Every organization wants to offer a great customer experience (CX) to their customers. And everyone understands that CX is by far, the biggest differentiator.

But have you thought about this – the experience of a Prospect with your organization has a direct impact on them going into the purchase cycle.

As marketers, while we become more and more inclined to a data-driven approach to enable customer experience, the key question to ask is – “Are we even looking at the right data?” (or) “Do we have access to the right data?”

Let’s take an example – say, a restaurant wants to address the decrease in footfall.

They typically tend to look at collecting feedback on the quality of food, presentation, taste, ambiance, service, etc.

But there is a good chance that the primary reason for the drop in footfall may be limited parking facilities. The “limited parking facility” was an information you had all the time, but never realized that it can have an impact on the customers walking into your restaurant. This kind of information is usually referred to as “dark data” or unstructured data, i.e., the plethora of untapped data in your possession.

While it’s true that data tends to decay over time, you always need to be sure that you are analyzing the right data.

Exploring the dark data on your website

Similar to the restaurant example, many businesses/websites have a huge gap between the number of people visiting your website and the ones that end up becoming a lead by filling up one of the forms on your website.

On an average, the lead conversion from a website traffic is under 3%. The problem is—we don’t always engage our website visitors while they are live on our website.

About 15% of website visitors engage when reached out proactively using a live chat tool. And if you look at it, about more than half of them go through the entire purchase cycle.

This is important because when a prospect is on your website, you have an opportunity to nudge them in their state of indecisiveness and enable them in their Journey.

In fact, according to a study conducted by Econsultancy, 73% of the customers prefer live chat, compared to email and phone, as the go-to channel for contacting a brand. The primary reason for this is the ability of live chat tools to get customer queries answered quickly.

Customer experience is contextual

Live chat isn’t about interrupting the customer’s journey and trying to sell hard. Imagine you are at a supermarket and the sales reps breathe down your neck at every aisle and direct you to a particular product. Would you like that experience?

On the contrary, a good buying experience is all about ensuring buyer autonomy and yet at the same time helping them at the right touchpoints with contextual information.

(Also read: 3 things you can do to create a great customer experience)

Put yourself in the shoes of the customer and you’ll realize that most times, great CX need not always be about wowing the customer at every opportunity. Sometimes, it’s about making sure their journey to resolve their issues is as painless as humanly possible.

So, how about making “Reducing your customer’s effort” as your KPI?

Putting that in the context of your website—what if you could know who your visitor is and take them through a personalized journey?

When you have access to data about your prospect, such as which company they represent, what business is their company into, and even firmographic information such as the number of employees, annual revenue, technology stack, etc, it becomes easy to build relevant and meaningful conversations on the fly.

Great CX need not always be about wowing the customer at every opportunity. Sometimes, it’s about making sure their journey to resolve their issues is as painless as humanly possible.
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Similarly, if you knew the website pages visited by your prospect, you can have a fair idea of what they might be looking for.

You can do this on-the-go if you are using the right live chat tool on your website.

For instance, Freshchat offers native integration with data enrichment apps such as Clearbit, which gives you insights about your visitor’s company and business. With this insight, you can contextualize the conversations with your visitor to give them a highly personalized experience.

Secondly, the messaging software also records the pages visited by the prospect on your website so that you understand their behavior and what they might be looking for. Upon identifying the pages visited, you can send the visitors to specific teams such as support, sales, etc. thus enriching their journey further.

Besides, it would make more sense for you to segment your prospects based on location, sales readiness and push them in appropriate sales or nurture cycles.

To sum up, CX is a collective responsibility starting from sales, marketing, customer support teams to everyone in your organization.

Fire up your CX engine!

Cover illustration and image by Karthikeyan Ganesh

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