Customer experience (CX) can be described as the "product" of an interaction between a business and a customer. Instantly making it more tangible, and transforming it into a commodity in its own right, thinking of CX in this way ensures you'll keep it front-and-centre in your strategies. Knowing how essential CX is to your business, we've also put together several ways you can get the most out of this important product.

Create customer personas

How well do you actually know your customers? Businesses often create products, develop services and put together campaigns with something of a scattergun approach to marketing, measuring success and failure by data and statistics only. Creating a customer or buyer persona not only saves you time and money, it also lets you know what they want from you – including how, when and why they want your product or service. You will also learn to identify essential "touchpoints" – the key moments in CX where your customers want to be engaged or receive a particular service.

Give your customers what they want

By specifically charming this key demographic, you won't only be on target to retain your customers – you could stimulate some new business, too. According to CX statistics gathered by SuperOffice, 72% of people who had positive customer experiences told 6 or more people what happened. If you've got your customer personas right, you'll have a good idea of how your customers want to be contacted, engaged by marketing and spoken to – and what they want to buy from you.

Evaluate your communications systems

You can't communicate with customers effectively if your systems aren't up to scratch. Is your website optimised for mobile? Are your staff able to handle the call volume? Many businesses are choosing to integrate how they manage their voice, data and mobile communications, in order to ensure the management of multi-channel CX is centralised. The UK-based Gamma, a company providing this kind of service to the business market, has become more popular due to the combined flexibility and scalability of the firm's services.

Make it easy to communicate with you

This might be a surprise, especially given the amount of e-commerce that takes place these days, but 78% of people still like to engage with a human during customer communications. Whether that's through live web chat, or over the telephone, you will know from creating your customer personas what your audience want from you. If you've identified that your telephone system needs updating, the new model will give you more data, more control, and more efficient management of all your ingoing and outbound calls.

Perform regular audits

Finally, once you've created your customer personas, evaluated your communications systems and implemented any essential changes , do it all again. Not straight away, but within a reasonable timeframe from "now". Set a date, something like 3, 6 or 12 months from now, when you will audit how your CX improvements have been received. If you've upgraded your communications service or started to make better use of the data available to you, your business will now be able to see if it is meeting essential CX expectations. If something does need tweaking again, just head right back to the top of this article and start the process again.