5 Steps to Delivering a Better Customer Experience

Improving customer experience is on virtually every brand’s radar these days. And for good reason. Customer experience is the new battleground where brands will either win or lose customers.

Personalization and loyalty can help you get there

Improving your customers’ experiences through personalization and loyalty may seem overwhelming. Don’t try to boil the ocean all at once. Remember, it’s a journey, and the key is to just get started.

These five steps will put you on a path to happier, more loyal customers, higher margins, a more differentiated brand and revenue growth.

1. Prioritize your customer journey enterprise-wide
2. Focus on your best customers
3. Treat data as a strategic asset
4. Make sure you have the right loyalty platform
5. Take a phased approach

1. Prioritize your customer journey enterprise-wide

Forbes advises that brands future-proof their business by making customer experience, customer success and customer loyalty top priorities. Standalone, siloed customer experience and loyalty teams and strategies won’t cut it any longer. Customer experience and loyalty are everyone’s responsibility. That means that to deliver the seamless, personalized, omnichannel experience your customers expect—you all need to be aligned with the same customer journey and growth strategies. Loyalty is designed to add value across every touchpoint along your customer journey.

2. Focus on your best customers

According to McKinsey & Company, the best way to maximize the results of your personalization program is to initially focus on your most loyal customers. In fact, programs targeting regular shoppers yield a return on investment three times higher than mass promotions. Loyalty programs give you the opportunity to create an on-going conversation with your best customers, collecting more and more data along the way. This enables you to continually improve the experiences of these valued customers while boosting response and conversion rates.

3. Treat data as a strategic asset

Customer data is the lifeblood of your growth strategy—so collecting it, managing it and leveraging it should be a strategic part of your growth plan. Loyalty platforms, such as Annex Cloud’s Loyalty Experience Platform, not only enable you to collect zero- and first-party data with consent at scale while adhering to all the global data privacy regulations—they also empower you to act on that data quickly and easily.

4. Make sure you have the right loyalty platform

If you’re still relying on a legacy loyalty solution, it’s time to understand the limitations and take the time to explore today’s modern loyalty solutions. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that, because you’re an enterprise with complex needs, building a custom loyalty solution is your only option. Today’s SaaS loyalty platforms offer flexibility, scalability and control that’s worth looking into. And integrations allow you to seamlessly push customer data across your tech stack to enable personalization of every touchpoint.

5. Take a phased approach

Start by identifying and leveraging data around key touchpoints in your customer journey. McKinsey & Company recommends defining a short list of high-impact use cases that are relevant to your consumers but not too complex to execute against. Then construct an integrated database for these use cases. Experiment and try out offers and rewards on micro segments before rolling out to the masses. The key is to test and learn while building the necessary capabilities and intelligence. The right loyalty platform allows you to create and modify segments, change rewards and more easily and quickly.

Loyalty can help you take your CX to new levels

Annex Cloud’s SaaS-based Loyalty Experience Platform is designed to enable you to respond to ever-changing customer needs and preferences quickly and easily. If improving your customers’ experiences is a priority, read our full CX guide, then let’s explore how loyalty can be a key component of your growth and customer experience strategies.