Customer experience (or CX) is the overall perception that a consumer has when interacting with your product, service, or brand. Many companies believe that definitive experiences are created internally, then passed on to the end consumer and not changed after that.
While the customer experience certainly begins within the business, internal efforts only get you halfway to the prize. The reality is this: customers are the judge, jury, and executioner when determining the experience they have with your company. So, it’s important to put attention into every step of the buyer’s journey. This includes the message portrayed (marketing), the approach used while convincing them to buy (sales), and the efforts made toward maintaining a positive relationship after a consumer has purchased your product (customer service).
To learn how to improve customer experience, we must talk about what a great customer experience looks like, the importance of continually improving customer experience, and how you can achieve an improved customer experience by using web data analytics.
What is a great customer experience?
You know you have provided a great customer experience if your customer is left feeling satisfied with their entire experience with your business and product. This can come in many forms. For example:
- The customer had an exceptionally empathetic salesperson who made them feel heard/understood.
- The customer had an easy time finding your product, navigating your website, and getting their questions answered in a timely manner.
- There was a problem with the product and the customer had a hassle-free experience of replacing or returning the item.
- Your product/service gave the customer a benefit that led them to a greater quality of life.
How can you improve customer experience?
Before we discuss the ways that web data can help to improve customer experience for your business, let’s take a moment to talk about why improving this experience is crucial to the success of your business.
The Pareto Principle states that 80% of your business will come from 20% of your customers. This means that creating an exceptional customer experience will play a key role in generating sustained profits over a prolonged period of time. In addition, those who have a particularly good or bad experience with a company will inevitably be the most vocal. Since negative word of mouth can be a big hindrance for businesses, you should always aim to make your customer’s experience as positive as possible (even if they aren’t continuing to use your product going forward).
By reinforcing a positive customer experience, you are attacking the problem from both ends, thus creating strong brand loyalty. Not only are those delighted customers spreading the word for you, but when satisfied, they are likely to continue purchasing from you in the future (contributing to that hefty 80% mentioned by Pareto).
Although managing every aspect of the customer experience can seem daunting to some, these web data tools can help save you time and give insight into ways that your company can improve:
Dynamic Product Catalog
A dynamic product catalog can help to make the customer experience better by collecting data from your inventory, then comparing that data to the same products on other websites. This way you will always have the proper products on deck, right when the customer needs them!
Traditionally, companies must go through manufacturer websites to manually get images, scrape product descriptions, and copy other data to keep their inventories current. Machine learning now makes it possible to routinely (and automatically) complete this process; saving time and increasing efficiency throughout your entire inventory system.
Dynamic Pricing
Web data can help to dynamically price your inventory, ensuring that your rates and amenities are always competitive and differentiated. Without a dynamic pricing system, monitoring/recording competitor prices would be highly inefficient and prone to an abundance of errors. These old fashioned pricing comparisons have been done for years and are far outdated. Instead, automatically compare your prices to those of competing brands, on a continual basis, to always remain up to date and competitive.
Sentiment Analysis
Reviews are generally the first place business owners turn when wanting to hear feedback about their company. Here’s the problem: If all businesses in a given industry have similar reviews (e.g. all local coffee shops have 4 out of 5 stars), then without manually reading through hundreds of comments it can be difficult to know what customers do/don’t like. With sentiment analysis, this data becomes much easier to both collect and analyze. Generate a spreadsheet of every review from every website. Easily make intelligent comparisons between businesses (such as comparing keywords from customer reviews), to protect your brand image and help make informed decisions in the future.
Track Market Opportunities for Expansion and Innovation
Using web data to optimize pricing and customer sentiment is a great way to get a headstart on market growth opportunities, but this leveraging of web data also grants you excess value beyond the surface level. The consistent analysis of this information will help to provide insight of lucrative business opportunities for expansion and innovation in your market. The more aware you can be of market trends, the more you can capitalize on them!
Gain Market Intelligence
Market intelligence is crucial for the success of sales and marketing strategy across the world. By harnessing the capabilities of web data, you can gain information to help generate leads, monitor search engine rankings, determine ideal customer profiles, and create content specifically geared toward applicable consumers.
As mentioned before, a good customer experience begins with marketing; early in the buyer’s journey. Because of this, it is important to get the appropriate message in front of the right people at the proper time. Web data tools can provide market intelligence (on a daily basis) into what competing companies are offering consumers, locations that customers prefer, and more– allowing you to make well-positioned strategic decisions for your business.
How Import.io Can Help You Improve Your Customer Experience
All of the tactics we’ve discussed to improve customer experience require web data, and Import.io can help you get that web data easily and effortlessly. Rather than coding a custom web scraper that could collect inaccurate or incomplete datasets, Import.io’s solution helps you identify data on the web that will provide value to your organization, extracts that data completely and accurately, and presents the data to you in a consumable format, already cleansed and prepared for analysis. You can get sentiment analysis, product and pricing information, and market intelligence all in minutes with Import.io.
Contact a data expert to learn more about how Import.io can help your organization leverage web data.
Recommended Readings
Turning Customer Reviews Into Actionable Data