The advent of cheap smartphones and widely accessible internet had opened new opportunities for companies to interact with customers via mobile apps.
To make my point, here’s a Statista study estimating the number of smartphone users to cross a 3.8 billion mark in 2021!
The market for mobile apps is growing exponentially, with over 2 million apps currently live on the app store. This unimagined degree of easy access and connection has witnessed a flood of new companies rushing to seize the opportunity.
But this poses a very interesting question:
In this intensely competitive digital space, how can you ensure that your prospective customers will not only download but keep interacting with your business’ mobile app on a consistent basis?
A simple answer: Offer a great customer experience.
Good customer experience can either make or break your mobile app strategy. An optimized customer experience can work effectively to convert your prospective clients into recurrent paying customers.
However, to establish, win, and create your space in the mobile world, you’re ought to develop apps that deliver quality, usability, and functionality.
But you might wonder: How important is customer experience?
Ponder over this statistic and you might realize the sheer importance of customer experience:
81% of companies expect to compete mostly or completely on the basis of CX, aka customer experience’.- Gartner.
So, how do you improve upon customer experience?
Let’s start with the basics.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer Experience, more commonly referred to as CX, is the impression your brand leaves on the customer during different stages of the customers’ lifecycle.
Though, the statement is self-explanatory and straightforward, people often use CX, and UX (User Experience) interchangeably.
They’re two distinct terms with a subtle difference, and it’s better to state that before we proceed further.
Difference Between CX and UX
User Experience (UX) pertains to the stages that involve digital interaction with your business, whereas, customer experience (CX) describes and covers all the interactions between the customer and your brand.
What defines a great customer experience?
As stated above, customer experience pertains to the stages of customer interactions. But there’s more to it.
Great customer experience involves studying and working on service/product availability, and the depth of customer interactions with your brand.
1. Touchpoints/Service Availability:
Analyzing and studying every stage where a customer interacts with your brand. This could be any stage- be it a contact through your employees, newsletter, display ads, or/and tangible products.
2. Customer Interactions:
Establishing a clear communication process between your customers and employees, for customer queries and requirements are tended immediately.
3. Customer Engagement:
Devise your business’ voice and maintain the quality and tone throughout the customer interactions.
Needless to say, a great customer experience is essential to the success of your mobile application. The only way it can be achieved though, is from providing excellence at every customer touchpoint.
Now that you’re well aware of what is Customer Experience, what makes up for a good CX, and other subtleties, let’s discuss the ways you can improve your business’ mobile app’s CX without incurring massive costs.
8 Ways to Improve your app’s customer experience (CX)
1. CDM & Personalization
Customers demand personalized experience whilst browsing a mobile app. But the level of personalization you can offer to an individual customer directly correlates with the information you have on them- not to add how well it’s organized and analyzed.
In other words, you need to streamline your customers’ data in a centralized customer data management.
2. Useful Notifications
Smartphones are indispensable. Simply put, we live in a digital age where everything from sending a text message to placing an order can be accomplished with a few taps.
Since everyone these days uses a smartphone, sending targeted notifications can positively influence your CX design and strategy.
And that’s not a mere assumption. A marketing study states that you can expect up to 88% higher engagement if you strategically employ targeted notifications along various customer touch points.
3. Embrace Customer Experience Analytics
Reviews and feedback are amongst the best practices to know your users and identify their behaviors, but what if there’s a better approach?
There is, indeed. Employ and track behavior-based analytics to identify and focus on areas that your customers spend the most time on your app, instead of primarily focusing on reviews.
4. Leverage feedback loops
How do you plan on assessing your brand’s value without asking for input from your customers? That’s what makes feedback loops essential and an integral part to the success of your app’s overall customer experience.
Here are two ways your business can benefit of Feedback Loops:
a. Use real-time feedback surveys. Follow up with your customers through newsletters, emails, or over the phone for detailed feedback.
b. Closely monitor social media and hashtags associated with your brand. Social media is where people share their real opinion and talk over pain points if any.
5. Be Proactive with Problem Solving
In order to create and deliver exceptional customer experience, you’re advised to proactively search for problems and devise solutions before they get identified by your customers.
Identifying problems lets you stay a step ahead of your customers, streamline personalization, and create a seamless customer experience.
6. Use Cookies
Rather counter-intuitive, you should strategically use cookies to take your users down the memory line.
For example: A user shows interest in certain products/services and adds them to cart for future reference. But exists the app without creating/logging into the account.
Using cookies would enable you to save that data on the user’s particular device and highlight previous purchases the next time they open the app.
From the users’ perspective, taking care of such subtle nuances adds up for a better customer experience, and makes them feel valued.
7. Hack the Sign-up Process
Sign up is generally considered as the first point of contact between you and your customer. That is to say, if your sign-up, or app registration is tedious and asks the user to engage in multiple actions, you’re on the wrong side of offering a great customer experience.
If you’re keen on offering a great CX without incurring huge costs, be sure to bring your A-game to the table and keep things simple, and intuitive.
8. In-app Navigation
Evoke the Cristopher Columbus in you and find the easy and reliable navigation routes within your app. In other words, keep the navigation simple, straight-forward, and visually-interactive.
Here are two pro tips to enhance the in-app navigation:
Tip No. 1: Integrate auto-fill and save the user some time entering mundane personal information.
Tip No. 2: Support/suggest users for product and services they desire (refer to point 3 and 6)
All that sounds good. But here’s yet another question that you simply can’t miss out on:
Is Customer Experience worth your time and effort?
Here’s a simple answer: Absolutely YES!
The argument is pretty simple too. If your business is empathizing with the struggles faced by your customers and delivering support for them on a consistent basis, you’re strengthening your interpersonal relationships with customers.
The world is ever-changing, and so is the way businesses operate.
Identifying and tending to the needs of your customers, whilst simultaneously improving upon your app’s CX, is a step forward in retaining your customers in unforeseen rough times.
