Customer success cannot be achieved in one day. It needs a series of events where your customers are delighted with great customer experience and satisfaction. Usually, businesses believed that they could easily compete on price and drive customer success.

But this is not possible today as now Customer Experience has become a key differentiator that overtakes the product’s price. 86% of buyers are likely to pay more for a better customer experience.

In this article, we’ll talk about Customer Experience trends for 2022 based on which you can improve your approach to drive customers. Also, you’ll learn the benefits of customer experience, good and bad customer experience, ways to measure and analyze customer experience.

• What is Customer Experience?
• Is Customer Experience Important to my Business?
• What Are Some Customer Experience Trends in 2022
• Why use Customer Feedback to improve Customer Experience?
• How does Customer Experience work?
• What Are The Four Elements of The Customer Experience Model?
• What is Customer Service Experience Examples?
• What is Meant by Customer Experience?
• How Can You Improve Customer Experience Strategy?
• How Much do Customer Experience Associates Make?
• What is The Role of Customer Experience?
• What is a Good Customer Experience?
• What is a Customer Experience Platform?
• How do You Write Customer Service Experience on a Resume?
• What is Digital Customer Experience?
• What Are The Ten Ways to Improve Customer Experience?
• Which Company Has Best Customer Experience?
• How Much Does a Customer Experience Coordinator Make at TJ Maxx?
• How Much do Customer Experience Specialists Make?

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience, also known as CX, is your customers’ holistic perception of their experience with your business or brand.  

Read Also: Using Customer Analytics To Impact Your Business Profit

CX is the result of every interaction a customer has with your business, from navigating the website to talking to customer service and receiving the product/service they bought from you. Everything you do impacts your customers’ perception and their decision to keep coming back or not—so a great customer experience is your key to success.

Is Customer Experience Important to my Business?

A remarkable customer experience is critical to the sustained growth of any business. A positive customer experience promotes loyalty, helps you retain customers, and encourages brand advocacy.

Today, customers have the power, not the sellers.

Who gave them this power? Us — with help from the world wide web.

Customers have a plethora of options to choose from at their fingertips plus the resources necessary to educate themselves and make purchases on their own.

This is why it’s so important to provide a remarkable experience and make them want to continue doing business with you — customers are your best resource for growing your brand awareness.

Delivering a great customer experience is hugely important for any business. The better experience customers have, the more repeat custom and positive reviews you’ll receive, while simultaneously reducing the friction of customer complaints and returns.  

The benefits of delivering a great CX include:

• increased customer loyalty
• increased customer satisfaction
• better word-of-mouth marketing, positive reviews, and recommendations

All business models can benefit from improving the customer experience: subscription businesses can increase retention and reduce churn, eCommerce marketplaces can increase repeat custom and reduce returns, and service industries can gain recommendations and reduce complaints.

What Are Some Customer Experience Trends in 2022

There’s no doubt that utilizing the latest customer experience trends can generate value for businesses. Research by Microsoft found that 96% of customers worldwide say good customer experience is an important factor in their loyalty to a brand.

Here, we’ve collected 10 trends for 2022 that you can use to revamp your customer experience strategy and increase customer retention.

Trend 1: The role of search is more important than ever before

Position Zero in search is a new Holy Grail, but it isn’t the only window to discoverability. The key is to be discoverable via targeted contexts and platforms…then guide a personalized journey to their desired next-based action. Think voice (Google Home, Alexa), AR (Google Lens), Amazon, and Youtube.

Trend 2: Ignite Moments become the “embrace” in important touchpoints and moments of truth

An immediate opportunity exists for marketers to become the light that customers crave. Marketers that create a productive and gratifying customer journey, one that prioritizes customer truth and positive engagement, will build trust and meaningful long-term relationships. #IgniteMoment

Trend 3: Native UX and UI and customer journeys are now mission-critical in customer experience

Next-generation CX must be designed as native experiences for emerging voice, mixed reality and 5G platforms. The future is about discoverability. You have to be present in ways that are relevant to customer moments, intentions and devices. That’s the context for engagement.

From there, dedicated and personalized experiences, how you talk, what you show, what you say, become the differentiation that sets you apart. But if you don’t show up the right way, at the right time, on the right device, then you’re by default out of contention in the customer journey. Without discoverability, whether that’s text, voice or visual, there can be no consideration.

Trend 4: 5G offers a new canvas for experience design and analytics

5G unlocks new opportunities to design richer, more immersive and personalized customer experiences. On the back end, 5G also transmits more data than marketers are prepared to analyze and execute against.

Trend 5: AI and machine learning offer ability to prioritise “humanisation”

AI and machine learning can identify patterns in customer behaviors to power real-time and even predictive analytics, but when pointed in the right direction, we can start to recognize patterns of humanity and aspirations to deliver more meaning.

Trend 6: The future of connected TV marketing/advertising is unwritten

The future of TV advertising is an entirely new ecosystem of planning, buying, distribution, performance/ influence and measurement. Desired households and audiences can be specifically targeted. Ad creative and placements are data-driven, to be more effective in connecting with distracted audiences in new formats.

Trend 7: Location intelligence unlocks geospatial data to empower understanding, insight, decision-making, and prediction

This is a next-level, real-time customer experience. LI adds layers of data, including demographics, traffic, and weather patterns to make sense of location behavior to then predict and optimize physical experiences, i.e. events, travel, hospitality, retail.

Trend 8: AI empathy + ethics takes a front and centre role in marketing/CX

Innovation, Empathy and AI Ethics become the differentiators for #DDNs (Data-Driven Networks). Prioritize human experiences.

Use clean data, shift from legacy biases and embrace a growth mindset will lead to personalized and innovative experiences and more accurately predict what’s next.

Trend 9: Brands will take a stand on ambient advertising in social media and gaming

Programmatic advertising is placing brands in toxic and unsafe (but popular) environments that affect user experiences (especially youth). Brands are “guilty by association” just by being present. Brands must align together to convince platforms to employ AI-driven moderation to protect the community and brand experience.

Trend 10: Shift from growth and vanity metrics to CLV

Prioritizing retention, loyalty and advocacy help brands measure what matters to customers.

These efforts become pillars for the BRAND EXPERIENCE. Growth and CLV are outcomes.

Why use Customer Feedback to improve Customer Experience?

Whether it is a good or bad CX, it makes an impact on your brand and business. Your customers are likely to share their experiences with their friends, colleagues, or relatives. This ultimately builds your word-of-mouth marketing.

Thus, you need Customer Feedback to know what your customers think about you, your products, or services. Customer feedback enables you to collect customer insights and make impactful changes and improve their experiences.

It is clear that: collecting customer feedback is crucial for improving customer experience, but how does feedback help improve CX? Customer experience improvement depends on how effectively you collect and deploy feedback responses.

Keep an eye on customers’ journeys and wherever you find that customer is feeling distracted, trigger a survey question and welcome them to share their issues. So, here you’ve collected the customer feedback effectively.

Now the key differentiator in the survey campaign is how effectively you use responses or customer data. Here at this stage, Online Survey Tool helps you a lot. It provides a collaborative response inbox to monitor all responses (positive, neutral, or negative). You can also make it easy for your team to monitor every response effectively by adding filters.

Once you assign the responses to the respective team members, tell them to segregate the issues into recurring and personal. It helps your team address every issue efficiently, ensure surefire solutions that improve customer experience and help you close the feedback loop.

How does Customer Experience work?

Measuring or improving customer experience starts with one question – What your customer perceive? And based on the answer to this question, you can easily find what your customers want? The biggest secret to improving customer experience is to move from touchpoints to journeys.

Undoubtedly, a great customer experience builds customer loyalty, makes employees happier, leads to 5 to 10% revenue gains, and reduces costs by 15 to 25% within two or three years. To achieve this, you need a customer-centric approach rather than product-centric.

OBSERVE: Identify & understand customer’s journey

Observing refers to focusing on the holistic experience that customers have with a company. You may measure the customer perception at individual touchpoints like post-purchase, billing, post-customer support service, or onboarding.

But tracking the overall customer journey gives you a clear picture from beginning to end. Customer journeys are significantly more strongly correlated with business outcomes than are individual touchpoints. Moreover, this end-to-end experience enables you to gauge overall customer satisfaction.

SHAPE: Redesign the business according to the customers

Here shaping or redesigning the business refers to changing approaches to deliver a better customer journey. Always differentiate the purpose – what is the most important customer journey, then start improving it. Thus, you need to understand the expectations of your customers quickly. For this, you can deploy a behavioral psychology approach to interact with your customers.

According to the case study by McKinsey & Company, a consumer-services firm has applied behavioral psychology to customer interactions and found improvements in customer satisfaction scores and business operations.

PERFORM: Deliver against tangible outcomes

The biggest challenge for the organization is to prepare themselves to deliver against their customer vision. There are two broad ways to deliver against tangible outcomes:

1. By deploying customer journeys to empower the front line
2. By establishing customer experience metrics to capture customer feedback

What Are The Four Elements of The Customer Experience Model?

CX doesn’t happen at one singular point in time. All four stages are vital throughout the customer’s journey, and all need to be addressed in any customer experience strategy. Here are four 4 elements of a successful customer experience strategy.

1. Engage your audience

“To engage with your customers, you must first know who they are so you can cater the customer experience for them,” says Bart Mroz, co-founder and CEO of digital commerce consulting firm SUMO Heavy, in an interview for this article. He suggests gathering any demographics available, such as age, gender, birthday, location, previous purchases, and browsing habits and then using this data to personalize their experience.

Next, implement tools such as chatbots to communicate with your audience in real-time. Mroz continues, “Of course, personalization is not a one-and-done task. Brands should revisit their customer profiles often and change their personalization strategies based on new data and behavior.”

2. Convert leads to customers

The ease of shopping and accessibility to helpful tools turns a browser into a buyer. “When you compare the total retail experience to a matrix, you gain the ability to sense, see, and source ways to enhance shopper experiences across a variety of channels, as well as states of mind.

Help your shoppers journey throughout the retail experience, effortlessly wherever possible, but always–always–on their own terms,” advises Alasdair Lennox, Executive Creative Director of FITCH, a retail and brand consultancy, in an interview.

3. Fulfill expectations

Whatever promise you make to your customers needs to be fulfilled. This creates a happy customer who is not only likely to return to shop or use your product but one who will also potentially act as a brand cheerleader shouting your praises to their social circles.

Ryan Croft, COO and Co-Founder of TransitScreen, a company that displays real-time information about mobility options via screen installations and mobile devices, says in an interview for this article, “For us, it’s really important to fulfill customer expectations to set them up to be advocates for us in the future.

Because people generally have poor previous experiences with setting up hardware and can be a little skeptical, we make the process as easy as humanly possible and provide support along the way.” While installation may be a major moment for exceeding expectations for Croft’s company, other organizations may benefit from offering no-cost or same-day shipping or concierge services, for example.

4. Nurture your customers

Nurturing previous customers is just as important as engaging with new consumers. According to FITCH’s thought piece, The Joy of Shopping, “Shoppers want to be inspired to dream, whether they are shopping for Saturday evening‘s dinner, or something fabulous to wear on that first date.” Nurture them here by providing snackable content via sponsored social media ads, video or blog content, or targeted email campaigns based on previous purchases.

Wherever you begin developing your customer experience strategy, make it a point to spend some time with the 3 other elements at some point as well. Your customers deserve the best experiences at all stages of brand interaction.

What is Customer Service Experience Examples?

Customer service experience is how customers feel when they get help from your company. Are they satisfied with the response? Did they get a timely answer? Was it frustrating to contact you? All of these aspects and more combine to become the customer service experience.

Before we get into the details of how your company can build a great customer service experience, let’s enjoy a few examples of what happens when you get it right.

BarkBox goes head and tails above and beyond

When Melissa’s dog Cricket managed to chew his way through a BarkBox toy that was meant for heavy chewers, she was upset. Cricket got sick from ingesting pieces of the toy, and that resulted in a hefty veterinarian bill — not to mention a sad pup!

But when Melissa contacted BarkBox, they completely turned the situation around. They immediately refunded her money, sent a new super-chewer toy, and apologized. But they took it even one step further.

Showing clear concern for the health of Cricket, they asked to see the veterinarian bill and reimbursed Melissa directly. Now she’s a very happy customer.

The post on Facebook has been shared over 78,000 times and has over 100,000 likes! Not only is Melissa a happy customer, but other pet owners also know that BarkBox is a great company to purchase from.

HelloFresh provides quick and convenient service

When Reddit user Rosyxie received a damaged package as part of her weekly meal delivery service from HelloFresh, she didn’t expect much from them. But she figured she would send them a message through their in-app chat just to see what they said.

Surprisingly, Rosyxie got a lightning-fast response apologizing for the issue and a refund for the meal. In her own words, she had “just experienced the best customer service in my life.” By making it easy for customers to get in touch, HelloFresh gained a new advocate.

Source Audio beats expectations

When Reddit user hekabip had both a hardware and a software issue with their new guitar pedal, they contacted Source Audio through a form on the company’s website. Then, they sat back to wait, expecting a response in two or three business days.

But instead, Source Audio responded within 20 minutes, accurately troubleshooting the software issue and shipping out a replacement part for the hardware issue.

“The point is they just really did a great job addressing my issue fairly and timely. That is all,” says user hekabip.

Not only did they post their experience on Reddit, but other users also added their own great Source Audio stories. This kind of advocacy, especially on a subreddit targeted to guitar players, is invaluable.

What is Meant by Customer Experience?

Customer experience (CX) is everything related to a business that affects a customer’s perception and feelings about it.

Customer experience (CX) focuses on the relationship between a business and its customers. It includes every interaction, no matter how brief and even if it doesn’t result in a purchase.

Whether it’s a call to a contact center, exposure to an ad, or even something as mundane as the payment of a bill, every exchange between customers and businesses builds (or damages) the relationship.

Most importantly, it’s how customers view those experiences in aggregate that matters.

A great customer experience is easy and fast. But it’s also built with empathy in mind and reflects customers’ values. In fact, 65 percent of customers want to buy from companies that offer quick and easy online transactions, and 54 percent want to buy from companies that prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion in their communities and workplaces, according to our Trends Report.

How Can You Improve Customer Experience Strategy?

The good news is that the customer experience can be improved. And it starts by putting the customer at the center of your strategy. Here are 7 tips:

1. Create feedback loops

Customer feedback provides insight into customers’ expectations, and how they might change over time with changes in your industry. It can also tell you where customers are getting stuck and confirm what’s working well.

The key is to acknowledge the feedback and do your best to act on it. “It’s important to create a feedback loop with customers and act on what they tell you,” said Dyson. “This builds trust and ensures it’s not just lip service.”

Dyson also recommends creating an internal employee feedback loop. Agents can help aggregate customer feedback and provide insight into what’s making it challenging for them to deliver great service, such as policies or processes that don’t suit customer needs or friction between siloed teams that’s leading to slow resolution of customer issues.

2. Build an omnichannel experience

When you develop an omnichannel CX strategy, you aren’t just meeting customers where they are—that’s table stakes.

Omnichannel means going a step further and providing a consistent communications journey for your customer, one where the conversation history and context travels with them from channel to channel.

Context—about who your customer is, what outbound emails they’ve opened, what’s sitting in their shopping cart, or what they’ve talked to you about in the past—is crucial for delivering a good experience across channels.

3. Create a content management strategy

Customers would often rather solve issues on their own than reach out to a live agent. You can help them help themselves with data-driven content.

Usually, it’s in the form of help articles or chatbots that quickly point customers in the right direction. Ensuring that your content is accurate and up-to-date is crucial; an unhelpful article translates into a bad experience.

4. Deliver personalization

According to our Trends Report, 76 percent of customers expect personalization using data.

This might include engagement over their preferred contact method, account type or status, product recommendations based on purchase or search history, or some kind of personalized online experience.

Tailoring support efforts towards customer personas can go a long way. Gathering context about who they are (their preferences, personalities, habits, etc.) can help agents better target their support that leads to faster resolutions. It may be helpful to conduct UX research on your business’s support initiatives to figure out ways to make interactions more personalized.

5. Empower customers through AI

Gartner estimates that by 2022, 72 percent of customer interactions will involve an emerging technology such as machine-learning applications, chatbots, or mobile messaging.

AI-powered chatbots and virtual customer assistants are handy for quick, repetitive tasks. But when they reach their limits on providing capable customer support, humans need to be there to help their customers.

6. Deliver proactive experiences

Simply reacting to customers’ needs is no longer enough to stand out. When businesses are proactive—anticipating customers’ needs and getting ahead of a problem before it escalates or even happens—they can create a unique experience that feels personal.

An e-commerce company might deploy a chatbot on its checkout page to answer customers’ questions before they abandon their cart. Or, an internet company might send a text to let customers know about an upcoming outage.

7. Use data and analytics

The stories found in the data about your customers and your support agents will clue you into many things: the efficiency of the support organization, general satisfaction with the interactions, behavioral trends amongst your customers, and lots more.

Refining processes with your customers in mind starts with understanding what the data is saying.

How Much do Customer Experience Associates Make?

The average annual pay for a Customer Experience Associate in the United States is $38,692 a year. Just in case you need a simple salary calculator, that works out to be approximately $18.60 an hour. This is the equivalent of $744/week or $3,224/month.

While ZipRecruiter is seeing annual salaries as high as $57,000 and as low as $18,500, the majority of Customer Experience Associate salaries currently range between $32,000 to $44,000 with top earners making $49,000 annually across the United States.

The average pay range for a Customer Experience Associate varies greatly (by as much as $12,000), which suggests there may be many opportunities for advancement and increased pay based on skill level, location and years of experience.

What is The Role of Customer Experience?

The role of a customer experience (CX) specialist is to ensure that the marketer follows a buyer-centric approach and delivers a smooth, unfragmented and consistent customer experience across all touchpoints and at all stages of the buyer journey.

A customer experience specialist is responsible for keeping track of customer journeys, interacting with customers across channels and platforms, and coordinating with all internal stakeholders such as product design or development, sales, marketing, account management, and so on, in order to keep fine-tuning the customer’s experience. Since no business can compete effectively without a great customer experience, the need for CX specialists too is on the rise.

The scope of this role is highly complex in the always-on, always-connected, multi-channel, multi-device work where most marketers – whether B2B or B2C – operate and compete now. Gone are the days when the scope of a customer experience manager was limited to tracking conversations at the customer service or support centre and ensuring that escalations were minimized.

Today, customer experience specialists need to track a complex buyer journey across online and offline platforms and channels, devices and touchpoints. Each touchpoint where customers interact, transact or engage with the brand is an opportunity to build a positive predisposition towards the brand, or a minefield where the customer can be put off the brand for good.

Here, it is also important to point out that the customer experience specialist has to address the bigger picture brand experience (the overall experience of the brand across all touchpoints including even display ads or franchise outlets), as well as the buyer experience, in a specific buying journey that ends in conversion. The outcome is a smooth, seamless customer experience across various touchpoints and channels, both online and offline.

As customers increasingly choose great experience above everything else including price and even features at times, an increasing number of both B2B and B2C businesses are investing in hiring customer experience specialists whose job it is to understand unique buyer needs, expectations, and journeys; and build brand and buying experience that creates a real competitive advantage for the brand.

The role of a customer experience specialist is to create an exceptional brand and buying experience for a customer or a prospect, across touchpoints – both digital and physical.

To be able to do so, one must demonstrate strong product knowledge along with an ability to efficiently interact with customers, understand their buying journeys, pain points; and align with other business functions or internal stakeholders such as product development or design team, sales, marketing, and customer service team, to find solutions for the same.

The customer experience specialist generally reports into the customer experience director, customer experience head or in smaller teams, to someone in the marketing leadership who owns CX within the organization.

What is a Good Customer Experience?

Great customer service means following best practices like valuing customers’ time, having a pleasant attitude, and providing knowledgeable and resourceful resources, but that you also take things a step further to exceed — rather than just meet — expectations.

While you can use many different methods to delight your customers and have them raving about your support to their friends, here are our 10 best ways to deliver great customer service.

1. Know your product

As a customer support agent, you spend all day troubleshooting for customers, and that means you need to be a product expert.

Expansive knowledge of your product is an essential customer service skill. Ideally, you should believe in your product, be able to discuss features and use cases in an insightful way, and show your customers how the product can benefit them — not to mention troubleshoot anything that’s not working right!

Your job is to help your customers get the most out of their purchase and feel like they have gotten true value for their money. Make it your goal to learn everything there is to know about your product so you can amaze your customers with timely recommendations for using new features and services.

2. Maintain a positive attitude

Attitude is everything, and a positive attitude goes a long way in providing excellent customer service.

“The right attitude changes negative customer experiences into positive customer experiences,” says Flavio Martins, VP of Operations and Customer Service at DigiCert, Inc. Since most customer interactions are not face-to-face, your attitude should be reflected in your language and tone of voice.

It’s easy to misinterpret the tone of written communication, and email or live chat can come across as cold. The brain uses multiple signals to interpret someone else’s emotional tone, including body language and facial expression, many of which are absent online.

Don’t be afraid to use emojis to convey warmth and good humor, or pick up the phone if you find an email or chat conversation getting tense.

3. Creatively problem-solve

Over 80% of customers have churned because they experienced bad customer service. That’s why you must thrive on solving problems for your customers and make it a central part of your support role — and there will always be problems to solve.

Everyone has heard of the legendary customer service at Zappos. For example, they once sent a best man free shoes the night before the wedding after his order was sent to the wrong location due to a mistake by the delivery company. Zappos solved a problem and exemplified excellent customer service — they won a customer for life and gave the man a story that he couldn’t wait to share.

Don’t be afraid to wow your customers as you seek to problem-solve for them. You could just fix the issue and be on your way, but by creatively meeting their needs in ways that go above and beyond, you’ll create customers that are committed to you and your product.

4. Respond quickly

66% of people believe that valuing their time is the most important thing in any online customer experience. Resolving customer queries as quickly as possible is a cornerstone of good customer service. Speed should be of the essence — especially for smaller issues that don’t take much time to solve.

That being said — great customer service beats speed every time.

Customers understand that more complex queries take time to resolve. There’s a difference between the time it takes you to respond and the speed at which you resolve their problems. Customers don’t want to languish in a ticket queue, but they’ll spend as much time as it takes to resolve their issue. You should, too.

Get back to your customers as quickly as possible, but don’t be in a rush to get them off the phone or close the ticket without resolving the issue completely.

5. Personalize your service

40% of customers say they want better human service. That means they want to feel like more than just a ticket number. They get angry when they’re not being treated like an individual person, receiving boilerplate responses, or being batted like a tennis ball to different people.

Customers want to interact with a person — not a company. It’s part of the reason why many businesses send gifts to their customers on their birthdays.

Do you know not only your customers’ names, but also their birthdays? How about their interests or hobbies? Can you make them laugh? It’s obviously not possible to do this for everyone, but going off script and giving the personal touch when you can is an important way to show your customers you know them and you care.

6. Help customers help themselves

That said, customers don’t always want to talk to someone to get their problem solved — often, they want to quickly resolve their issue themselves. Among consumers, 81% attempt to take care of matters themselves before reaching out to a live representative. Further research shows that 71% want the ability to solve most customer service issues on their own.

Self-service is a scalable, cost-effective way to make customers happy — that’s the thinking that led to Help Scout’s Beacon, which puts help content front and center so customers can find answers right where they are without leaving the page. Then if they’re unable to answer their own question, help from a real person is just a couple clicks away.

7. Focus support on the customer

Your customers are the most integral part of your business, and they come before products or profit. Treat them like they are the center of your world — because they are.

According to Kristin Smaby in ”Being Human is Good Business,” “It’s time to consider an entirely different approach: Building human-centric customer service through great people and clever technology. So, get to know your customers. Humanize them. Humanize yourself. It’s worth it.”

Southwest Airlines put this principle into practice in a very memorable way when one of its pilots held a flight back to wait for a customer traveling to a funeral. They put the human before their targets, and that customer will never forget it.

8. Actively listen

Paying attention to customer feedback includes looking back over the data, as well as listening in real-time. Show your customers you hear them when they take the time to speak to you. Listening increases the chances that you’ll hear your customers’ real problems and can effectively solve them, resulting in happier customers.

Listen to what they have to say without pushing your own agenda. Don’t assume that you know what your customer is going to say.

Demonstrate active listening skills; when you’re on the phone or live chat, use phrases like “It sounds like … ” and “Do you mean … ?” or “Let me make sure I’ve got this right.” Make sure you repeat the problem back to them in your own words to show you’ve heard them.

Active listening also means you are mindful of your customer’s unique personality and current emotional state so you can tailor your response to fit the situation. Customer service is not one-size-fits-all.

9. Keep your word

If you promise something, making sure you deliver on it is common-sense customer service. Don’t let your customers down. Keeping your word is about respect and trust.

For example, if you promise an SLA uptime of 99%, make sure you keep to that standard. If you promise to develop a certain feature in your software in a particular time frame, make sure you deliver on that.

When you break your word, like saying you’ll get back to a customer within 24 hours and you don’t, offer something to make up for it. If your customer’s delivery goes awry, offer to replace it and refund their money for their trouble. You might lose some money in the short term, but you’ll gain a loyal customer.

Interestingly, customers do not feel extra grateful when you deliver more than you promised. They do, however, feel angry if you break a promise. It’s still better to under-promise and over-deliver so you can make sure you never break this important social contract.

10. Be proactively helpful

Going the extra mile is one of the most important things you can do to deliver great customer service. This is when you have ticked all the boxes, yet you still want to do more.

Sometimes being helpful means anticipating your customers’ needs before they even have to articulate them. In fact, sometimes customers may ask for one thing without realizing that they really need another. It’s your job to anticipate their needs and provide for them.

When customers feel like you value them — like they’re truly special to you — they’ll keep coming back. This may be linked with the phenomenon of reciprocity in social psychology: If you do something nice for your customers, they will want to do something in return — like buy your products!

Sending them a small gift “just because,” or giving them a rare promotional code, will speak to your customers’ egos and demonstrate your genuine appreciation of their business.

Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland hotel delivered truly helpful customer service when a customer asked them where she could buy a particular alarm clock they had in her room. The hotel gave her one as an unexpected parting gift, winning them one very delighted customer.

What is a Customer Experience Platform?

In a world where only 4% of potential customers really trust advertising, big investments should be made on improving the overall experience instead. But how do you know what to improve and how to do it? These tools come to the rescue for enterprises that want to identify user problems and optimize the customer experience.

Hence, we compiled a list of the top 10 digital customer experience software platforms for 2022 to suit your business size and other customer journey specific requirements.

1. Adobe Experience Manager

A part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Experience Manager is a comprehensive Digital Marketing solution that allows you to create a powerful enterprise toolkit that includes web analytics, paid advertising management or the ability to A/B test digital content. It is an open and extensible solution with features such as Customer Location Mapping, Customer Data Platform, Data Governance and so on.

Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Experience Platform together create the Customer Data Platform. It also provides the services of Identity Service and GDPR Service. Moreover, its open architecture allows you to easily integrate it with your existing enterprise software systems.

It supports various platforms from Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iPhone/iPad, and is well suited to teams of any size and for any industry.

Please rank alphabetically. Always add an intro line that leads to the listicle, you can include this fact that it’s ordered alphabetically. Also, mention a disclaimer – that this listing is done keeping in mind the requirements of mid-to-large companies.

2. Clarabridge

Clarabridge is a text analytics and customer experience management software that allows you to capture feedback from any channel like voice recordings, agent notes, chat logs, or social media. It can work with both structured and unstructured customer data. It is an AI-backed tool and can capture interaction from any medium.

It is one of the best solutions for social listening, media analytics, media management, media reporting tools, speech analytics, surveys, and text analytics. It also provides advanced sentiment analysis and offers real-time email alerts when data suggests and anomalies in customer experience.

3. ClickTale

A web-based solution that can be used on Windows, Mac, Android, and iPhone/iPad, ClickTale is even integrated with Google Analytics. It provides you with heatmaps and visitors’ session recordings that let you visualize customer behavior and how people experience your website on desktop, tablet and mobile.

Through Google Analytics you can identify users from the segment you want to learn more about and then use ClickTale integration to watch their complete browsing sessions and investigate behavior patterns. It offers enterprise-level scalability along with data-rich visualizations.

4. IBM Tealeaf

This AI-powered, cloud-based Customer Experience Management software for enterprises comes with features that let you create dynamic content, connect with customers, improve collaboration and leverage analytics. Through this software, you can track how users interact with your mobile sites or apps.

It offers advanced filtering, allowing you to retrieve a specific mobile session based on the device parameters, HTTP or observed events. It can help you improve customer value by creating behavior-based marketing segments. Its unique replayability (a page-by-page, browser-level recording of the actual customer experience) allows you to quickly diagnose and fix the problems causing poor online experiences. It offers both ready-to-use and customizable reports and dashboards.

5. Medallia

Medallia is a cloud-based CX platform that offers features for data collection, benchmarking, customer recovery, and data integration. It can provide detailed insights in real-time through its features of interactive analytics, Text analytics and Push Reporting.

Additionally, it offers functionalities for Media sharing and Mobile feedback. It is well suited for most sectors from financial services, retail, public sector and telecom to B2B companies. It allows you to collect feedback from almost any device which is connected to the internet.

6. OpenText

Good for businesses of any size, OpenText provides a set of integrated customer experience management solutions. It can deliver personalized content and customer engagement. The solution is capable of customer behavior analytics and interactions.

It can be deployed on-premises or on-cloud and can be used on any device. It offers web content and customer communications management and lets you automate the forms. It also offers features for Digital Asset Management and Workforce Optimization.

7. Qualtrics

Suits businesses of all sizes and scales. The software is popular for its surveys, research and experience management. Qualtrics offers intelligent features such as Text IQ, Stats IQ, and Predict IQ. It can be easily integrated with your existing tools as well. It provides functionalities for form building, multi-channel surveys, and data analytics.

It has options of platforms for managing customer, employee, product, and brand experiences. Its platforms can perform closed-loop follow up and allow other features such as digital CX, customer analytics and customer retention.

8. Satmetrix

Satmetrix offers surveys with advanced capabilities, such as segmenting by location, industry or product. For enterprise clients, it provides a private virtual cloud with enhanced support. It helps you understand the connection between customer behavior and business outcome, through its automated analytics and even lets you directly publish positive client feedback on social media.

9. Zendesk

One of the most popular CX software platforms, Zendesk is trusted by businesses of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. It lets you build a help desk, call center, and live chat software for better customer relationships.

From email, phone and chat to social media, the platform combines all the channels through which customers interact with businesses nowadays. Through its all-encompassing platform, Zendesk enables you to create more meaningful, personalized and productive relationships with customers.

It offers a host of features including analytics, customer segmentation, feedback management, knowledge management, survey management, multi-channel data collection, predictive analytics, sentiment analysis and more along with a user-friendly dashboard for a unified view.

10. Zoho CRM Plus

While Zoho offers a range of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, Zoho CRM Plus is a unified platform that helps businesses provide enhanced customer experiences through streamlined administration, omnichannel customer engagement, social media marketing, powerful analytics, built-in AI, intelligent chatbots and more.

It allows free trials after which it is available at a starting price of $60/month/user. It offers other customer experience features such as analytics, customer segmentation, survey management, predictive analytics, sentiment analysis and more.

How do You Write Customer Service Experience on a Resume?

1. Write a resume objective targeting the position

A customer service resume objective should show hiring managers that you’re worth hiring. When writing your objective, remember to explain why your experience, skills, and prior achievements will benefit the company and help it grow.

A successful customer service resume objective is normally three sentences.

Sentence No. 1: Mention how many years you’ve worked in customer service, as well as your key duties during those years.

Sentence No. 2: Describe your skills related to the job posting — ones that make you a good fit for the role.

Sentence No. 3: Highlight your career ambitions, any relevant certifications or licenses you have, and your educational background.

2. Include strong customer service skills throughout your resume

One of the best ways to impress a hiring manager is by using a strong resume skills section that highlights your expertise in customer service.

Additionally, be sure to include any skills that are relevant and transferable.

You can usually find relevant skills in the job listing. If you have any of the skills mentioned in a company’s job description, include them on your resume.

Transferable skills are either hard skills you need for the new job (like specific types of software), or soft skills that make you a better customer service professional (like verbal communication).

Having a balance of hard and soft skills on your resume makes you a more desirable candidate, especially in customer service where soft skills are more crucial.

Here are some additional customer service skills that are important to highlight on your resume:

1. Communication skills: As a customer service professional, you must provide information clearly and politely to help customers with whatever problems they have. Whether this is verbally or through text, your communication skills are crucial for getting your customer what they want.
2. Technical skills: Working in customer service means that you’ll use specific software to better serve your customers. Whether that involves Zendesk or Microsoft Office, being familiar with technical skills will make your job easier and keep you organized.
3. Interpersonal skills: An important aspect of customer service is interacting with people. If you have excellent interpersonal skills, your friendly and sociable attitude will help you calm customers down and win the customer loyalty your company craves.
4. Problem solving: When customers reach out to customer service, they’re looking to resolve a problem. If you have the quick thinking and problem-solving skills to assist them, you’ll be popular with both customers and your bosses.
5. Patience: Dealing with customers sometimes requires patience. Whether the customer is upset or has repetitive questions, it’s part of your job to stay calm and professional while politely resolving their problem.

However, the skills above aren’t the only ones valued by hiring managers looking for strong customer service representatives. Other skills to put on your resume include:

Hard skills:

• Blazedesk
• C-Desk
• Computer skills (Mac or PC)
• Email
• Excel
• Headphones
• Knowledge of product or service
• LiveChat
• Mathematics
• Microphones
• Microsoft Office Suite
• Multiple languages
• Outlook
• SupportCenter
• Typing
• Zendesk/Talkdesk

Soft skills:

• Active listening
• Adaptability
• Attentiveness
• Closing ability
• Conflict resolution
• Creativity
• Decision-making
• De-escalation
• Dependability
• Empathy
• Focus
• Leadership skills
• Negotiation
• Persuasion skills
• Politeness
• Positivity
• Quick thinking
• Responsiveness
• Time management
• Up-selling
• Willingness to learn
• Working under pressure

Remember that having a good mix of hard and soft skills strengthens your customer service resume. However, since customer service is soft skills-oriented work, leaning into your soft skills on your resume is a good move.

3. Carefully write your professional experience bullet points

Add numbers to your resume that are tied to your work experience. With numbers, you can give the hiring manager a clearer picture of your accomplishments as a customer service representative.

Let’s examine how this applicant added numbers to their resume:

• Handle 90+ calls daily, with duties including signing up new customers, retrieving customer data, presenting relevant product information, and canceling services
• Received an average 85% customer satisfaction rating to date, 15% higher than company average
• Suggested a new tactic to persuade canceling customers to stay with the company, resulting in a 5% decrease in cancellations
• Trained two new employees in how to use Kayako, entering customer data and organizing customer interaction logs

Why are these good examples?

As you can see, the applicant used numbers to highlight exactly how many staff members they trained, how many calls they handled daily, how much they decreased cancellations by, and the customer satisfaction rating they achieved. 

This helps the hiring manager understand the applicant’s skills and the scope of their abilities more quickly.

Think about your own work experience, and where you can add numbers to it.

• How many customers did you deal with daily?
• Did you receive customer commendations, or achieve a high customer care rating?
• If you’re doing sales, how much did you earn per day?
• Were your earnings higher than the company average?
• If so, by how much? How many employees did you train?

4. Add action verbs that emphasize your strong customer service abilities

Action verbs add some power to your resume and help your resume stand out from others. Here are a few action verbs commonly associated with customer care:

Answer	Listen	Resolve
Communicate	Maintain	Respond
Conduct	Manage	Sold
Consult	Post	Supply
Implement	Provide	Train

What is Digital Customer Experience?

The term digital customer experience refers to the sum total of all the online interactions a customer has with your brand. It may start with your company website but could also include mobile apps, chat bots, social media, and any other channels where the touchpoint is virtual.

And what matters here is the perception customers take away. Is it cumbersome and frustrating to ask for help or place an order, or is the process frictionless, memorable, and delightful?

Don’t overlook the importance of operational aspects of the experience: From the Shopping Cart to the Contact Us form, every interaction adds up to an overall feeling about your brand. What story do you want these moments to tell? What story do you want those who experience them to share?

What Are The Ten Ways to Improve Customer Experience?

Improving your customer experience (CX) could have a major impact on your bottom line. In fact, a moderate increase in customer experience generates an average revenue increase of $823 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues, according to the Temkin Group.

Check out the 5 tips below on how to improve the customer experience:

1. Empower your employees

This may seem backwards, but companies that win at CX start with their employees.

There’s an important connection between empowered employees and happy customers. Think about it – you’ve been speaking to a customer service agent for 10 minutes and you ask for a discount. The agent wants to resolve your issue, but they need to approve it with their manager.

ou’re already tired and just want to be finished with the conversation. It would be much easier if the agent could use their judgment, approve the discount (or take other appropriate action) and solve your issue on the spot.

Take action:

Find out what’s blocking your employees from delivering a great customer experience. Use an employee pulse survey to uncover any common pain points in the employee experience, and use those insights to review systematic processes such as contact center protocols and CRM software.

Consider your company culture, too. Are leaders, managers and employees all on the same page, with clearly understood shared values that support good customer experiences? Can you do more to build a customer-centric culture in your organization?

2. Value employee ideas

Employees who are on the frontlines interacting with customers are in a unique position. They’re the rubber meets the road when it comes to delivering on your brand promises, and they’re equally pivotal when it comes to perceiving and communicating customer expectations, mood and perceptions.

So when that crucial connection suffers, so does your understanding of your customers, and their perception of you. Employees who feel valued are more engaged at work and more willing to help customers.

According to our latest employee engagement trends research survey, employees are two times as likely to be actively disengaged if they think their manager ignores them, so it’s important to let them know they’re valued by listening to their opinions and ideas.

Take action:

As well as running regular pulse surveys to collect employee experience data, consider setting up an employee suggestion box to create a channel for ad hoc feedback. Giving employees a voice can offer valuable insight.

Even more importantly, take action on the feedback your employees provide. Making a clear connection between what they give you and what you’re able to do as a result will underline how important they are to you.

3. Use tech to create breakthrough customer experiences

AI and machine learning are tailor-made for CX experiences. From chatbots that are there for customers 24/7, to natural language processing that allows you to understand what people mean in free-form text messages, the latest digital technology has made time-to-insights faster and new levels of personalization and service both scalable and affordable.

The value of these technologies are reflected by the increasing numbers of big businesses using them. For example, Dominos lets customers order pizza through the Domino’s Facebook Messenger chatbot, and eBay helps customers search the entire eBay marketplace for the best deals out there just like a personal shopper. There’s no doubt AI and related tech can make life easier for your customers and allow you to get creative with your products.

Take action:

Explore the possibilities with AI and machine learning tools designed for experience management.

4. Embrace an omnichannel mindset

Gone are the days of sitting down at a desktop computer to connect with a brand. With more than 50% of web traffic coming from mobile devices, multi-device digital journeys are now the standard.

But it’s not just about maintaining a consistent journey across different devices. Today’s CX leaders understand that customers use a range of offline and online channels to connect with brands, often switching multiple times, and that every part of the journey – however meandering and unpredictable – needs to be seamlessly joined-up and consistent.

Embracing omnichannel is one of the most important shifts you’ll make in your business thinking, and it’s one that goes hand in hand with prioritizing CX.

Take action:

Find out how to develop an omnichannel approach

5. Personalize, personalize, personalize!

Customers today want personalized interactions. In fact, research by Epsilon found that 80% of consumers were more likely to make a purchase when brands offered CX, and 81% of consumers want brands to understand them better and know when and when not to approach them, according to Accenture.

Personalization, where the experience adapts based on what you know about the customer, makes customer journeys smoother and strengthens the bond between brand and customer.

If you’ve ever received a marketing email filled with recommendations and vouchers based on your purchase history, or been able to set up which content you see on a website from your user profile, you’ve experienced the power of personalization.

Take action:

Here are some ways you can use personalization:

• Use data to personalize survey questions
• Use geolocation technology to personalize based on location
• Offer recommendations based on past purchases
• Personally follow-up with survey responses
• Adapt your website to offer dynamic content based on user preferences

Which Company Has Best Customer Experience?

If your goal is to enhance customer service, you might wonder where to begin. Fortunately, plenty of companies offer exceptional customer service experiences that can help inspire and educate you. Keep reading to learn more about seven great businesses that have prioritized their customer service experiences to great effect.

1. West Community Credit Union

West Community Credit Union (WCCU), a Missouri-based credit union that’s been in business for more than 80 years, managed to increase their total asset holdings by over 50% during the past three years—just by providing better customer service. How?

They improved their customer experience by implementing a Capacity AI-powered chatbot that offered customers and potential customers instant answers to their questions without having to wait on hold.

Allowing customers to receive more accurate answers to their questions in a shorter amount of time made them better informed, which allowed them to move further down the membership acquisition pipeline. WCCU’s use of Capacity is a great example of the benefits that can come from implementing new tools to streamline customer service and engage customers. 

2. Zappos

Anyone who’s done business with Zappos, the online shoe and clothing retailer, knows that providing a stellar customer service experience is one of their main priorities. Zappos puts their customers first by giving customers a year to make returns, always providing free shipping, and training their phone representatives to be as kind and friendly as possible.

This above-and-beyond customer service is one of the main reasons for Zappos’s immense popularity and the reason why it was able to be sold for nearly $1 billion to Amazon in 2009. Zappos’s business model just goes to show that sometimes, nice companies finish first.

3. Trader Joe’s

Trader Joe’s provides its customers with high-quality customer service that relies on using incredibly friendly and outgoing employees, as well as convenient layouts and a relaxing atmosphere, to make its customers feel engaged and excited to come back again.

Do you run a business and want to emulate Trader Joe’s customer service strategy by allowing your customers to engage with real, enthusiastic humans? Consider employing an AI-powered chatbot that offers seamless escalation through human-in-the-loop (HITL) technology, which allows customers to connect with a real human when the chatbot doesn’t know the answer to their question.

By using the unbeatable combination of super-smart technology and the human kindness for which Trader Joe’s is famous, your customers will be satisfied enough to keep coming back for more.

4. Rackspace

Rackspace, a cloud infrastructure company, prides itself on offering “fanatical” customer support. The leaders at Rackspace understand that the key to happy customers is happy employees, and they’ve made sure to design the Rackspace headquarters to be as immersive and fun as possible.

But their approach doesn’t stop there: Rackspace is committed to being fanatical about supporting their customers, whether that means ordering them a pizza during a troubleshooting session or earning rave reviews from companies such as Wyndham Hotels & Resorts and Aeromexico.

Anyone who’s seeking to ramp up their own customer service experience would do well to let Rackspace serve as a reminder that you can never be too fanatical!

5. Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines has made it the company’s mission to fly the friendly skies by featuring outstanding customer service. Its happy employees are trained to provide the warm, friendly service that is so important to the company—it’s literally part of its mission statement.

To match this people-first philosophy in your own business, consider Capacity’s Guided Conversations, a tool that guides customers through a series of questions to provide them with specific information.

The Guided Conversations feature makes it easy for customers to receive the help they need without experiencing any of the stress of staying on hold for hours waiting to be connected with the correct representative.

Whether your customers are trying to reschedule a missed flight or need help with something else entirely, take a page out of Southwest’s book and try to make solving stressful problems as painless and easy as possible for your customers.

6. Costco

There’s no reason why a large, industrial warehouse should be known for providing a relaxing shopping experience. However, Costco routinely tops the lists of companies known for having flawless customer service. Costco makes it a point to keep its employees happy and well-trained. It also allows them to speak openly and transparently with customers, who appreciate being treated with respect.

What’s more, Costco doesn’t advertise heavily. Instead, they spend money to keep current customers happy instead of making a concerted effort to attract new shoppers. While customers may have to track down an employee at the Costco warehouse instead of being able to, say, quickly speak to a chatbot, once they do, they’re guaranteed to receive a sublime customer support experience that makes them excited to return.

7. Ritz-Carlton

Customer service is incredibly important in the hospitality industry, and perhaps nowhere is it taken as seriously as it is at the Ritz-Carlton. Employees at the Ritz-Carlton are trained to be so warm, generous, and inviting that they form an emotional bond that makes it hard for customers to consider staying anywhere else.

On top of that emotional bond is Ritz-Carlton’s famous dedication, as their employees are willing to do anything it takes to make their customers happy. Going above and beyond to ensure customer satisfaction doesn’t mean needing to fly across the world to make one customer happy.

Instead, it could mean using machine learning to develop customer service tools that are optimized to provide your customers with the best service possible. The positive reactions to the Ritz-Carlton’s customer service represent a valuable reminder that customers value dedication and loyalty.

How Much Does a Customer Experience Coordinator Make at TJ Maxx?

The typical TJ Maxx Customer Experience Coordinator salary is $12 per hour. Customer Experience Coordinator salaries at TJ Maxx can range from $9 – $16 per hour. This estimate is based upon 78 TJ Maxx Customer Experience Coordinator salary report(s) provided by employees or estimated based upon statistical methods.

Read Also: 10 Strategies to Improve Your Customer Service Experience

When factoring in bonuses and additional compensation, a Customer Experience Coordinator at TJ Maxx can expect to make an average total pay of $12 per hour.

How Much do Customer Experience Specialists Make?

The average annual pay for a Customer Experience Specialist in the United States is $35,514 a year. Just in case you need a simple salary calculator, that works out to be approximately $17.07 an hour. This is the equivalent of $683/week or $2,960/month.

While ZipRecruiter is seeing annual salaries as high as $50,500 and as low as $17,500, the majority of Customer Experience Specialist salaries currently range between $29,500 to $40,500 with top earners making $48,000 annually across the United States.

The average pay range for a Customer Experience Specialist varies greatly (by as much as $11,000), which suggests there may be many opportunities for advancement and increased pay based on skill level, location and years of experience.