3 CX best practices to drive customer acquisition

The competitive ground for customers has never been fiercer. Customers face fewer issues in online purchasing than they did a few years ago, but they are also more likely to abandon shopping carts as attention spans shrink. Customer acquisition has never been harder.

Studies suggest that customers are more likely to do business with companies that provide better experiences. 8 out of 10 customers say they are more likely to do business with a company that offers personalised experiences.

Today's successful customer acquisition strategies require a unique mix of multichannel targeting that appeals to a consumer's interests along the entire purchase journey. According to the Harvard Business Review, the average American consumer uses six different media channels throughout the buying process.

In a hyper-digital world where the rules of customer engagement are constantly evolving, organisations need to recognise and adapt to new dynamics. Here are three CX best practices to drive customer acquisition:

1. Harnessing customer intelligence

Smart companies know it is crucial to analyse customer insights to build better experiences and relationships. The insights gained can help track a prospect's purchase history, product usage patterns, and behaviour. During the customer acquisition stage, identifying trends and patterns of behaviour that indicate prospect responsiveness means collecting substantial data points across multiple layers:

• Define the metrics that can give you actionable insights.
• Find patterns in customer insight for segment and cohort analysis.
• Optimise the funnels based on these findings to drive conversions.

Together with customer journey analytics, behavioural data can be leveraged to solve problems and impact KPIs at every stage of the customer journey. Customer intelligence will be imperative for most businesses to acquire clients, and it will grow increasingly difficult to compete in any industry for those who do not follow data-driven footsteps.

2. Omnichannel customer engagement

Capturing the modern customer's attention is not easy, and organisations pursuing traditional single or multi-channel customer communication strategies struggle to acquire customers. Omnichannel customer engagement simplifies, personalizes, and links the points of customer engagement to create a single, seamless, and consistent conversation. This enables customers to engage with a business while making a purchasing decision via any platform or channel - whether in person, phone-based, or via email, text, chat, or social media.

With this approach, diverse support touchpoints are designed to complement each other, allowing customers to switch between channels without the need to reiterate information. This helps conversion while minimising acquisition costs, and ultimately retains far more customers than non-omnichannel approaches.

Businesses also need to invest in integrated omnichannel communication and customer service platforms with extensive reporting and analytics, to get a comprehensive view of each customer's path to sales conversion.

3. Engaging customer service

Traditional customer service generally addresses the 'at present' rather than 'what is next'. Digital disruption signals the need for a fresh customer service strategy - customers today are accustomed to early notifications of a product launch and expect the same proactive approach from service teams.

New ways for attracting and retaining customers need to be explored, and most of that effort can and should sit with customer service teams. Interacting regularly with customers, service teams are best placed to create better brand awareness and improve sales conversion rates as well as repeat business.

In fact, repeat customers are significantly more likely to refer others. Bain & Company research shows that after a single purchase from an online retailer, an average shopper is most likely to refer three other people to the eCommerce site, demonstrating a clear functional link between customer satisfaction and new customer acquisition.

Engaging customer service needs to be at the heart of every interaction in the moments that matter. Service teams should not only address customer queries but also drive customer acquisition and loyalty.

Customer acquisition is no longer separate from customer experience. The organisations that win new customers fastest are those that make service engaging, consistent and insight-led at every interaction, turning each one into an opportunity to convert, retain and earn referrals.

Firstsource's Digitally Empowered Customer Experience (DECX) offers a distributed model, channel freedom, Intelligent Automation, and Analytics to future-proof CX capabilities and drive customer acquisition. Outsourcing your customer acquisition provides inherent cost benefits while giving you access to an expert partner's specialised knowledge.