Madalyn Sklar

Providing Great Customer Experiences

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Twitter has long been the weapon of choice for angry and annoyed customers who want to rage at a brand. And it works pretty effectively as well. Many brands are terrified of the prospect of unhappy customers taking to Twitter to complain about the service they’ve received. This is exactly why Twitter can also be a powerful tool to engage with customers genuinely. This week on the chat, we spoke to customer experience expert, Stacy Sherman about providing great customer experiences. Here’s a summary of our chat.

Guest: Stacy Sherman
Topic: Providing great customer experiences
Format: Eight questions directed at the guest. Everyone’s welcome to share.

Q1: What is the difference between customer experience (CX) and customer service?

Customer experience is the collective phrase that describes how a person feels while engaging with a brand. This starts from the moment they hear about the brand, all the way through purchasing, using, and recommending it to others.

Customer service, on the other hand, is one part of customer experience. It relates to the service and support you offer customers after they’ve purchased your product or service. Our guest calls it a “moment of truth” because customers who’re unhappy with your customer service, may leave a bad review and negatively impact your business. This is why business leaders should ensure that every customer interaction is perfectly designed to offer a a good experience collectively.

Q2: Why is social media important to providing a good customer experience?

Social media is crucial for providing a good customer experience because it shows people how a brand engages with and responds to its audience. People are always watching how a brand deals with complaints, praise, and sticky situations on social media. They notice how you respond and when you don’t respond. Social media is a window into a brand’s customer service practices.

As Madalyn added, social media is also an excellent way to understand your audience on a deeper level. The more you interact with them, the more you know about what they want to hear from you and what type of content resonates with them most. All of this will help you create more relevant and popular content that your audience will really want to consume and share.

Q3: What’s the role of customer experience in marketing?

Providing good customer experience is increasingly becoming a part of marketing. Understanding your audience’s behavior patterns, building customer personas, and defining the customer journey are key elements of creating a good marketing strategy. Now, all of those elements apply when creating a good customer experience as well. Marketing decisions such as messaging, communication channels, and even brand personality are all contributing greatly towards delivering a good customer experience. Together, marketing and CX inform each other’s decisions—for the better.

Pavel also pointed out how great customer experiences can support marketing efforts. Sometimes all you need to convince a potential is a heartfelt review or a customer testimonial.

Q4: How can marketing and customer support teams work together to provide great customer experience?

By communicating often and extensively. The last thing you want is a customer talking to three different people who gave them three different messages. It happens more often than you might think, and that’s why it’s important to shatter siloes in the workplace—get all your departments to talk to each other, brainstorm, and keep each other updated of the latest goings on.

Mlee gave us an example of how this communication might look. Customer service teams can help the marketing team understand what customers are looking for. This includes specific content they want, events they want the brand to attend, and any messaging they want clarified. These insights an help the marketing team strengthen their strategy and create appropriate content. Similarly, the marketing team can also offer suggestions to the customer support teams about improving engagement.

Q5: What’s the connection between customer experience and employee experience?

Happy employees will be more motivated to serve customers. When you offer your employees a good culture and experience, they will naturally pass it on to customers they engage with.

Q6: Are automation and AI helping or hindering customer experience?

Helping, clearly. When done right, technology can be an excellent way to provide great customer experiences. Don’t be afraid to embrace AI and automation when building your customer experience. However, don’t lose the essence of your business either: The love and the passion that you and your customers feel. Have a look at our guest’s website for more on how you can achieve this.

Our friends from VirtuDesk agreed with our guest. AI and automation can help improve customer experience greatly, but only if used effectively. Most people don’t always want robotic responses. As useful as AI and automation are, you also want to humanize your brand.

As our friends from Social Media Pulse added, use AI and automation to compliment your exisiting customer service efforts—especially when you cater to customers on a large scale. That way, automation will help make your service more personal, and give your customers an improved experience.

Q7: How do you go about creating a customer journey map that prioritizes CX?

First, make sure to build your customer persona. This includes creating a customer journey, mapping out each touchpoint, and identifying potential issues at every stage. Once you’ve built a rough idea of your target customer and their journey with you brand, bring in other teams into the conversation to validate your work. The more customer-facing teams you have in this conversation, the better. That way, you’ll get real-life perspectives and experiences from the people who support your customers. Modify your journey map accordingly.

During this stage, also try and approach your brand from an outsider’s perspective. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes, as our guest and Madalyn suggested. Consider why you’d purchase from your brand and what you can offer to reassure and convert potential customers who’re on the fence.

Q8: Share your tips for building an online voice that customers will love engaging with.

The biggest tip our guest offered was not to overthink it. Twitter can be intimidating at the best of times. Don’t let it rattle you. Show up consistently and be yourself. Engage with your audience authentically, share helpful content, and be transparent when something goes wrong. People will understand and forgive mistakes if you’re open about them.

Well folks, that’s all from me this week. Thanks for reading through and for more great insights from our chat with Stacy, have a look at this Twitter thread. If you like this summary, you’ll love the real-time chat. Join us next Thursday at 1 pm ET for #TwitterSmarter. We also have an after-chat on Twitter Spaces at 5 pm ET. See you there!

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About me, Narmadhaa:

I write all the things—marketing stuff to pay the bills; haiku and short stories so I feel wholesome. A social media enthusiast, I hang out with the #TwitterSmarter chat crew, and am always happy to take on writing gigs.

Say hello: The Opinionated Copywriter | LinkedIn | Twitter

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