Every customer interaction between you and your customers, at every touchpoint, including before and after the sale, is invaluable. Customers are increasingly empowered and have more platforms to praise or take down your service. Which is why you must also invest in this relationship online. The following ten user experience strategies are indispensable for your business, today and in the future.

A chatbot is easy to implement on your website, but can also be a valuable addition for your Facebook page. You can use chatbots to answer simple questions from your customers quickly, without requiring any human interaction. Enabling you to process more customer requests and saving your employees a lot of time. Obviously, more difficult questions can and must be dealt with by your employees. The big advantage of a chatbot? The bot gives your customer the idea that he is already being helped, while the question is transferred to an employee. In the best scenario, the customer has no idea that he was talking to a chatbot in the first place.

Omnichannel is so much more than just a marketing term. It’s a strategy for reaching customers through touchpoints, such as your shop, an app or your website. Customers want companies to be available 24/7, any place and anywhere. By always being available, you build closer relationships with your customers, something that we at Dstny have also noticed. While we don’t have a shop ourselves, we engage with our customers through various online channels, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, the Dstny website and a partner portal. We supplement these online channels with regular face-to-face contact with our customers and continuous availability through e-mail or by phone. That is how we strengthen our customer relationships at Dstny.

A company without a social media presence?  These days it’s almost inconceivable. It’s the perfect place to (continue to) engage with your customers. And a handy platform to find out how your customers feel about your competitors.

An important aspect of social media is the monitoring of messages and keywords and using sentiment analysis. This systematic analysis is used to map the sentiment about your brand and communications. There are plenty of free tools to do this easily and quickly.

When a customer has a problem, he expects it to be solved as soon as possible, without having to explain it to several people over and over again. CRM integration with telephony can be quite useful and can boost your customer support considerably. Your employees can work more efficiently because they can pull up the most important information on screen with just a few clicks. And when it comes to efficiency, we are the experts at Dstny. The employees at Dstny use our own CRM integration with telephony, enabling them to easily respond to any situation and help the customer with the right information.

You need to know your target audience well to improve your customer experience. You can do this by collecting information about your target audience - using a CRM system or an annual survey, like we do at Dstny - and by segmenting your target audience. This tells you which solutions they bought and what is their history with you. You can then use this information to offer them a more personalised experience.

There are plenty of customer data and even potential behavioural data available. It’s vital that you use these data and insights to find out more about your customers and predict what they want. So investing in AI and machine learning is a smart move for the future. AI algorithms help you predict your customers’ preferences, displaying the right, desired content in real-time.

Having a mobile app creates a lot of added value for most companies. It enables you to offer immediate and direct support to your customers. What’s more, Augmented Reality (AR) also creates so many new possibilities. It gives your customers a better idea of your products.

Even if AR is not a good fit for your company, you don’t have to limit the app to text and speech interactions. Use image recognition and optical character recognition so customers can send you photos of the problems they encounter or forms that make it even easier to flag issues.

Did you invest in data collection and other User Experience (UX) strategies? Then it’s vital that you involve your employees in these new tactics. They are the face of your company and contribute to a great customer experience. Invest in your employee experience, in other words! At Dstny, we do this by organising internal training sessions, during which our employees learn to respond in the right to way to various customer scenarios. Or you can set up a social company network, so colleagues can communicate better with each other.

You need to automate if you want technology such as chatbots, omnichannel and data integration to work. This keeps the workload manageable for your employees and their job interesting. Ask your CIO and his IT team to integrate or develop the right applications.

When collecting customer data, you need to secure them properly. While your customers are interested in personalisation, they are also concerned about their privacy.

At Dstny, online security is a must, rather than an option. Make sure that you have proper protection against malware, phishing, ransomware and other threats.

Think very carefully about your tone of voice on every channel where you engage with customers. You need to be consistent in how you communicate with your customers. Analyse and choose your words carefully, both on and offline.

At Dstny we do this during extensive brand identity sessions, to create the right tone of voice. We then share this with our employees, during internal workshops or onboarding sessions - where new employees are informed about the brand’s origins and the reason why behind it.

There are plenty of strategies for creating a better customer experience. On which strategies should you focus? Start by checking which of your existing services need improving and look for technology that offers clear added value for your current problems and your customers’ needs.

Are you curious to learn more about Dstny’s customer experience programme? Let us know! We will gladly discuss ideas for this with you.