Here’s a little business 101 for ya: If you’re not regularly bringing in new customers, your business won’t be around very long.

And while most companies talk about customer acquisition in terms of brand awareness and conversion channels — you know, paid ads, sponsorships, TV spots, social media, the works — these tools really only make up half of what a brand needs to convert prospects to paying clients.

See, people are looking for confidence when they’re buying something. And sometimes your commercial or ad is enough to inspire that confidence and overcome or answer any questions. But if you’re anything like me, you’ve been on plenty of websites that had you digging through page after page trying to find an answer to the one question you had before purchasing.

It’s at this critical point that you can step in to meet your customers’ needs and make the sale. All it takes is a brilliantly executed experience strategy — one that I just so happen to be outlining in this Snack.

Welcome to Snackable CX, where we break down our best resources into bite-sized guidance on how to stand out and be known for your customer experience. I’m Sam Salerno, here from Mindful, the best-in-class, total-experience solution that aims to add kindness to your tech stack.

Alright, this is an action-packed episode, so let’s jump right into some strategies to improve customer acquisition. I’ll look at three ways to improve your customer experience that will have a big impact on your purchase potential.

1. Make it easy for your visitors to connect with an agent on the phone.

I know, that probably sounds dangerous to you if you’re running a contact center. For the last three decades, we’ve seen plenty of brands try to wrangle call volume by keeping customers off of queues as much as possible. Support numbers get buried three layers deep on the website, chatbots hit a dead-end without providing a way for a customer to escalate their questions, or the IVR gets transformed into a digital labyrinth of menu options that leave customers all sorts of irritated.

The end result? Customer frustration spikes and the chances of making a sale plummet. I know you might not be thinking of your call center as a sales engine, but it absolutely is, and making it difficult to access is having a revenue impact.

So, how can you fix it? By using a click-to-call solution on your website or mobile app.

Click-to-call has been around for a while. It allows customers who are viewing your website to schedule a call with an agent right from their phone or computer.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “I don’t know if I want to make it that easy to connect with an agent. Won’t that just overrun our contact center?” Listen, your customers are going to call your contact center. They’ll search out your support number, call, call again, and keep going until they connect with an agent to talk about their question. With that in mind, the question isn’t so much about keeping customers out of the contact center, it’s how do we make the customer experience work for both our customers and our contact centers?

And a click-to-call solution built for call centers really is the best solution for both parties.

For customers, they get to skip picking up the phone, hitting the IVR, and having to wait on hold — which makes life easier and a sale much more likely. And for contact centers, a click-to-call solution that utilizes a virtual queue actually makes call volume more predictable — which saves on telephony fees and staffing overhead.

It’s really a win-win, and it’s these kinds of customer experiences that set your brand apart as a rockstar. If you want to see it in action, you can check out the Mindful version of it on U-Haul’s website.

2. Be available to answer customer questions before they purchase.

Your potential customers are guaranteed to have questions before buying. And that’s doubly true when your products or services are higher up on the price scale.

In a brick-and-mortar store, you’ve got employees and associates who can come to the rescue and give customers some extra clarity. But online, visitors are often left to solo-navigate your website, product pages, and FAQs to get the information or help they need.

You can put the human element back into their pre-purchase experience in three ways.

First, focus on improving the user experience on your website.

Take a good hard look at your CSAT surveys, customer effort scores, and real-time user data to find those spots on your site that might be causing a little extra friction on the customer’s journey — like, the pages that a customer hits before clicking over to your contact page. Or, talk to your customer service department and use a call analysis tool to learn which questions agents get the most from potential customers, then front load those answers on your product and FAQ pages. Whatever you can do to streamline a visitor’s web experience, do it.

Second, use a low-lift solution like live chat so visitors can connect with an agent and ask questions.

Live chat is just like walking up to an employee at a brick-and-mortar store…minus feeling like you’re interrupting their day. The best part: live chat gives contact centers flexibility, since an agent can handle multiple chats at a time. If you can staff it fully, then you’ll provide an amazing experience. But if you’re looking to keep operations slimmed down, use a chatbot with strong natural language understanding skills to try to route customers to the best place before connecting to an agent.

And the last step, building on the chat piece:

Make it as easy as possible for a visitor to escalate their chat experience to the voice channel.

Haste and ease are the name of the game, here. Remember: when you answer a customer’s questions (and yes, even if that means taking up time from agents that should be offering support), you greatly increase the chances of winning a new customer.

If you want a perfect example of this, just look at Walmart’s help site. Customers with simple queries can interact with a chatbot to get the help they need. But if something comes up that’s not covered by the pre-programmed options, the chatbot AI is programmed to offer the customer a chance to book a call with the next available agent. The cool part? Their chatbot then carries over the visitor’s chat context to the voice channel — meaning that customers won’t have to repeat their questions or issues to an agent, and Walmart gets to attribute the user’s resolution data to the right channel. That’s a golden ticket for both the customer and the company.

3. Automate gathering customer reviews.

Reviews are often only seen as post-purchase niceties — or the proverbial “cherry on top” of hopefully a positive experience. But the more I look at the data, the clearer it is that customer reviews play a critical role in today’s buying process.

Here’s just a few numbers:

• 61% of consumers say they ALWAYS read reviews when shopping online.
• 57% say the same thing when shopping in brick-and-mortar stores.
• And 92% of consumers say they’re more willing to hit the buy button after reading a positive review.

If you aren’t regularly collecting and displaying customer reviews, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity for acquiring and retaining new customers.

Now, you already know how important it is to collect customer feedback at every stage of the customer journey so you can monitor VoC, or voice of the customer. But a best-in-class VoC solution can also be automated to identify customers who’ve had a positive experience with your brand and automatically ask them to leave a review.

That customer who raved about a particular agent? Ask them to leave a Google review outlining their experience. Send a followup text or email to glowing customers that thank them for their feedback and ask them to post about it wherever you prefer to collect reviews.

It’s not sales-y and it’s not soliciting. You’re just asking for reviews based on the positive feedback you’ve already received privately. These reviews are key to quickly developing trust with prospects and moving them through your sales funnel.

Next steps

The better equipped you are to provide thorough, seamless support to your prospects before the sale — whether that’s through your voice channel, website, or social proof — the easier it’ll be for you to win the sale.

Analyze your customer acquisition strategy through these three lenses to see where potential customers are getting stuck in the buying process. Work across departments and teams to streamline the user experience in all of your digital channels. Then watch as your traditional customer acquisition tools go into overdrive to deliver stronger conversions.

Nutritional Facts

This episode has been adapted from our article, “3 Enterprise Customer Acquisition Strategies that Leverage CX,” which you can find in the Mindful CX library at getmindful.com.

We publish new Snackable CX episodes just about every week, so be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. See you next time.

Written and hosted by Sam Salerno.

Produced and engineered by Jared Evers.

Edited, mixed, and mastered by Adam Griffith.

Artwork designed by Rob Beckham.