Your guide to building exceptional customer experiences

All customer experiences are about emotional connection, but there are some big differences between B2C customer experience and B2B customer experience.

• B2C customer experience is about catering to the individual preferences of a single consumer, at scale. B2C customer experience and the relationships it builds thrives on immediacy and personalization. The customer you’re building these experiences for is the direct beneficiary of your product—either they’ll use it themselves, or gift it to someone they love.

• B2B customer experience is about catering to the preferences of an organization—a team of people, often with high involvement from a sales person. B2B customer experience and relationships involve long sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, and decision makers who are often not the person who will be using the product at the end of the day.

Global women’s fashion company MESHKI, for example, uses a form of immediate, personalized customer engagement that wouldn’t be as common in the B2B world: zip code-based text messaging.

“When figuring out where our customers were located, we used segments to determine: are they within these zip codes? Are they downtown? We want to meet them where they are,” explains Liz Hayes, CRM specialist at MESHKI.

Hayes and her team then use this information to send location-based SMS messages inviting customers within a 5-mile radius to pop-up events.

OK—so you need to create memorable moments again and again and again for every one of your customers. This is not an outcome you can get by winging it. You need to use all tools available to bring this to life, and you need to document how to bring it to life for your larger team and brand.

To build an exceptional customer experience, you need:

• Personalization at scale: Customers expect experiences tailored to their specific needs, not the same generic campaigns everyone else is getting.
• Omnichannel consistency: Omnichannel marketing is an industry buzzword, sure. But it simply means showing up consistently for your customers across all touchpoints. Your message needs to be coherent whether customers interact through email, SMS, social media, in person, or all of the above.
• Customer service: Speaking of all channels, customer service is a crucial one. Consumers expect quick answers to their questions and issues across social media, email, and support tickets––and there’s a lot at stake for brands that don’t reply quickly and with empathy. This includes makes sure that your marketing messages exclude those with existing issues until a resolution can be found.
• Empathy and understanding: Customers buy from brands that “get” them. You need to show that your brand understands their preferences, pain points, and motivations.

The ability to deliver on these expectations at scale depends on robust customer relationship management technology, otherwise known as a B2C CRM.

A B2C CRM is your foundation for customer experiences that drive revenue and brand loyalty. It’s also what helps you retain your internal talent. With centralized, real-time data and AI-suggested personalization tactics, your team is able to hit what were previously unrealistic customer experience goals—without burning out.

A B2C CRM can:

• Unify customer data from every touchpoint across marketing, sales, and customer service, which helps you map the customer journey.
• Generate real-time insights about customer behavior, and recommend data-backed, revenue-driving tactics you can implement quickly.
• Bridge analytics visibility across marketing and customer service so your team can spot trends (good or bad) quickly, and act on them.
• Enable personalized communications at scale through segmentation, dynamic content blocks, automations, A/B testing, and more.
• Track and measure the effectiveness of every interaction so your team knows where to double down, and where to let up on the gas.

For B2C brands, the right CRM transforms mountains of customer data into actionable insights, making exceptional experiences both scalable and achievable—whether you’re serving hundreds of customers or millions.

Let’s think about your customer experience strategy through the lens of a single hypothetical customer.
Mia visits your website and falls in love with a canary yellow hat. She adds it to her cart but pauses to ask a quick question about the material. She reaches out to customer support via live chat, and even though she gets her answer, she still decides to wait before purchasing.

Rather than losing the sale, your CRM springs into action. The support interaction, combined with Mia’s browsing behavior and cart activity, is seamlessly shared with marketing. This triggers a personalized email with a “Top Picks for You” theme that includes the yellow hat, along with recommendations for complementary items and a limited-time offer tailored to Mia’s browsing history.

The email (Mia’s preferred channel) is sent at Mia’s preferred time, ensuring it lands when she’s most likely to shop. Inspired by the thoughtful recommendations and the exclusive offer, Mia returns to complete her purchase. She even adds a matching scarf, earning loyalty points that keep her coming back for more.

By unifying customer service insights, marketing efforts, and real-time data, your CRM turns every interaction—whether it’s a question or a hesitation—into an opportunity to delight customers, increase revenue, and build loyalty that lasts.

There are 5 key stages of this customer journey, and each present distinct opportunities and challenges for marketers:

1. Awareness: This initial stage focuses on capturing attention in increasingly crowded channels (think social media advertising channels like Facebook or Pinterest, marketplaces like Amazon, and even offline channels like outdoor malls and shopping areas). It’s important to make a good impression at this stage because consumers are learning more about your brand, what you stand for, and what you offer.
2. Consideration: During this stage, consumers actively evaluate your brand against alternatives. They seek detailed product information, compare prices, read reviews, and look for social proof. You want to surface helpful information through the consumer’s preferred channels, answering their questions before they need to ask.
3. Purchase: The transaction stage extends beyond simply buying goods or services. It encompasses the entire check-out experience, from cart to confirmation. This stage must minimize friction (such as requiring someone to fill in all of their shipping information) while maximizing value through relevant up-sells, clear delivery information, and transparent policies.
4. Customer service and post-purchase: After the sale, customer engagement becomes crucial for long-term success. This stage includes order tracking, product usage guidance, and proactive support. The goal is to help customers get maximum value from their purchase, setting the foundation for future interactions.

Retention and loyalty: This final stage transforms satisfied customers into brand advocates. It goes beyond offering basic rewards programs to creating genuine emotional connections with your customers. True loyalty comes from consistently meeting and exceeding customer expectations across every touchpoint.

Even if you’re a pro at recognizing the key stages of the customer journey, remember: every customer is different. While you can’t create individually personalized experiences for your hundreds or thousands of customers, you can identify general customer types that will help you create personalized cohorts, otherwise known as segments.

In general, there are 3 distinct customer types:

1. Loyalists: These customers place high value on consistency and recognition. They engage frequently across multiple channels and respond strongly to exclusive access and VIP treatment. While they appreciate discounts, their loyalty stems more from emotional connection than monetary incentives.
2. Pragmatists: These are value-driven customers who carefully evaluate every purchase. They respond to concrete benefits, clear communication, and reliable service. Price matters to them, but so do consistent quality and dependable experiences.
3. Explorers: These customers seek novelty and excitement in their brand interactions. They engage well with new products, innovative features, and unique experiences. Transparent communication and authentic brand stories resonate strongly with this group.

Identifying these relationship types from the beginning can make your entire customer lifecycle marketing strategy more effective because you have a deeper understanding of what makes your customers tick.

Think about the many ways your customers find and engage with your brand. Even if you only have a website and a single social media profile, your brand sells on two different channels.

How your brand shows up in these channels is your omnichannel strategy, also known as a multi-channel or cross-channel strategy.

Making sure your brand is showing up effectively and consistently wherever a consumer might find you demands careful thought and strategic coordination of the following channels:

1. Email: The foundation of digital communication, email marketing enables detailed storytelling and personalized content delivery. Effective email strategies segment audiences based on behavior and preferences, delivering relevant content at optimal times.
2. SMS: Text message marketing excels at immediate, action-oriented communication. SMS works best for timely, relevant messages that demand quick attention.
3. Mobile push notifications: These immediate alerts serve as time-sensitive updates and personalized reminders, keeping your brand present in customers’ daily lives.
4. Customer service: Support interactions represent crucial moments of truth in customer relationships. Effective service combines quick response times with personalized attention based on customer history and preferences.
5. Reviews: Customer feedback creates social proof while providing valuable insights into product performance and customer satisfaction. Integrating reviews throughout the customer journey builds trust and aids decision making.
6. Website: Your digital storefront must deliver personalized experiences based on customer behavior, preferences, and history. This includes tailored product recommendations, personalized web forms, and seamless check-out processes.
7. Brick and mortar: Whether you have a pop-up shop, a permanent retail location, or primarily sell in person because you are a hotel, restaurant, or spa, how you bridge the gap between your physical and digital customer experiences matters. Who you show up as online should be reflected in person, too, including coordination of any promotions, offers, and loyalty points.

For Hayes, offering MESHKI customers a stellar omnichannel experience starts with knowing which channels a customer prefers.

“I always recommend implementing preferred channel tagging in Klaviyo to identify what channel your customer engages with most—whether it’s email, SMS, or both,” she explains.

“I’m a big advocate for keeping your email and SMS on one platform,” Hayes adds. “It streamlines things and allows you to see the full picture of customer engagement rather than having it siloed.”

An exceptional customer experience should drive more revenue for your brand. And you don’t need to wait until the dollars start rolling in to know if it’s a success.

One thing to keep in mind: it’s important to use a single customer experience analytics dashboard to track the impact of CX. When different departments track different metrics, teams are misaligned, and the CX story is incomplete—or, worse, entirely wrong.

Successful measurement starts with understanding which metrics matter most, and how they work together to reveal the complete customer story.

Each of these CX metric reveals a different facet of your customer relationships:

• Customer lifetime value (CLV) shows the long-term health of customer relationships. CLV predictions help identify growth opportunities, optimize marketing spend, and create targeted experiences for your highest-value segments. Find predicted, total, and existing CLV in your Klaviyo account.
• Churn rate signals relationship problems before they become catastrophic. Learn why a customer churns so you can win them back. Find churn rate in your Klaviyo account.
• Engagement metrics reveal the effectiveness of your communication strategy. “I prefer to focus on click rates over open rates,” explains Hayes. “A click rate is actionable.” Find engagement metrics in your Klaviyo account across high-level flow and campaign engagement and individual message effectiveness.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customers’ willingness to recommend your brand. High NPS scores often correlate with increased customer loyalty and organic growth through word of mouth. You can include NPS surveys in your emails.
• Customer Effort Score (CES) quantifies how easy or difficult customers find their interactions with your brand. Lower effort typically leads to higher satisfaction and retention. Here is some insight from the Klaviyo community on how to build an experience like this (and the one below).

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Provides immediate feedback on specific interactions, helping identify both problems and successes in your customer journey.

Individual metrics tell part of the story, but true insight comes from comparison. Klaviyo’s benchmarking tools put your performance in context, showing how you measure up against similar businesses in your industry.

“We only realized [our unsubscribe rate] was an issue because of the benchmarks Klaviyo gives us, which we can use to create a roadmap for improvements,” says Ivan Monells, co-founder of clothing brand Brava Fabrics.