Unfortunately, great CX doesn't just come naturally; it's important to invest resources into improving your CX all the time. And CX standards are always changing, which is why this is an arena you'll never be able to coast in. Let's take a look at five ways that you can improve the customer experience in your company.

• Learn how to use customer intelligence

Customer intelligence, or CI, refers to the process of gathering customer data and drawing insights from it. Harnessing the power of CI allows companies to find out more about their customers, including who they are and what they really want, in order to tailor the customer experience to these factors. In order to make the most of the customer data that comes your way on a daily basis, it's important to invest in a quality CI platform that will help you to collect, store, and analyse customer data in order to gain meaningful insights into your audience.

• Don't forget about employee experience

Some companies might think that EX has nothing to do with CX. But they would be wrong. In order to identify the link between EX and CX, it's important to understand why EX is so important. Employees who have a positive experience and feel engaged at work are more likely to understand the purpose of their role and strive to achieve good results consistently. This added effort that engaged employees make to achieve results contributes positively to customer service; customers served by happy, friendly, helpful staff members are far more likely to feel positively about their experience than those served by disengaged or reluctant staff.

• Look beyond the competition

When you're setting goals for CX teams, it can be tempting to look to your direct competitors to set a benchmark. This can be limiting and means that too often, companies in smaller, niche markets aren't setting their aims high enough. Look beyond your immediate competition to CX principles used outside of your industry to ensure that the time and money you invest in improving CX is well spent. If you settle for 'good', all it takes is an ambitious start-up with higher standards of CX to threaten your spot at the top.

• Measure CX every step of the way

There's no point in spending a large chunk of your company's resources on customer experience improvements if you've got no idea whether they're working. It's important to implement various procedures that can help you to measure and track customer experience, and this is usually done using surveys that enable customers to directly feed back on their experience. Popular metrics include the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures how likely a customer is to recommend a brand to their family and friends, and the Customer Effort Score (CES), which measures how much effort customers have to put in to reach their goals.

• Go digital

No matter what industry you work in, we can guarantee there are ways to improve customer experience by embracing digital technology. Technology can reduce wait times, increase customisation, and improve accessibility for those customers who need it. A common example of using technology to improve the customer experience is chatbots, which can be used to answer customer queries online with minimal wait time, which in turn reduces the strain on human advisors, who can then deal with more complicated customer queries more quickly. Online dashboards, AI automation, and interactive voice response (IVR) can all contribute to improved CX scores across multiple industries.