience efforts are more likely to fail when different teams don’t understand why they should go the extra mile, pitch in to make customer interactions exceptional, and prioritize requests from the customer support team.
Managing customer data is a three-pronged challenge that usually scales with you the larger your organization:
Ensuring a seamless and consistent customer journey across all channels can be a significant challenge for customer experience (CX) teams due to several reasons:
Getting customers engaged and cultivating their trust guarantees higher retention, average revenues per user, and customer satisfaction. But, CX teams often struggle in this regard, either because of a lack of the appropriate technology, unresponsive support, or the lack of commitment to actually supporting customers after the sale or subscription.
From the top-down, you can purchase expensive CX software, enroll your staff for seminars and 1:1 training, and paste placards about being customer-friendly all over your offices. But, it takes an organization-wide mindset shift to get your staff to respectfully listen to customers, go the extra mile, and constantly focus on improving customer experience 1% at a time.
Surveys and polls are some of the most accessible channels brands can use to collect feedback, understand how their users interact with their product, and possible changes they can make to improve their customer experience. Sadly, surveys often paint an incomplete picture, magnify marginal issues, and can distract CX teams from improving their most pressing pain points that attack their revenues and customer retention the most.
With a digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix, organizations can enable customers with more contextual, guided user experiences.
Whatfix’s data-driven DAP approach uses an ‘ACE framework’ to analyze customer experiences and user paths, create in-app guided content and self-help support to empower end-users and customers, and engage customers with more contextual, moment-of-need support, in-app experiences, and surveys.
Whatfix’s no-code editor enables customer-facing teams and product managers to create in-app tours, flows, tooltips, pop-ups, and more – as well as curate all their customer service, success, and support resources into an embedded, self-help knowledge base that allows customers to search for the contextual issue they’re facing.
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