Providing the best possible customer experience is a growing concern for many businesses. And rightfully so. According to a study carried out by Zippia, 73% of customers believe that CX is a deciding factor when making buying decisions. As part of the same study, 89% of customers who have had bad CX went to a competitor.

Based on the above statistics, it’s easy to see why providing the best possible CX is crucial for customer retention and business growth. Doing so, however, is easier said than done.

If you’re trying to learn how to improve customer experience, you’ve come to the right place. In this comprehensive article, we are going to:

• Give industry-specific examples of how surveys can help you improve CX
• Go over various proven strategies that will improve customer experience
• Outline and provide a solution for the most common challenges businesses face when trying to improve CX

...and a whole lot more. But first, let's take a look at the three pillars to improving customer experience.

Understand your customer needs and expectations

Improving customer experience always starts with a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, preferences, and expectations. This foundational knowledge will enable you to tailor your services, products, and interactions to meet and exceed those needs, which will foster brand loyalty and satisfaction.

There are various ways you can get a better insight into what your customers’ needs, preferences, expectations, and pain points are. However, there is one approach that stands above them all – carrying out customer feedback surveys.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Customer Effort Score (CES) are just some of the surveys that you can carry out to better understand the needs of your customers and improve customer experience (more on the different types of customer feedback surveys later).

Enhance customer interactions across all touchpoints

Every touchpoint presents companies with the opportunity to impress or disappoint a customer. To ensure consistency in delivering a great customer experience across the board, it's crucial for businesses to take a more holistic approach across all possible customer to business interactions – be it online, in-person, or over the phone.

To do that, businesses need to identify all possible touchpoints, set up the infrastructure to measure key CX metrics, and regularly audit the results. The next step in enhancing customer interactions is optimising each touchpoint based on the incoming data.

For instance, if customers rate their online checkout experience below average, there is existing friction in the checkout process that you need to address. That could be a slow-loading website, unnecessarily long or confusing checkout page, collecting far too much information, and more.

Leverage technology to enhance customer experience

Over the last decade, advancements in technology have changed the way businesses approach the management and implementation of their CX campaigns. Today, a lot of the time-consuming and repetitive processes (such as survey creation, distribution, and data analysis) are simplified and in part, automated, resulting in far greater efficiency.

That's why CX platforms like SmartSurvey are quickly becoming every company’s best friend when it comes to improving customer experience. In the case of SmartSurvey, one of its major benefits is to help businesses create, distribute, and analyse a large variety of CX surveys quickly and easily.

That way, rather than dedicating hours upon hours setting up the infrastructure to collect feedback from customers, you can focus on acting on the feedback, which will make a real difference in the experience your customers receive.

Improving customer experience through surveys

Surveys are one of the best ways to gather quality feedback from your customers. That said, not all surveys are the same, and the type of surveys you need to carry out will depend on your business, the customers you serve, and most importantly, the industry you work within.

If you are keen on collecting customer feedback through surveys, in the sections below, we will share with you 5 ways you can improve customer service using surveys in various industries, starting off with retail stores.

5 surveys that will improve CX in retail stores

To improve customer experience in retail stores, brick and mortar businesses should carry out these five surveys:

Post-visit feedback survey: Whether at checkout points or through digital receipts, every retail store should carry out a post-visit feedback survey. In such a survey, you can ask customers to rate the variety of products available, the price of products, store cleanliness, atmosphere, and more.

Product satisfaction surveys: Several days after a product has been purchased, send your customer a product satisfaction survey to see how happy the customer is with their new purchase.

Store layout survey: Collected data from a store layout survey can help retail store managers optimise the layout of their store based on customer recommendations. This will positively reflect on the overall shopping experience that future customers will have.

Employee performance survey: The quality of interactions staff have with customers are key to great customer experience. And one great way to measure how well your staff deal with customers is to ask customers to rate them directly through an employee performance survey.

Incentivised survey: Offer discounts, loyalty points, or additional benefits to encourage customers to answer more detailed surveys, which can help you gather better insights.

5 surveys that will improve CX in ecommerce

Ecommerce businesses can choose from a large variety of surveys to measure key CX metrics. The five most popular surveys for improving CX in the ecommerce industry include:

Post-purchase feedback survey: Once the customer receives their order, send them a post-purchase feedback survey to assess their overall shopping experience, delivery service, and product satisfaction, to name a few.

Website navigation survey: Ecommerce businesses should regularly survey their website users regarding the website’s ease of use, loading speed, checkout process, and more.

Abandoned cart survey: Contact customers who have abandoned their shopping carts to understand what went wrong, identify the obstacles they faced, and find out why they didn’t complete their purchase.

Customer service survey: Following an interaction with your customer support team – whether over the phone or e-mail, send your customer a customer service survey. There, they can rate the quality of customer support they received.

Customer needs survey: Want to know what your customers want from your business? Ask them and implement their feedback. That’s one of the best and most straightforward ways to improve CX in ecommerce.

5 surveys that will improve CX in banking

Banks and other financial institutions can improve the customer experience they provide by carrying out the following five surveys:

Transaction satisfaction surveys: These surveys can ask customers about their opinion on speed, fees, ease of sending/receiving money, and other variables relevant to the bank or financial institution.

Service and product feedback surveys: Whether you offer loans, mortgages, or other financial products, you can ask customers to rate them and gather insights for improvement.

Branch surveys: Individual surveys dedicated to each branch can help banks measure various key CX metrics, including wait times, staff courtesy, and atmosphere. That way, banks can see what works and what doesn’t in each individual branch and form their CX strategy based on that data.

Online banking surveys: If your bank offers online banking, you can ask customers to rate their experience on variables such as ease of use, security, and the features available.

Customer support surveys: For customers that regularly seek help and advice over the phone or email, banks should carry out customer support surveys and measure waiting time, agent knowledge and expertise, and their overall satisfaction from the interaction.

5 surveys that will improve CX in call centres

Call centres are often responsible for handling the majority of customer inquiries. As a result, the CX they provide can have a major impact on overall customer satisfaction. To improve CX in call centres, we recommend carrying out the following five surveys:

Post-call survey: Following the call with the customer, send them a brief survey to assess their general satisfaction with the interaction they just had.

First-call resolution survey: Shortly after each interaction, call centres can send out FCR surveys, which are used to determine the effectiveness of resolving customer issues on the first call. And if the problem hasn't been resolved, call centres can ask the customers how many times they've spoken to customer service so far or how many calls it took for the issue to be resolved.

Agent performance survey: The best way to improve CX in call centres is to make sure that your agents are doing their job as well as they possibly can. And one great way to measure their performance is to carry out an agent performance survey. This type of survey can ask the customer to rate the knowledge and expertise of the agent, their approach and friendliness, and provide any open-ended comments about the agent's overall performance.

Net Promoter Score survey: This survey can give call centres a fair idea of customer loyalty and their likelihood of recommending the company based on their call centre experience alone.

Service improvement survey: One of the most impactful surveys call centres can carry out are general service improvement surveys. These types of surveys are designed to ask customers for their honest suggestions on where improvements can be made (as far as the call centre is concerned).

5 surveys that will improve CX in hotels

Hotels surveys offer the opportunity to learn a lot about guests and the experience they've had during their stay, by collecting feedback using the following five surveys:

Guest satisfaction survey: After guests check out, send a general survey to gather feedback on cleanliness, staff interactions, room comfort, and more.

Dining experience survey: If your hotel has a restaurant, you should carry out a dining experience survey, which should touch on the variety of items on the menu, quality and taste of food, price, atmosphere, and more.

Facilities and amenities survey: Hotels that have gyms, spa centres, swimming pools, and other facilities and amenities should ask their guests what they would rate them based on certain variables, including price, cleanliness, availability, and more.

Check-in and check-out survey: A seamless check-in and check-out results in a great first and final impression. Asking customers to rate their experience right after their check in and check out will help you identify areas for improvement that will smoothen the process further.

Loyalty program survey: If your hotel runs a loyalty program, ask existing members open-ended questions to find ways to enhance its appeal and utility to new potential members. To enhance response rate, consider incentivising your existing members through discounts and additional benefits.

5 surveys that will improve CX in restaurants

There are several key surveys that restaurants should distribute to customers if they want to get actionable feedback and improve customer experience. They include:

Dining experience survey: A general CSAT survey can give you a good idea of the overall experience your customers are having. You can take this a step further and ask your customers to rate different aspects of their dining experience, including the quality and speed of service, restaurant cleanliness, and more.

Special offers survey: If you’re running any special offers, you should carry out a special offers survey, which will help you gauge customer interest and satisfaction.

Food taste survey: After every meal, you should present your customers with a quick food survey and ask them to rate their meal. Over time, as you collect more data, it will become evident which food items are appealing to customers and which are not.

Atmosphere survey: The food and the service is important, but so is the environment that you're dining in. An atmosphere survey can give you all the feedback you need regarding lighting, choice and loudness of music, and the overall atmosphere of the restaurant.

Event hosting survey: If your restaurant regularly hosts events, you can survey attendees and ask for their thoughts regarding the quality of planning and execution of the event.

5 surveys that will improve CX in healthcare

Hospitals, health clinics, dental practices, among other healthcare facilities can massively improve the customer experience they provide by carrying out the following five healthcare surveys and acting on the feedback they receive:

Post-appointment survey: Right after an appointment, the patient can be presented with a post-appointment survey. This is the time when the patient can give the most accurate feedback on waiting time, the care they just received, the professionalism of the staff, and more.

Patient education survey: Patients often have questions, and whether they have been answered well or not is a major factor that can affect CX. Following each visit, ask patients to fill out a patient education survey, which is when they’ll have the opportunity to rate the clarity and helpfulness of the health information they've just received.

Treatment outcomes survey: Following a predetermined period of time, you should send your patients a treatment outcome survey to see if the treatment they received has worked and if they are satisfied with the care they received.

General facility survey: From cleanliness to doctors sticking to the allocated appointment slots, a general facility survey can give clinics and hospitals a lot of insight regarding the general satisfaction of patients outside the care they are receiving.

Staff interaction survey: Medical staff need to be more empathetic and put the patients at ease. And one great way to measure if that is happening is by carrying out a staff interaction survey and see if your staff are doing their best or if they're treating patients like regular customers.

5 surveys that will improve CX in B2B

Whether you're selling tiles to a construction company or a survey software to businesses looking to improve their CX (as is the case with SmartSurvey), the 5 surveys that you need to carry out to improve CX in B2B include:

Client satisfaction survey: General CSAT surveys should be carried out regularly to gauge clients’ satisfaction rates across the board.

Post-interaction survey: Following meetings, sales calls, and various other interactions, B2B companies should send surveys to their clients to assess the quality of communication and information provided.

Client needs assessment survey: The best way to find out what your customers want is to ask them. And the best way to do that is through a client needs assessment survey.

Product or service feedback survey: Whether you're looking to evolve your product or service or need help identifying areas for improvement, product or service feedback surveys can not only help you do that, but also improve customer experience once the changes based on the feedback are implemented.

Account management survey: If you run a large B2B business and have several accounts, using an account management survey, you can ask them about their experience working with your business when it comes to professionalism, responsiveness, understanding and acting upon your business needs, and more.

Other strategies for enhancing customer experience

Enhancing the experience your customers have with your business isn’t a linear process but rather a multifaceted approach that requires attention to various aspects of customer interaction. Here are a handful of additional strategies that you should consider if you want to take your CX to the next level.

Provide adequate training to all staff members

To maximise the impact of your CX efforts, you need to provide the same level of training to all of your staff and make sure that they are all on the same page. Otherwise, your customers will receive inconsistent customer experience, which will hurt customer satisfaction and their loyalty to your brand.

To make sure that doesn't happen, on top of providing sufficient training, you should also set clear guidelines that everyone within the company should follow. Then, measure how well the guidelines are followed and continue supporting the underperforming departments or individual staff members until the CX experience they provide aligns with your expectations.

Design a seamless customer journey

To be in full control of the customer experience provided by your business, you should create a customer experience journey map of the entire customer journey, identifying all stages customers go through from the moment they find out about your business to their last purchase.

Your first customer journey map won’t be perfect, which is why you should analyse and optimise it based on incoming data from the surveys. The data will often reveal customer frustrations and bottlenecks, which you can resolve to instantly see an improvement in customer experience.

Personalise customer experience at scale

Personalising the experience each of your customers has with your business can be tricky but is becoming more essential than ever. And it’s easy to see why. Personalisation can drive customer engagement, satisfaction, and conversions.

According to a report from McKinsey, 78% of customers state that personalisation would make them more likely to repurchase from the brand in the future.

One example of personalisation at scale is product recommendations based on purchase history. That way, without any additional effort from your side, customers will be recommended products that they'd most likely be interested in instead of random products they may or may not want.

Continuously measure and improve CX

Providing a great customer experience is a never-ending process that requires continuous measurement and improvement. This is largely due to the fact that customer needs and expectations naturally evolve over time. So, if you want your business to continuously provide great CX, evolving and adapting your strategies and approaches is essential.

To make sure that you don’t fall behind trends and shifts in the market, data will be your best friend. That’s why you should never stop measuring and analysing key CX metrics, such as customer satisfaction, net promoter score, retention & churn rate, and more.

To give you an example, if your customer churn rate is increasing, but nothing in your business has changed, that’s a good sign that your product or service no longer meets the customer’s needs or there is a better alternative out there that your customers are shifting to.

Challenges in improving customer experience (and how to overcome them)

Although improving customer experience may sound relatively straightforward on paper, there are certain challenges that almost every business faces during their attempt to improve the customer experience they provide. Some of the most common challenges include:

Understanding customer needs

Understanding the customer’s ever-evolving needs is at the core of improving customer experience. Sadly, even in this day and age, a large chunk of businesses struggle with getting a good grasp of what their customer’s needs, expectations, and pain points are.

To avoid being part of this statistic, you should carry out relevant surveys on a continuous basis that will help you identify what your customers like and don’t like about different parts of the business. Some of the most popular survey types that will help you do that include:

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys

CSAT surveys assess how satisfied customers are with a company’s products or services. Typically, these surveys use a straightforward question asking customers to rate their satisfaction on a scale, such as 1–5 or 1–10. The results provide a snapshot of customer contentment and help identify areas for improvement.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys

NPS surveys measure customer loyalty by asking how likely customers are to recommend the company's products or services to others. The survey includes a single question with a rating scale from 0–10, followed by an open-ended question for additional feedback. This survey helps identify promoters, passives, and detractors to gauge overall customer sentiment and loyalty.

Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys

CES surveys evaluate the ease of customer interactions, particularly regarding support or service experiences. Customers are asked to rate the level of effort required to resolve an issue or complete a task, typically on a scale from 1–7. The goal is to identify and reduce friction points, enhancing the overall customer experience.

Product/service feedback surveys

Product feedback surveys collect detailed opinions from customers about specific products or services. These surveys include a variety of questions, both quantitative (e.g., rating scales) and qualitative (e.g., open-ended questions), to gather comprehensive feedback. The insights help companies understand customer preferences, identify areas for improvement, and drive product or service enhancements.

With the customer feedback at hand, identifying areas for improvement will be much easier, allowing you to make improvements that will have a positive impact on customer experience.

Leveraging technology

Technology plays a big role in improving customer experience – especially when it comes to digital CX. Unfortunately, a large portion of businesses, especially brick and mortar companies struggle with leveraging technology and using it to their advantage.

Fortunately, customer experience platforms like SmartSurvey exist. Our CX platform is not only comprehensive, but it's also easy to use. That way, whether you’ve used a CX platform in the past or are completely new to customer experience management, you can take advantage of SmartSurvey and easily create, distribute, and analyse surveys before turning the data into actionable insights.

Getting every employee on the same page

The larger the business, the more difficult it will be to train your staff and make sure that they are all on the same page regarding the level of customer experience they need to provide. This is especially true if your business is split into several departments, which don't have a good track record of communicating or working together.

To combat this common issue, businesses should implement several key strategies designed to ensure alignment across all departments and employees. One example would be creating a universal customer experience playbook that everyone within the business needs to follow.

Measuring success

Accurately measuring customer experience is one of the biggest challenges that businesses face when it comes to customer engagement.

You can understand what your customer’s needs are, have your entire team on the same page when it comes to CX, but if you can’t measure the success of your efforts, how will you know if what you're doing is working?

To measure success, you should use a CX platform in the likes of SmartSurvey. Over time, data from your surveys will be collected and using our CX tool, you can compare the results of key CX metrics (such as CSAT or NPS) before and after any changes have been implemented.

Wrapping up

Continuously improving customer experience is one of the sure-fire ways to attract new customers, keep your existing customers around, and keep on growing the business. Hopefully, the ideas, strategies, and solutions we shared above have given you enough information to know what you need to do next.

And remember, improving customer experience always starts with understanding the customer and the problems they have. And the best way to know what those are is by collecting regular feedback through surveys.

If you're ready to move forward and give your customers the best possible experience, request a free demo today and we'd be more than happy to show you just how impact SmartSurvey can be when it comes to improving customer experience.

Key takeaways

• To improve customer experience, you must first understand your customers’ needs and expectations.
• Breaking down customer experience down to the last touchpoint and enhancing the interaction customers have with it is extremely important.
• With advancements in technology, businesses that don’t leverage technology (CX platforms in particular) will have a far more difficult time improving customer experience.
• Surveys are a fantastic way to gather feedback, turn it into actionable insights, and make data-driven decisions to improve customer experience.
• Finding unique and creative ways to personalise the experience of each customer will result in better engagement, increased satisfaction, and more conversions.
• Addressing common challenges such as measuring impact of your CX efforts and getting your entire team on the same page will significantly boost the effectiveness of your CX campaign.