Maybe your customer experience…isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Now, don’t take that as a jab. Realistically, every business falls flat with their customer experience somewhere, at any given time. This is the case even if your experiences are technically brilliant, and even if your delivery seems to make rational sense.

Human beings, your customers, are individuals. This is probably both the joy and the bane of every brand’s existence. 

We love that individual journeys tell us how customers like to interact with our brand. We hate that Customer A, who took nearly the same journey as Customer B…reached that journey for a totally different reason, and hit a wall with an experience that succeeded with Customer B.
But learning what makes customer journeys different, and optimizing to provide experiences that resonate best with consumers, is a huge part of what helps businesses scale.

What is customer experience optimization?

At its core, customer experience optimization (CX optimization) is analyzing your customers’ behaviors across their interactions with your brand, and working to lessen areas of high friction. 

High-friction areas of your customer experience are those that slow or stop a customer’s interactions with your brand. This could be wonky website navigation, inconsistent branding, messaging hitting customers at the wrong time—the list goes on.

When you’re optimizing customer experiences, you’ll be:

1. Collecting a wealth of data and information about your various customer journeys.
2. Spotting places of friction based on those data learnings.
3. Identifying changes that need to happen to smooth things out. 

In essence, end-user optimization often is, or leads to, customer journey optimization.

Generally, these CX optimizations happen across three major arenas: Digital experiences, product experiences, and messaging experiences. Let’s take a closer look at each of these pillars.

Digital experience optimization

The vast majority of your customers, just like you, likely have a digital device with them at all times. That means, of course, that the digital interactions a single customer can have with your brand are only growing, and opportunities to reach them could arise at virtually any time.

Creating effective online customer experiences entails looking at your entire digital customer journey to identify areas of improvement wherever customers interact with your brand through a screen. This might involve optimizing your website experience, email marketing experience, digital advertising, app, etc. 

Because the average digital experience is so large, you’ll sometimes find that when friction is present, it’s because multiple pieces of the digital experience are acting independently instead of together.

So, while it’s useful to improve individual parts of your digital experience, you can also improve digital customer experiences tenfold by paying attention to the holistic view. For example, ensuring that your branding is consistent wherever customers see it online goes a long way.

Product experience optimization

A solid, unified brand experience is a great start to the journey, but what happens when you get customers hyped for your brand and the idea of your product…only to find that the customer journey stops when they meet your product?

Truthfully, your product experience is never exempt from optimization. Whether or not you feel your product is thoroughly conceptualized and thoughtfully built, your consumers ultimately get the final say.

Optimizing your product experience might happen pre-purchase. For example, you might need to redesign your product page to describe better what your product does to reduce the hesitation to purchase.

Alternatively, you may also need to optimize the product experience post-purchase. For example, you may learn from aggregated customer feedback how to improve the usability of the product and other products you sell, to improve loyalty over time.

Messaging experience optimization

Information is king—but the right information delivered at the right time transcends the throne. Understanding what information your customers need and don’t need across their journey can help you step up your messaging experience.

Optimizing your messaging experience happens across all channels where direct messaging to your customers is present. This might happen among email newsletters, SMS messaging strategies, or chatbot capabilities. Marketing automation platforms, such as Marketo Engage, help scale communications across channels.

For example, let’s say you notice that customers who have just been introduced to your brand tend to drop off after you start sending them emails. Optimizing at this point of friction will likely involve looking at what you’re saying in those emails. 

Are you providing them with neutral information to build familiarity with your product, or are you pushing a sales pitch early, hoping a discount will draw them in? (The latter isn’t likely to go over well with unfamiliar audiences.)

Why is customer experience optimization important?

Optimal customer experience optimization is essential for brands because it helps increase both the number of customers that make it to purchase and those that become brand loyal.

Most businesses, despite initial successes, will find that a lack of proper customer experience optimization eventually causes stagnation.

Customers’ needs are constantly evolving, and their expectations of brand experiences are constantly increasing. So, the brands that optimize to meet rising challenges and expectations are those that scale in the long run.

Optimize customer experiences continually, and you’ll find that your business’s core vitals (your customer experience KPIs) are capable of long-term improvement. These core vitals include:

• Churn rate: The percentage of customers you lose over a given time. The better your customer experience is, the fewer customers you should lose.

• Pages per visit: The number of pages customers visit on average in a single session before they leave your site. Customers provided with a consistent, engaging experience often express increased interest by spending more time exploring your site.

• Conversion rate: The percentage of website visitors who actually convert on your offer. Needless to say, the better your customer experiences are, the better your conversion rates get.

• Cart abandon rate: The percentage of people who add things to their cart but fail to buy. Well-optimized customer experiences are effective at both bringing cart adders back to finish what they started and reducing the pre-purchase hesitation that causes cart abandonment in the first place.

• Average order value: The average dollar amount of a single purchase. People who trust your brand as a result of your customer experiences and customer value optimization solutions are often willing to spend more on one purchase.

Survey-based scoring (CSAT, NPS, CES): What your customers say about their experience. If your customer experience and customer service optimizations are working, your survey scores should rise.

How to optimize customer experience

Now, when it comes down to actually optimizing your customer experience, think of this as an ongoing and continuous process rather than a one-and-done. Remember, what you learn about your customers’ journeys won’t necessarily paint the full picture next month, next quarter, and next year.

So, it pays to look at optimal customer experience as an investment—one that requires the right tools to set you up for success.

Start collecting customer data

If you’re not already aggregating data about how your customers interact with your brand…you should be. Without a clear picture of your customers’ paths across your conversion funnel, you won’t know what you need to optimize. And it never pays to guess.

Data comes in many shades—online data, offline data, web data, app data, etc. If you want the clearest picture of your customers, you’ll need a platform that can collect and aggregate data across all touchpoints, even if some of those touchpoints aren’t trackable with a pixel.

For most businesses, a CDP (customer data platform) will come in handy. A tool like this allows you to build complex data profiles around each customer. 

But CDPs can be a substantial investment, so you’ll need to ensure you choose one capable of growing as your datasets grow, and not one that limits you on the data points you need the most. A world-class solution like Adobe’s Real-Time CDP is our choice for a growing enterprise.

Analyze and visualize customer data

Once you’ve started collecting your data, you’ll then need to start identifying the areas where you can optimize. Looking at a lot of data alone can make this a more difficult task than it needs to be. So while we need and love our CDPs, putting visuals to all that data helps conclusions arise much faster.

When looking to optimize your whole customer experience, you’ll want to have an analysis platform that doesn’t silo your view into one kind of data. A web analytics platform, for instance, is incredibly useful at providing anonymous data about online behavior—but what about everything else?

Successful customer journey optimization relies on a holistic analysis of your customer profiles and their touchpoints with your brand wherever they happen. 

For this, you’ll need a specialized customer journey analysis platform that can take high volumes of data, of any kind, and visualize where the most optimization is needed. The right journey analysis software should make it simple to create customer maps that highlight the steps individual customers take with your brand.

Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, for example, makes it easy to know where your experiences succeed, and where they fall flat. (And it integrates seamlessly with Real-Time CDP, which is a win-win.)

Identify customer pain points

Once you have some visuals in hand and have mapped out key customer journeys, you should have a much clearer idea of where their pain points lie.

Look for common areas of dropoff, when customers decide to stop actively engaging with your brand, across all five E’s of customer experiences: Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit, and Extend.

Maybe your brand has been successful at enticing and prompting initial entry, but your attempts to engage cause friction across the board. Or maybe you’re succeeding at the first four E’s, but failing to generate customer loyalty among younger audiences. Your maps and visualizations will help you spot these problem areas among customer profiles.

Act on customer data insights

Now comes the important part—how to improve your member experience based on the insights you gain from collecting, analyzing, visualizing, and mapping your data.

Most businesses by this point will have a large handful of various customer maps. These maps can help you design and orchestrate the experiences you show to customers along their journey.

Needless to say, this is a hard thing to do if you’re trying to deliver effective experiences to the same ends across disconnected platforms. To truly optimize your customer experience, you need a platform that helps connect and contextualize the delivery of your various experiences.
This is a task that Adobe’s Journey Optimizer was made for—helping businesses seamlessly coordinate contextualized experience delivery as customer journeys occur.

Better yet, Journey Optimizer also smoothly ties back to Customer Journey Analytics and helps build your data and understanding of the combinations of experiences you deliver.

To sum things up…

There are a lot of processes and tools out there that you can use to collect data in ways that help you optimize. But you should always be looking for tools that are capable of scaling with your business in the long term, like Adobe’s customer journey suite. 

We know that robust platforms like Adobe take more effort, time, and technical knowledge for businesses to implement on their own, especially if you want to implement more than one tool. This alone makes it easy for businesses to choose platforms that promote simple self-serve integration…but that then fall short when it comes to long-term scale.
That’s where we come in—shouldering the implementation of scalable, powerful Adobe solutions, so your teams get all their benefits without all the work to get them going. Adobe platform implementation is something our experts could do in their sleep (no kidding). Ask us about your process toward customer experience optimization with Adobe!