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Customer Experience Optimization: What Is It & Actionable Steps
Blog →
by
Jake Bartlett
January 31, 2024
· Updated on
Creating a good customer experience is a heavy lift for any organization. It requires constant maintenance and continuous improvement, a process usually referred to as customer experience optimization.
86% of consumers say they’re willing to pay more for a superior customer experience. And 80% of customers surveyed by Qualtrics said they have switched brands due to a poor customer experience .
In today’s market, there just isn’t room for delivering a bad customer experience today.
Due to constant change in technology and consumer expectations, customer experience is in perpetual evolution. This means you’re never really “done” optimizing your customer experience — it’s an ongoing process. Every business needs to regularly revisit what it means to have an “optimized” customer experience.
Table of Contents
Customer experience optimization (CXO) is the ongoing process of enhancing all of your customer touchpoints throughout the customer journey. Customer experience optimization aims to create positive and valuable experiences that meet or exceed customer expectations. When CXO is done right, customers are happier and more loyal, and they will advocate for your brand.
Customer experience can feel nebulous, because it’s ultimately about your customer’s perception of how your company treats them. Every customer who encounters your brand has their own perception of your business, and that perception affects their behavior with your service or product.
A customer who associates negative experiences with your brand is less likely to become a loyal customer. In contrast, a customer who has had a positive experience with your brand is more likely to be a long-time satisfied customer.
So how do you shape the perception customers have of your business? How do you impact customer behavior?
Let’s start by looking at the 4 pillars of customer experience optimization.
The 4 pillars of Customer Experience Optimization are:
Focusing on each of these components is a great start to building a better (more optimized) customer experience. Let’s look at each of these more closely.
Adobe reported that 67% of customers want a personalized experience .
The one-size-fits-all approach to customer experience is no longer an option. Customers come to a business from various backgrounds, with different types of problems, and with various (but often high) expectations.
That’s why creating a personalized experience is a must to be competitive in today’s business landscape. A personalized experience helps build trust and increases customer engagement, which increases customer loyalty. You need to understand who your customers are and what they need so that you can create an experience that resonates with them.
We’ve all been here: we’re on the phone with a support agent only to find we’re getting transferred to another agent for help. The next agent answers the phone, and we find ourselves explaining our problem again.
Or maybe you’re stuck with a product, so search Google for some help documentation — only to find information that contradicts what you learned during the sales process.
Either scenario is frustrating, and both illustrate a lack of consistency in the customer journey.
Customer-facing team members must be well-trained and equipped with the right tools and information at the right time to deliver a consistent customer experience. Web pages and other resources should contain up-to-date information without discrepancies that may confuse customers. Designers and writers should be trained and have access to your company style guide to ensure any customer-facing graphics or content are true to your company’s brand.
Consistency is hard to manage across dozens or hundreds of touchpoints, but it’s a critical part of customer experience optimization. It’s more than how you engage customers. Consistency across the entire customer journey makes customers more confident in your brand. The more confidence your customers have, the more trust you will build with them.
Consumer expectations evolve alongside the evolution of technology. You could even say that our patience has plummeted as we become more technologically dependent. When things go wrong or when we have a question, we want an answer quickly.
It is, after all, what we expect.
A Forrester study reported that 77% of consumers say that valuing their time is the number one thing companies can do to provide a great online customer experience. To be responsive, companies — and the teams within those companies — must be equipped with the right resources and technology.
If you have customers all around the world, that might mean offering 24/7 support. Or it might mean implementing an AI-powered chatbot that’s always available to handle your most common customer inquiries.
Start by tracking your response time and other time-based customer service KPIs so you have an idea of where you’re at today, then work to improve it over time.
In addition to fast responses, customers want an effortless experience when it comes to using your product and finding help. Customers today want a seamless user experience and an omnichannel support experience.
Removing friction from the customer experience will help decrease the effort required for customers to get their problems solved, which leaves room for increasing customer satisfaction.
Simple tactics like making sure it’s easy to find your support team’s contact information or embedding help guides within your product go a long way to making your company seem more accessible.
Optimizing the customer experience will help your business grow.
Delivering a great and consistent experience is something prospective customers will recognize. They are also likely to tell people about their experiences, which can exponentially increase your brand’s awareness and, ultimately, your growth rate.
Even better, Deloitte’s research found that customers who have a positive experience are likely to spend 140% more than customers who have negative experiences. That’s good news for your bottom line.
A good customer experience will also increase engagement from existing customers. No one wants to use a product that’s difficult to use or that comes with a poor customer service experience. Customers will be more likely to use your product more when the experience meets or exceeds their expectations.
In short, optimizing your customer experience will retain existing customers and bring in new customers.
Optimizing the customer experience is incredibly valuable, but it comes with challenges. Here are obstacles you should look out for as you begin your customer experience optimization journey.
It’s hard to optimize your customer experience without accurate data about your customers. Unfortunately, many CX leaders find it difficult to capture or access the data they need.
To overcome this challenge, you’ll need to work closely with your engineering or data teams. If your organization already uses tools like Tableau or Looker, you may be able to set up dashboards or reports that make accessing and analyzing data far easier.
CXO is not a one-time thing. The ongoing need to optimize the customer experience is a challenge in itself. Companies must be invested in optimizing the customer experience all the time. It’s one of the cost of having a business in today’s world.
As your product or service changes, your customers’ expectations and needs will also change. Don’t set it and forget it. Empower a team or a person to own the customer experience and continually act on opportunities to improve it.
You’ll need tools and systems to build and maintain a great customer experience. Choosing the wrong technology will only make this difficult task harder.
For example, you might choose a tool that serves your support team’s needs well, but fail to consider how it integrates with your data visualization tool or the CRM your sales team is using. Because having a clear view of your customer’s holistic experience with your brand is important, this would be a painful misstep that would require a lot of time or money to correct.
When choosing CX tools, involve stakeholders from other business teams to ensure you’re accurately understanding how they’ll interact with your entire tool stack.
Now let’s look at some specific ways you can optimize your customer experience.
A great customer experience starts with understanding as much as you can about your customers . A good way to start learning about your customers is to map out their journey with your brand by creating a customer journey map, which is a visual representation of the ways they interact with you. A good journey map also highlights your customers’ needs and expectations at each point of the journey. Once you’ve mapped out every customer touchpoint, you’re able to optimize the experience at each point.
In addition to a customer journey map, you can use customer data to learn more about your customers. Quantitative data like purchase details, geographical location, and industry type give you details about customers so you can segment customers and personalize their experience.
Qualitative data, like customer feedback and customer support conversations, help paint a fuller picture of your customers. Combining both types of data enables you to create both product and support experiences leads that are optimized to your customers — not to some generic avatar or audience that isn’t buying from your business.
Your customers are hoping to “hire” your product to do a job for them. Do you know the job your customers are looking for your product or service to do for them? By understanding the pain points your customers are facing, you gain a deeper understanding of their purchase motives — the reason they bought your product. You can uncover these motives by using the Jobs to Be Done framework and asking questions like:
Understanding purchase motives enables you to guide your customers to that “aha” moment of achieving their goal faster, creating a more powerful experience from the get-go.
With qualitative and quantitative data and an understanding of the customer’s purchase motives, you can craft a unique and personalized experience that resonates with your customers.
Simple ways to personalize your customer experience include:
There’s plenty more you can do to personalize your customer experience and create meaningful customer connections.
As we mentioned earlier, customer experience optimization is looking at every touchpoint your customers have with your product or service. A touchpoint can be many different things, including any web page on the internet related to your company.
So ask yourself:
Have a plan in place to maintain your customer-facing content and ensure you’re delivering consistent, up-to-date, and valuable information.
Experimentation and personalization are a powerful combination when it comes to customer experience optimization. You never know exactly how a change will affect your customer experience, so run experiments to see how different approaches to personalization impact things like customer satisfaction or retention.
For example, you can experiment with two different onboarding processes or different types of messaging. If you try two different formats in your onboarding emails, which one has the higher open and click-through rates?
It’s important to deliver a consistent experience across all customer-facing channels. Giving customers a consistent experience sets clear expectations for them.
For instance, a consistent tone of voice across your emails, chatbot, and help center helps customers know who they’re talking to. Clear policies help them know what to expect when working with you. Consistent response times enable customers to know you’ll follow through on your promises.
Being consistent requires a good amount of planning and disciplined execution. Your customer journey map will help you identify where you can inject consistency throughout the entire customer experience.
We’ve seen a massive shift over the last ten years. Nowadays, it seems like every company is claiming that they’re “customer-centric.” It’s no longer enough to just make the sale — you have to make the sale and keep customers coming back for more. This is largely due to the transition to a subscription-based business model in so many industries, but it’s also due to an increase in competition.
But what does “customer-centric” mean today?
A customer-centric company is one where everyone at the organization — from the frontline support agent to the CEO — is thinking about the customer every day. It’s a company that optimizes the customer experience and makes decisions with the customer in mind.
Customer experience optimization is a cross-functional effort . Everyone from CX to engineering to product managers and executives needs to be involved. Everyone has a role to play.
As your customer’s expectations evolve and change, you’ll see big benefits — like high retention rates — if you consistently optimize your customer experience.
May 14, 2025
6 Ways to Use AI in Your Email Inbox
In a world where new AI tools are releasing every day, we're going to share some practical ways to use AI within email and your inbox.
AI and email management go hand in hand.
There are AI tools dedicated to helping you clean your inbox (like SaneBox) and plenty that help you draft emails better and/or faster.
In a world where new AI tools are releasing every day, we're going to share some practical ways to use AI within email and your inbox.
At the end of each section, we'll cover some of the best AI email tools and AI assistants that can help you be more efficient in your inbox—whether you're a Gmail or Outlook user.
Here at Missive, our users get a lot of emails—100+ in a day in some cases. We crowdsourced the most practical, helpful AI suggestions that real businesses are using to maintain a clutter-free, productive inbox.
Before we jump into the examples, these are the three broad buckets where AI is used within inboxes:
For cleaning emails, there is usually a deep purging functionality (i.e., archive all emails before a certain date) as well as a new system to keep your inbox clean after the purge (i.e., auto-categorization into folders/labels). SaneBox is a great example of this bucket.
For drafting and writing emails, you can create prompts that take into consideration your writing style, structure, and tone and add in resources for AI to pull context from—most commonly, your knowledge base or website.
For kicking off other tasks—this is the most exciting part of AI within your inbox. Certain tools (like Missive's AI-powered rules) allow you to automate a set of actions based on the context of an email. Imagine every email gets assigned to the right people, a set of tasks is created, a label or folder is applied, and an entry is made in your CRM—without a single human interaction. That’s magic!
Let's get to the AI-powered magic.
We're highlighting Missive's AI-powered rules in the examples below, but you can create your own AI email automations with your favorite tools, and we include some recommendations.
Here are the 6 best AI email workflows.
Our inboxes get inundated every day, but not every email deserves equal attention. A clean inbox needs a system of categorization.
Historically, you could set up automations based on sender, message content, etc.—but now with AI, you can understand the context of emails, which changes email management entirely.
It's like having an AI assistant read each email and then categorize it based on the context within. It's far more robust than just looking at the sender domain.
If you don't already have some form of auto-labeling, auto-folder categorization, or archiving automation running, here are a few examples to get you started:
By auto-filing certain emails out of your inbox using AI, you'll be able to focus on the ones that need your attention. And when you have some free time, you can visit your newsletter label to catch up on industry insights.
Most modern email clients have some version of this built in. If you're looking for an add-on tool for Gmail or Outlook, we cover those below as well.
Missive — Inbox collaboration for teams
Superhuman — Great for keyboard shortcut lovers
Shortwave — For an AI-first inbox
SaneBox — AI email organizer that integrates with your existing client
Unroll.me — Alternative to SaneBox, bulk email cleaner for any provider
AI can save time inside your inbox—but using it to trigger external workflows is where the magic really happens.
Example: A real estate business receives emails from both buyers and sellers in a shared inbox. Their workflows are completely different, so we used AI to identify the intent and trigger specific assignments, tasks, and summaries for the right team members.
If you have different workflows depending on the email, you can use AI to detect the context and automate accordingly.
Relay.app — AI-first workflow builder
Zapier — Classic builder, now with AI
Missive — AI rules built into the collaborative inbox
Inbox maintenance is like pruning a tree—it requires regular attention.
With AI clients, workflow builders, or Missive rules, you can automatically clean up emails without manually clicking "unsubscribe."
Set it up narrowly (specific senders or domains) or broadly (based on open behavior, like emails unread for 30+ days).
Solutions like SaneBox include versions of this, though some manual training may be required.
Say you run an accounting firm where each client has a dedicated team and inbox.
Most messages are about invoices, but occasionally, an urgent email from the CEO arrives that needs management's attention.
AI can identify urgency and escalate the message automatically to the right person.
Other tools can do this too—but may require you to create specific folders/labels and rely on manual monitoring.
This works best if you have a large, public knowledge base or help center that the AI can reference. If you do, you can use one of the newer AI models that allow you to search the web.
Here's the prompt we use at Missive for our support team:
You are an expert customer support specialist for Missive, the collaborative team inbox platform. Your job is to draft accurate, empathetic, and clear replies to customer inquiries based only on official Missive documentation.
Note: Keep all responses strictly tied to Missive's documented functionality.
Now, if you want to get crazy with it. You can create an automation where a draft is created every time an incoming email fits a specific criteria. And you can use AI to help you determine which email triggers the automation.
Don't want to pay for contact enrichment tools? Use AI to summarize new prospects.
It adds context directly to the email thread, so you can start conversations better informed.
For more robust enrichment, tools like Clay or CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce offer AI-powered data collection.
We hope these ideas help you clean emails, draft faster, and automate smarter.
All the tools mentioned above offer a “fresh start” feature to deep clean your inbox and begin anew.
Whether you're using SaneBox with your current client or switching to an AI-first inbox—there's no reason your email shouldn’t flow to the right people and places automatically after setting a few AI-powered rules.
If you're looking for an AI-powered email client uniquely designed for teams—give Missive a try. No credit card needed, and our free trial includes access to AI rules.
February 5, 2024
How to Set Customer Service Goals for Success
Learn how to set customer service goals for success
When I took over the customer service team at my last company, it was during a period of transition.
We’d just gone through an acquisition which, although welcome, meant we needed to reassess our resources, our tools, and our team’s strategy for the foreseeable future. I was also stepping from a senior role into a management role, and while neither management nor the team were new to me, the situation was changing quickly.
This presented a challenge: quickly leading the team through setting new expectations and requirements, while still delivering the same excellent customer service experience for our customers.
It also gave us an opportunity to move from good to great — by understanding where we were, where we wanted to go, and how we might get there.
Maybe you’ve also just taken over a new team, or you’re also going through an acquisition or reorganization. Or maybe you’re just looking to level up your support team.
Regardless of why you’re here, this article will help you understand what SMART goals are in the context of customer service and how to define SMART customer service goals for your team. It includes some examples of great customer service goals, and it will show you how to measure the success of your goals so your team can continue to grow and adjust your customer service strategy as needed.
Table of Contents
Being on a ship with no destination is unpleasant and nerve-wracking for everyone aboard.
Setting solid customer service goals for your team provides a common purpose and keeps everyone moving in the same direction. It improves your odds of reaching your destination: consistent excellent customer service.
And beyond the psychological benefits of having clear goals, there are plenty of more tangible benefits too.
Clear customer service goals ensure that your team’s efforts align with the broader objectives of the company, so it’s clear how your team is contributing to business growth.
It also means both you and the company can make more informed decisions about budget and resource allocation, using the real data and trends you glean from measuring your progress against your goals.
Goals focused on customer satisfaction directly contribute to improving the overall customer experience. Satisfied customers are more likely to be loyal, to make repeat purchases, and to recommend your business to others.
Consistently meeting and exceeding your customer service goals also builds your company’s reputation for reliability and trustworthiness, which is essential for long-term brand success.
Setting specific goals and measuring how each member works toward these objectives allows customer service teams and managers to identify strengths and weaknesses. It also allows individual team members to understand and direct their own professional development.
Well-defined goals also provide teams with a clear sense of direction and purpose. Team members who understand how their work contributes to larger goals are happier and more committed to the company’s success.
You’ve probably heard of SMART goals before. It’s a handy mnemonic tool that reminds everyone that effective goals are:
But why do the goals you set for your customer service team (or that they set for themselves) need to be SMART?
The point of setting goals is to be as clear as possible about expectations:
There shouldn’t be ambiguity in customer service goals. That’s because while a well-defined goal tells your team members what success looks like, it also acts as a catalyst or guide to help you get there.
This may be from a customer standpoint (satisfaction, response time, self-service, etc.), from an individual perspective (performance or professional development), or from a company perspective (cost per customer, retention rate, expansion rate, etc.).
First, keep in mind that you usually can’t jump right into creating a goal. There’s always an assessment period first.
You need to spend some time figuring out what the current state of your customer service team is.
Some questions you can ask to guide your assessment:
Your assessment will be highly dependent on your team and company, but these questions should give you an idea of the things you should consider as you work to define your goals.
Once you’ve done the foundational work to understand what your team needs to improve on, you can begin using that information to define your goals.
Let’s break it down in the context of a real customer service SMART goal.
Any goal you set should be clear and well-defined. For example, “answer customers faster” is a nice aim, but what are the channels where you want to answer customers faster? What does “faster” mean?
A more specific goal for reducing customer wait times would be to set a target first response time for a specific channel, such as: “Send a first response to customers within 60 seconds of their initial chat message.”
Depending on your needs, you could get even more specific: “Send a response to customers inquiring about their order status in 60 seconds or less.”
Any customer service goal should be measurable, so you can understand whether you’ve achieved the goal (or not) and adjust your strategy appropriately.
Taking our example from above, a measurable target chat response time goal could be: “80% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 60 seconds.”
This is the point at which your initial assessment becomes really important.
“80% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 60 seconds” may sound like an achievable goal. It might be doable if you have a simple product or many agents trained and available to handle chats.
But what if you have only two chat agents and are receiving hundreds of chats each day?
Of course, you still want to strive to improve their first response times, but you’ll have to set reasonable expectations to give your agents a fair shot at success.
An attainable goal in this context might instead involve increasing the initial chat response time or decreasing the percentage of customers you’re targeting, like this:
Your context will determine what makes the most sense for your team. Just remember to aim for a goal that’s stretching, yet realistic.
This is another area in which your foundational assessment is key.
First, are your proposed customer service goals aligned with your customer service values and company’s objectives? If not, they won’t be effective or successful, no matter how well they fit the SMART parameters.
Secondly, are your goals relevant to your team? For instance, a manager with a high chat volume might adapt our example to involve implementing a chatbot in order to hit their desired initial chat response time goal.
But a manager with a low ticket volume probably can’t justify the time and expense of implementing a chatbot because the benefits will never outweigh the costs for their team.
This parameter is closely tied to being measurable. You won’t be able to determine whether you’ve succeeded unless you know when the goal needs to be achieved.
To make our example time-bound, we could edit it to read: “By the end of Q2 2024, we’ll be responding to 80% of customers within 60 seconds of their initial chat message.”
Customer service goals aren’t just about how your agents interact with your customers. Surveys have shown again and again that customers want the option to solve their own problems.
A goal for developing effective self-service could be:
“By [DATE] we’ll have launched a knowledge base with articles answering our 10 most frequently asked questions about [PRODUCT], resulting in at least a 10% reduction in tickets about those issues.”
Many knowledge base tools will have built-in ticket deflection tracking features, such as giving you the number of views for an article and the number of tickets created after the article was viewed.
You can also measure the success of this goal by tracking ticket volume for a specific category or tag over time.
Implementing a quality assurance program is a great way to improve overall customer satisfaction, response and resolution times, and brand recognition. It’s also a more objective way to measure and track agent performance and to kick-off conversations about professional development with your team.
It might look like this:
“In January 2024, develop a draft QA scorecard based on ticket reviews from the previous 3 months, so that we can begin calibration sessions with the team in February 2024.”
In this case, measuring success is relatively simple: is the draft scorecard available by February 2024 when calibration conversations must begin?
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is crucial to your support team’s success, but also the overall success of the company. To build a customer-first organization, improving or maintaining your customer satisfaction score should be one of your main goals.
A sample goal for CSAT could be:
“Each month next quarter, maintain an overall CSAT across text channels (chat and email) of 85% or better.”
You can gather CSAT ratings using built-in tools on your customer communication platforms, or through a dedicated CSAT tool to send customer surveys. Most tools will calculate your CSAT score or percentage automatically.
As we’ve already covered, customer service agents are most engaged when they understand what their role is and can see how their contributions matter (both to their entire team and the company).
A goal for improving your customer service team’s overall engagement could be:
“Have a monthly one-on-one with each agent on my team and arrange at least one team social event a quarter, with the aim of reducing employee turnover by 10 percent by the end of the year.”
As you can see, this goal includes multiple conditions for success, and the team turnover rate is a metric that can be directly measured.
As a customer service manager, you get an especially broad view of how customers use and feel about your product. You also have the ability to take that customer feedback and put it in the hands of those who need it: your product team, your engineering team, your marketing team, and so on.
This can be as simple as implementing a public customer feature request tool where your customers can share their feedback and vote on what they want to see, or as complicated as setting up an internal, cross-functional customer feedback process.
The goal for becoming the voice of your customer could be:
“Have a bi-weekly Voice of the Customer meeting with the product development team, leading to at least one product bug fix and one new customer-requested feature release every quarter.”
You could measure this goal in a number of ways, depending on your strategy. If you have implemented a dedicated customer feedback tool, you can track customer usage against the rate of product releases and bug fixes. You could also track ticket volume in a specific category as well as any impact on CSAT ratings.
Everyone has their specialties and their weaknesses, and your customer service agents are no different. Quality assurance programs are a great way to identify areas for improvement, but you may also uncover opportunities during performance and career development conversations.
Your customer service reps can improve by seeking training in special topics, professional development courses, and peer support. Working with each team member to set and achieve goals for improvement fosters a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
A good example of goal for your agent could be:
“Get training on my weakest skills as identified by our QA reviews during the next month so that my average handle time goes down to [TARGET] by the end of the quarter.”
They can measure the success of this goal through attendance and completion of training, as well as by looking for improved QA scores and handle times.
The more customer service agents take ownership of their customers’ experience, the happier both they and the customer will be.
Owning the customer’s experience will mean something different for every team. It may look like being the customer’s one point of contact for an issue, or it may mean acting as the customer’s guide as they move through the escalation process.
It may look like answering every CSAT rating, good and bad, to thank the customer for their thoughts and solicit more feedback. Or it may mean reviewing their own customer interactions, identifying missed opportunities for exceeding customer expectations or anticipating customer needs, and devising strategies for doing so in the future.
A goal for owning the customer experience could be:
“I’ll reduce my ticket escalation rate by X percent in Q2 by being the primary agent on tickets about Y topic.”
Measuring your growth at owning the customer experience will depend a lot on what specifically that means for your company. For the example above, you’d measure the achievement by looking at the percentage of tickets you’re still escalating on the specific topic.
As you’re building out goals for yourself or your customer service team, remember to take a step back occasionally and look at the big picture.
Are these goals aligned with your company and your team’s vision? Are they clear or confusing? Are they too inter-dependent, so that if you fail at one, you fail at them all?
There’s nothing magical about setting SMART goals. They’re a fantastic tool for customer service teams, but the real key is in making goal-setting a discipline and a habit you’re regularly engaging in. Setting goals is not a one-time task — it’s an ongoing process of adaptation and growth.
The landscape of customer service is always changing, and your goals will need to evolve with it.
