CX Checklist: 15 Tasks to Improve CX

No matter what, we always want to offer our customers the best service, products and experiences we can. But with so many touchpoints and so many ways to interact, it can be difficult to get everything right all the time. Consider checking these 15 tasks off your list when you embark on your journey to improving CX within your business and to become a CX leader.

1. Collect feedback continuously –  Don’t just send out surveys to customers on an annual or biannual basis. Solicit feedback regularly and at various touchpoints so you can get a more holistic view of the customer experience and journey. You need to regularly check in with customers to monitor how your business is performing and how it is being perceived. This can help you to get a better understanding of what needs to be addressed within your business. 
2. Excel at customer service – Great customer service is friendly, reliable, efficient, fast and sincere. Customers are fickle, and if they don’t feel valued or prioritised it won’t take much for them to move on to a competitor or tell all of their friends how bad your business is. When a business offers great customer service (in-store, over the phone, via chat, and even self-service) customers really appreciate it. Constantly strive to find the gaps in your service so you can offer the best customer experience possible and make sure if something does go wrong, you are able to address it quickly. 
3. Be easy to do business with – This sounds obvious, but many brands fail to have low customer effort. Take a walk in your customer’s shoes and identify at which touchpoints there are hiccups in service. Figure out how you can improve the customer experience by making it quicker, more efficient and easier. This will make your customers much more loyal to your brand. 
4. Close the loop – Closing the loop with customers maximises the potential of your voice of the customer programme. Collecting feedback is a logical first step in improving customer experience, but if you don’t follow up with your customers they won’t know that their feedback matters to you or if you are taking their feedback seriously. There is a lot to be learned from customers, so engaging in conversation with them can only help to strengthen your company’s bond with them and enhance your understanding of their experiences. 
5. Empower your employees – When it comes to discussing improving employee satisfaction empowerment and engagement are always at the forefront of the conversation. If your employees are empowered and engaged, they will see the success of the company as a part of their own success and vice versa. If employees feel a sense of detachment from the business – like they are working towards their paycheck without a sense of purpose in their work – it will show in how they interact with customers and affect your bottom line.
6. Choose the right metrics – No two businesses are the same, so choosing the metrics relevant to your business can require a lot of consideration. Metrics won’t make or break an experience or your business’s success of course, but they can be important to how you measure performance and track improvements. NPS, CSAT and CES are a good place to start for surveying your customers, but for the analysis you perform, you will want to consider a wider variety of KPIs. 
7. Design a loyalty programme – Customer loyalty and retention are important factors for the success of your business. A loyalty programme is a really effective way to entice your customers to continue returning to your business when done right. Whether your programme offers loyalty points per spend, free shipping or exclusive offers, it can create a more certain and constant revenue stream without a high cost to your business.  
8. Manage your online reputation –  Are you keeping track of what people are saying about you online? Comments on social media and review sites can leave a bad impression when someone is considering making a purchase. Make sure you are engaging with your online haters to try to rectify mistakes made and redeem your reputation in the eyes of new customers. 
9. Share customer feedback with employees – Engage your employees and promote transparency amongst your teams by sharing customer feedback with them. This is of particular importance for the frontline employees who interact with your customers on a day-to-day basis. Making your employees aware of what customers are saying about them and their team members, whether positive or negative, can really motivate your employees’ performance as there is much to be learned.
10. Use social listening tools – Start to pay attention to how people are talking about your brand and products on social media as there can be a treasure trove of feedback data on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. With social listening tools, you can engage in the conversation and gain valuable insights similar to those through a voice of the customer programme. Social listening shows you how people are talking about your brand online even when they don’t mention you directly.
11.  Perform sentiment analysis – Sentiment analysis is the tool to help you determine if a comment is positive, neutral or negative. Natural Language Processing (NLP) lets the computer do the hard work for you, so the data can be presented in a manner that’s really easy to digest. Sentiment analysis can also be used to parse through customer comments on social media so you can get a pulse on what is being said about your brand and service across the internet.
12. Incentivise feedback – To get more survey responses from customers, you can offer an incentive to motivate them to leave feedback. Simple incentives work well to draw your customers to your survey and will have a positive impact on your response rate. This will allow you to perform a meaningful and robust analysis of from a larger pool of data.
13. Review your policies – Take an inventory of policies that might be creating roadblocks for your customers or employees and try to streamline them to make them as simple and effective as possible. Rather than having customers call with concerns or questions about policies, create a robust help centre on your website that points them in the right direction. 
14.  Perform a customer needs analysis – If you are really stuck on understanding who your customer is, you should send a customer needs analysis survey. Customer needs analysis surveys identify what your customers’ true needs are so that you can meet their expectations and desires. If you are launching a new product or service this is particularly useful for figuring out the real and perceived benefits a customer will receive. With a needs analysis, you can pinpoint the values or traits of your customers that influence their preferences. 
15. Thank your customers – Let your customers know that you appreciate them. A thank you is a small gesture that goes a long way and it can really improve a customer’s perception of your business. One of the main reasons customers churn is that they feel under-appreciated. Customers enjoy a bit of personal attention and personalisation, and it isn’t difficult for you to offer this to them. Reinforcing that they matter to your business to them will, in turn, strengthen their loyalty to you and their likelihood to spread the word about how great your business is.