Are you truly putting your customers first? ‘If you haven’t yet adopted a customer-first digital strategy, you're risking customer loyalty big-time. In fact:

• 47% of consumers admit they’ll abandon a brand after a poor experience, and
• An overwhelming 76% believe it’s simpler than ever to switch to a competitor.

Today’s businesses are rapidly acknowledging that customers’ commitment to brands is fleeting. Working tirelessly to improve customer experience (CX) is vital to foster loyalty, cut costs, and achieve sustainable growth.

So, what exactly are the innovative ideas to improve customer experience? Our guide covers CX basics, key CX technologies, and a ton of strategic recommendations and examples of how to improve your customer experience.

‍You'll learn:

1. What is customer experience?
2. What is an innovative customer?
3. What is the role in innovation in customer experience?
4. How does innovation benefit customers?
5. What is the latest technology available to enhance customer experience?
6. What is the best way to improve customer experience?
7. What can be done to improve customer experience?
8. What are the 5 c’s of customer experience?

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience (CX) refers to the entire journey a customer goes through with a brand, encompassing every interaction, from browsing a website to receiving customer support.

It's the sum of all these moments that shape their perception and relationship with the company – and a single negative experience along the way could tank the whole thing.  

Just imagine ordering from Patty’s Pizza online: your mouth waters thinking about the last pizza you ordered from Patty’s.

Their website is user-friendly and remembers your previous order, address, and payment information. The pizza gets there right-on-time, and it’s delicious – all adding up to a positive customer experience and increased likelihood you’ll order again.

But, could Patty’s Pizza innovate this CX to be even better? Let’s say they add a pizza tracker to follow the delivery driver’s journey or friendly chat support for when your coupon code fails.

You get it – continuous innovation enhances customer experience, making it as satisfying as getting that last slice of your favorite pizza.

Taking a step back, let’s define what that customer looks like.

What is an Innovative Customer?

This may sound like a weak innovative customer definition, but today, everyone is an innovative customer.

Customers are tech-savvy, highly informed, and unafraid to demand plentiful options to browse, buy, and engage companies however they want.  

• 81% of customers use online chat or live support
• 82% use mobile apps
• 54% use voice assistants to communicate with companies

With 80% valuing the experience a company provides as equally important as its products or services, customers aren’t just buying products; they're seeking (and judging) experiences.

Their expectations are higher than ever and they’re not afraid to switch loyalties if their expectations aren’t met. Your customers demand businesses differentiate themselves through innovative ideas to improve business and increasingly simple and satisfying customer experiences.

Let’s examine the pivotal role of innovation in customer experience.

What is the Role of Innovation in Customer Experience?

Continual customer experience innovation is the difference between a business driving repeat business or facing customer churn. Reliable customer insights is key to deciding the most impactful areas to focus innovation.

Whereoware’s Chief Strategy Officer, Joe Mallek says it best, “Throughout my career, I’ve seen businesses’ appetite for innovation transform from influenced strictly by what the competition is doing to now trying to differentiate themselves and really focusing on enhancing their customers’ experience.

A prime blinder I see businesses missing is insight.

It’s one thing to be able to speak in a wishful manner, about an idealistic outcome. ‘Like wouldn’t it be great if we could get more sales?’ or ‘wouldn’t it be great if we could deliver this workflow with less friction and lower costs?’ The blind spot is most people are challenged to look at situations with objectivity, to make the right design, strategy, and technology investment calls.

Often customers don’t have the data infrastructure to understand the realities of their digital ecosystem. It’s hard to optimize something if you don’t have nuts and bolts, like data, to guide you in terms of prioritization.”

Failure to innovate can lead to customer frustration and negative experiences, such as outdated digital interfaces (website, portal, app, mobile, etc.), poor security, or slow response times.

Essentially, customer experience innovation involves not just keeping pace with technological advancements, but also creatively leveraging a combination of data-driven insights, smart strategy, and emerging technology to meet and exceed customer expectations, thereby fostering long-term loyalty and satisfaction.

Let's look at how innovation directly benefits customers.

How Does Innovation Benefit Customers?

CX innovation makes it easier, faster, and more enjoyable for customers to achieve their objectives (like finding the right gift, downloading a helpful report, or reading about a trend).

It helps them navigate a website or digital space more easily, reducing their annoyance. It helps them get the support they need, without headache – and it pays off.

Customers who receive exceptional service are 93% more likely to make repeat purchases and spend 43% more with brands they are loyal to than with those they aren't.

That payoff is not just in new revenue. Overall marketing efforts have become increasingly costly - 222% rise in customer acquisition costs in the e-commerce sector over the past eight years.

Clearly, great customer experience examples show that fostering customer loyalty not only helps you generate new revenue, but it makes for cost-effective marketing.

Next, we'll look at the best ways to achieve customer-driven innovation.

What is the Latest Technology Available to Enhance Customer Experience?

Technology is at the heart of most customerdriven innovation - it's the enabler for creating more value and delight.

Luckily, there's a whole arsenal of advanced technologies ready to help you gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and responses to strategically guide your CX strategy and scale your business.

Let’s take a look at some of the key tools used to improve CX.

Customer Insights and Analytics Technology

These powerful tools tap into vast pools of data, unlocking predictive and actionable insights. It's like having a crystal ball that reveals exactly what your customers want - and how to deliver it.

Notable data tools and tactics include:

• Google Analytics 4 – a free tool that tracks website traffic, user interactions, and so much more to provide insights into customer behavior. GA4 is the gold standard starting point for many businesses.
• Customer Data Platforms - bring all of your disparate data sources into a single source of truth. Ensuring you have a clear, holistic picture of your customers, enabling you to assess whether your tech investments are meeting your needs.
• Hotjar – helps you understand how customers are using your website by capturing heatmaps and visual representations of customer and website interactions.
• Tableau - specializes in data visualization, helping businesses understand complex customer data.
• AI – artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions are embedded in many analytics and MarTech tools and can help your business run smoother and faster from predicting sales trends to detecting fraud alerts and more.

DXPs, Marketing Automation, and Media Asset Tools

Digital experience platforms (DXPs) are your all-in-one platforms for your website, e-commerce store, and multi-channel marketing execution.

Similarly, marketing automation tools are used to manage your audience data and deploy automated customer journeys, typically spanning email, SMS, social, and more.

Many of these core platforms can be used interchangeably - for example, many DXPs offer email marketing solutions, and you can build landing pages and even ecommerce experiences in some marketing automation platforms.

Ultimately, both help marketing teams use real-time data on customer interactions to trigger personalized and relevant digital experiences.  

Notable tool and platforms include:

• Salesforce Platform – connects full customer data across its various clouds, including Sales Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Marketing Cloud, to enhance customer interactions. Experience Cloud uses this data to create tailored digital experiences across websites, mobile apps, and online communities. Marketing Cloud delivers targeted marketing campaigns and tracks customer engagement to create end-to-end customer experiences. Sales Cloud focuses on sales automation and CRM, facilitating personalized sales experiences.
• Optimizely One - provides a suite of tools (DXP) for real-time customer experience management across an organizations entire web experience. Marketers are enabled to plan, execute, personalize, experiment, analyze, and validate content and data across their digital sites and apps.
• HubSpot Marketing Hub – is a marketing automation tool that uses CRM data to automate the right messaging and communication across email, landing pages, forms and more.
• Digital Asset Management Systems (DAM) – assist internal teams in deploying consistent ‘on brand’ digital assets and rich product and service information to support smooth omnichannel experiences. DAMs are frequently used alongside or integrated with DXPs.
• Product Information Management Systems (PIM) – enable internal teams to update product information and feed it directly to the channels that need it, like your website and marketplaces like Amazon. Similar to a DAM, PIM solutions are frequently part of your overall digital experience platform.

Customer Service and Feedback Tools

Streamline the way your brand communicates with its customers by addressing a spectrum of inquiries efficiently.

Nothing beats direct feedback from your customers. These tools provide just that, enabling you to fine-tune your offerings based on what your customers truly want and need. It's like having a direct line to your customers' thoughts and feelings.

Notable platforms include:

• Chatbots – provide customers a real time communication tool accessible on web or app, either supported by a representative or powered by AI assisting customer with speedy support.
• Self Service Portals – enable users to access personal information, purchase history, support, and FAQ’s saving your support team time and manpower.
• Zoho Desk – is a self-service portal enabling customers to submit support claims via email, phone, chat, social, and website for agents to respond and resolve quickly.
• SurveyMonkey and Typeform - enables businesses to create and distribute customer surveys to gather feedback and insights.
• Zendesk and Trustpilot- collects and manages customer feedback directly through its customer service platform.

But remember, it's not enough to simply invest in these technologies. You must continuously use data and experimentation to understand what your customers need and investing in improving those aspects of the experience.

So, there's no silver bullet for enhancing customer experience. It's a continuous process of understanding, adapting, and improving. But with the right technologies in your corner, you're well-equipped to make the journey a successful one.

Technology aside, what’s the best way to improve customer experience?

What is the Best Way to Improve Customer Experience?

Shocker, but improving CX starts and ends with your customers. The best way to improve your customers’ experience is to take care to understand their journey, needs, pain points, and wishlists, and use this information to make ongoing, incremental improvements, with an eye on customer driven innovation.

Start with a strategy session, audit your data, and immerse yourself in your customer's shoes. Identify all points of interaction with your brand, whether it’s through email, your websites, social media platforms, paid media campaigns, thought leadership content, customer support, or in-store experiences.

Psst – a customer data platform that pulls together all your data from different sources and channels (online and offline) makes this effort way easier!

Take note of signs of positive interactions (increase AOV, time-on-site, repeat visits, etc.) and negative (customer complaints, website bounce rates, time since last purchase, etc.). This data will help you prioritize the most impactful moments in the customer journey.

This holistic approach to customer experience helps you focus optimization in the most meaningful way to achieve your customers’ goals AND your primary business objectives, while crafting a unified and intuitive customer journey.

Let’s dig deeper into specific focus areas of improving CX.

What Can be Done to Improve Customer Experience: 5 Simple Ideas

When it comes to CX, small changes make a huge impact. Simple innovative ideas to improve customer experience focus on marrying data, strategy, and technology.

Follow these 5 ways to improve customer experience:

1. Get Your Data Engine Right

It may seem counterintuitive that improving your internal data practice improves your customers’ experience, but all aspects of CX optimization come back to data.

If you don’t have integrated, reliable, and actionable data, your ability to personalize customers’ experience fails. Your analysis of CX issues and opportunities is unreliable. Your ability to innovate – by leveraging AI, for example – is hamstringed. Your view of a holistic customer journey is inaccessible.

Ultimately, data fuels all these aspects of continuous optimization. Before investing in a robust CX program, we beg you to invest in your data practice.

2. Prioritize Customer Support

Nothing is more frustrating and damaging to CX than not being able to access help when it’s needed – leading to customer dissatisfaction, churn, and revenue loss.

On the flipside, customers are used to poor customer service interactions (think: waiting on hold; listening to elevator music; repeating your issue twenty times to twenty people as you’re passed like a hot potato throughout the organization).

Customer service is ripe for innovation. By incorporating multiple touchpoints like on-site chatbots, social media support (such as Facebook Messenger), self-serve portals, and readily available phone assistance, you can create seamless communication and issue resolution avenues.

Make sure you’re sharing data across these channels to arm your customer service reps with the latest information. They should be able to pick up a customer experience where it left off, whether that was on your website or in your store.

This approach empowers service reps to personalize the conversation, address concerns, and fosters a sense of trust and confidence in your brand.

Proactive support not only resolves issues efficiently, but also positively influences customer decisions, encouraging both initial purchases and repeat business.

3. Prove You Value Customers - Elevate Your Customer Loyalty Program

Loyalty programs may not be new, but customers love them - they demonstrate you value customers by rewarding repeat business, with the added benefit of gathering valuable data for personalized marketing.

Loyalty programs can be as simple or sophisticated as you want, and might include personalized email, SMS, and website experiences.

Creative Co-Op went full sophistication with their loyalty program.

Creative Co-Op has a unique, four-brand multisite, built by Whereoware. They upleveled their loyalty program by tying the data together from all four websites to deliver hyper-personalized product recommendations and give Creative Co-Op a better view of customer activity.

Customers can checkout from a single cart experience that is personalized with their loyalty tier information – enabling customers to clearly see their progress and motivate increased purchases to get to the next tier.

4. Ensure Your Website is Accessible

You need a fast, secure, and content-rich website to deliver a positive customer experience. That’s really table stakes at this point, so we’re not diving into those fundamentals here.

Instead, let’s look at an area of website optimization that is frequently overlooked: website accessibility.

Web accessibility means websites, tools, and technologies are designed, built, and optimized in a way that people with ALL abilities can use them and have a rich customer experience.

Why is this important? Nearly 61 million Americans have some sort of disability, accounting for an annual disposable income of $1.2 trillion.

Plus accessibility accounts for people experiencing short term limitations, like having a broken arm or even having poor Wifi in a rural location.

Effective website accessibility focuses on essential elements like:

• Legible text with suitable font sizes and color contrast
• Clear and concise copy to reduce cognitive load
• An intuitive layout with clear headings and whitespace
• Media accessibility through descriptive alt-text and video captions

For a detailed guide refer to our comprehensive Website Accessibility Audit here.

5. Don’t Overlook the Post-Purchase Experience

You’ve made a sale, so your work is done now, right? WRONG. Now, we switch gears to focus on staying top of mind to deepen customer connections and gain repeat customers.

When executed properly, sending personalized post-purchase emails can significantly enhance customer satisfaction and demonstrate that your business cares to nurture the relationship.

Just make sure your post-purchase email is adding value to the conversation – not overtly selling, as if the person didn’t just convert. Including a purchase satisfaction questionnaire, coupons for related or complementary products, a simple thank you, or information about maintaining their purchase are all ways to continue the conversation.

Take a peek under the hood of Yamaha Golf Car’s hyper personalized post-purchase campaign, that drove $1M+ in revenue. ‍

Far from comprehensive, these ideas will get you started making CX improvements to create deeper customer relationships. There is no right or wrong way, as long as your following the 5 C’s of customer experience.

What are the 5 Cs of Customer Experience?

The 5 C's of customer experience are foundational principles designed to foster a strong, positive relationship with your customers.

• Care: Demonstrate to customers that you value them through quick resolutions, empathetic responses, strong security, data privacy, and clear brands values.
• Clarity: Take time to talk to customers and use data to understand how to better meet their needs.
• Communication: Can your customers get through to you? Effective communication across all channels is crucial to guide a seamless journey, resolve issues, or answer questions.
• Collaboration: All teams - from customer service, sales, marketing, executives, and operations - need to have a unified understanding of the customer experience to deliver constant value.
• Consistency: Deliver a consistent brand experience across all touchpoints – via website, mobile, app, etc.

The 5 C’s are a guiding light for how to approach CX innovation, internal efficiency, and customer engagement to continuously improve your marketing and business.

Get Started Improving CX Today

Provide a great digital experience and your customers - and your bottom line - will thank you.

Investing in an exceptional customer experience is not just a strategic business move; it's a commitment to your customers' satisfaction and loyalty.

Navigating this journey can be complex, and that's where the expertise of a digital experience agency becomes invaluable. Connect with Whereoware for expert guidance to transform your customer experience today.