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Running a customer experience workshop is the key to truly understanding what your customers want and need. It’s where you discover their frustrations and create effective solutions — because it’s all from their perspective.

Here’s why I swear by it: 80% of customers say a company’s experience is just as important as its products or services. By conducting this workshop, I can align my team, fuel creative problem-solving, and, most importantly, deliver experiences that keep my customers coming back.

If you’re ready to up your CX game, stick with me. I’ll break down what a customer experience workshop looks like, why it’s worth the effort, and how to run one for your team, including hands-on customer experience activities.

Table of Contents

• What is a customer experience workshop?
• Why a Customer Experience Workshop is Important
• Customer Experience Workshop Activity Ideas
• What You Need to Run a Customer Experience Workshop
• How to Run a Customer Experience Workshop

Considering that companies focusing on CX see up to 3.4 times more returns, it’s a no-brainer for you to keep a pulse on customer needs and rapidly innovate journeys to meet these needs.

To build a great customer experience, all departments must collaborate to understand the whole customer journey better.

CX workshops get everyone on the same page.

A CX workshop puts the participants in the customer’s shoes.

Through the exercises, the team maps out, step by step, what the customer experiences from the brand, including how they feel at specific touchpoints, the value they receive, and so on — which can be very revealing.

It’s an eye-opener. You’ll quickly spot gaps in their experience and, better yet, brainstorm practical solutions as a team.

CX workshops help to set priorities.

Once you see the big picture, it’s easier to focus on what really matters. A workshop helps you zero in on the experiences that make the biggest impact. No more guesswork — just clear priorities that put your customers first.

CX workshops break down silos.

When marketing, sales, support, product, and other teams sit at the same table, something magical happens. Communication improves, and everyone aligns toward the same goal: delivering a seamless customer journey. Silos crumble, collaboration strengthens, and your CX strategy becomes everyone’s responsibility — not just one department’s.

CX workshops help to spot hidden issues.

Sometimes, the biggest problems in your customer’s journey are the ones no one sees. A workshop brings fresh perspectives from across your team, making it easier to uncover those sneaky pain points. With everyone’s insights in one place, you’ll walk away with actionable steps to smooth out friction and elevate the experience.

CX workshops build a customer-first culture.

Dedicating time to a CX workshop sends a powerful message: customers matter. It’s more than a meeting; it’s a mindset shift. These sessions inspire your team to think like your customers, driving long-term changes that make your brand truly customer-centric.

With these advantages in mind, let’s now see how you can create a customer experience for your team.

What You Need to Run a Customer Experience Workshop

Here is everything you need to get your customer experience workshop up and running.

Preparation

“He who fails to plan has planned to fail.” That old saying rings true when creating a customer experience workshop.

To prepare effectively, start by defining clear, SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely). Examples might include:

• Training customer-facing employees to handle complex scenarios.
• Cultivating a “customer-first” mindset across the organization.

Next, focus on logistics:

• Decide on the duration of each session and schedule breaks.
• Assign roles, such as moderators or facilitators.
• Choose a workshop format (in-person, hybrid, or virtual) that works best for your team.

Such organized preparation sets the stage for a productive session.

💡Use Service Analytics in your workshop to spot trends, measure team performance, and identify ways to improve service. Align your team with these insights and create actionable strategies to elevate customer experience.

Workshop Moderator

Every workshop needs a strong moderator to guide the discussion and ensure objectives are met. Moderators should:

• Facilitate group activities.
• Keep the workshop on schedule.
• Ensure everyone feels heard.

Be sure to assign experienced team members to this role. Additionally, you’ll need the right set of participants. You can include anyone who is a part of any touchpoint across the customer journey, such as:

• Representatives from customer-facing teams like sales, marketing, support, and UX.
• Decision-makers or senior leaders who can champion outcomes.

I also recommend including customers or users in the workshops to get firsthand insights on interacting with your brand.

Workshop Supplies

Depending on your workshop format, you’ll need specific supplies to keep things running smoothly.

For in-person workshops, organize:

• Seating and workspaces for small groups.
• Post-its, pens, and flip charts.
• Screens or projectors for visual aids.
• Water, snacks, and sound systems.

For virtual workshops, ensure:

• A reliable video conferencing tool.
• Passwords and access to necessary applications.
• Digital collaboration tools like whiteboards or journey-mapping software.

Alignment of Expectations

Everyone involved should have common goals and outcomes and realize what’s asked of them. Participants can engage deeply when clear about the requirements and expectations.

Before the workshop, share a repository of resources with participants. It should ideally include:

• Customer feedback (e.g., reviews, ratings).
• Case studies or success stories.
• Performance metrics, such as revenue numbers or satisfaction scores.

Icebreakers and Creativity Boosters

Icebreakers make it easier for everyone to participate freely. For example, you can have each team member share a short story about their best or worst customer experience.

I also encourage role-playing scenarios where participants step into a customer’s shoes to promote creative thinking.

How to Run a Customer Experience Workshop

Here’s a quick rundown of how you can run a successful customer experience workshop:

1. Define clear objectives and success metrics.

Decide what you want to achieve — and make it specific. For example:

• If your goal is to uncover pain points, your success metric can be to identify the top three issues customers face.
• If you’re brainstorming solutions, create a shortlist of implementable ideas ranked by impact and feasibility.

Before the workshop, share these objectives and metrics with participants. This preps their mindset and avoids meandering discussions. For instance, if “improving post-purchase communication” is the focus, have team members review email sequences, chat logs, or survey feedback related to that phase.

2. Assemble a cross-functional dream team.

Don’t just invite the usual suspects. Your CX is touched by multiple departments, so include:

• A customer service rep to provide firsthand knowledge of recurring issues.
• A marketer to highlight campaign touchpoints.
• A product manager to connect feedback with product iterations.
• Someone from operations who understands backend workflows affecting CX.

Aim for 10-12 participants max, and assign roles to avoid redundancy. For example, designate a facilitator (you or a neutral leader), a note-taker, and a timekeeper. This keeps the session efficient.

3. Start with a quick, interactive icebreaker.

To set the tone, begin with an activity that places participants in the customer’s shoes. For instance, you can:

• Share anonymized customer feedback and ask each attendee to respond as if they were the customer.
• Run a quick empathy exercise, like “What would a first-time user feel at checkout?”

These exercises shift the focus from “us” (the business) to “them” (the customer).

4. Create and analyze a customer journey map.

Use tools like Miro, Lucidchart, or good old sticky notes to map out the customer’s full journey. Divide it into stages, such as:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Purchase
• Onboarding
• Post-Purchase Engagement

I tend to add detailed examples to each stage, such as:

• Awareness: “Customer clicks an Instagram ad but bounces after 5 seconds.”
• Post-purchase: “Customer receives product but finds the manual confusing.”

Label specific pain points (e.g., high bounce rates) and emotional moments (e.g., “delight” at a surprise thank-you email). Also, encourage each department to share where they excel and where they could improve.

5. Zoom in on pain points and prioritize by impact.

Use a prioritization framework like an Impact vs. Effort matrix:

• High impact, low effort: Quick wins, like simplifying a confusing FAQ page.
• High impact, high effort: Larger projects, such as revamping the onboarding process.

For example, if customers frequently complain about delayed shipping notifications, a quick win could be implementing automated tracking updates.

6. Brainstorm solutions with focused prompts.

Set aside 30-45 minutes for brainstorming solutions. Keep it structured with prompts like:

• “How can we reduce friction at checkout?”
• “What would surprise and delight a loyal customer during renewal?”

A good tip here is to use frameworks like SCAMPER (Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, Reverse) and Six Thinking Hats (exploring ideas from different perspectives).

Encourage creative ideas, but always connect them to customer feedback or journey insights. For instance, if post-purchase engagement is low, consider ideas like sending a video tutorial series after a purchase.

7. Assign ownership and immediate next steps.

No workshop is complete without action. Before wrapping up:

• Assign ownership for each identified action item.
• Use SMART criteria (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) for each task. For instance: “Update product pages with comparison charts by the end of Q1 (Owner: Marketing Team).”
• Schedule a follow-up meeting within two weeks to track progress.

Make sure these steps are documented in a tool everyone can access, like Notion, Trello, or Asana.

Here are customer experience workshop ideas you can use for your next customer experience journey mapping workshop. These activities are divided into three main parts:

Activity 1: Empathy Mapping

Empathy mapping is all about stepping into your customer’s shoes. It helps you see what they think, feel, say, and do — making it easier to align with their needs. Here’s how I make this work:

1. Set the stage: Hand out templates with sections labeled “Says,” “Thinks,” “Feels,” and “Does.” Quickly explain how these categories reveal different parts of the customer’s experience and why they matter.
2. Introduce personas: Share detailed customer personas so everyone’s on the same page about who you’re focusing on.
3. Facilitate brainstorming: Pull in insights from feedback, research, or even gut instinct to fill out the map. This often sparks some eye-opening conversations.
4. Discuss insights: When the maps are done, review them together. Spot patterns, identify gaps, and decide what to tackle next.

Activity 2: Journey Mapping

Journey mapping gives you the big picture of your customer’s end-to-end experience with your brand. Consequently, you can pinpoint rough spots and hidden opportunities to enhance your customer-facing strategy.

Here’s how to go about this:

1. Prepare materials. Provide participants with journey mapping templates and outline real-life customer scenarios to contextualize the exercise.
2. Map key touchpoints. Break down the customer’s journey step by step — actions, emotions, and interactions included. This makes it easier to see how everything flows.
3. Identify pain points. Use color-coded markers or symbols to flag areas where customers might face difficulties. This visual representation can reveal the biggest trouble spots.
4. Discuss opportunities. Brainstorm fixes as a group. Focus on changes that make an immediate difference and set the stage for lasting improvement.

Activity 3: Role-Playing

Role-playing puts your team in the customer’s shoes — literally. It’s a hands-on way to build empathy and improve responses. To start, you should:

1. Create scenarios. Base them on real feedback or common issues so they feel authentic. I make sure these scenarios reflect a variety of experiences to ensure broad learning of customer behavior.
2. Assign roles. Divide participants into groups and assign roles, such as customer, employee, or observer. Each participant should have a clear understanding of their role’s objectives.
3. Act out scenarios. Run the scenarios while observers take notes. The goal isn’t to perform perfectly but to uncover insights.
4. Debrief. After the role-playing sessions, I always have a group discussion to talk about what worked, what didn’t, and what you learned. Then, use these takeaways to refine future interactions.

Activity 4: Collaborative Brainstorming

Brainstorming is where creativity meets action. It’s your chance to tackle the most pressing customer challenges with fresh ideas. Here’s how I approach this process:

1. Set goals. Be crystal clear about what you want to achieve — solving a specific problem or refining a touchpoint, for example.
2. Use creative techniques. Try methods like mind mapping, “How Might We” statements, or even flipping problems upside down to spark new ideas.
3. Prioritize solutions. Rank ideas based on feasibility, impact, and alignment with goals. Focus on the ones that pack the biggest punch.
4. Develop action plans. Turn top ideas into concrete plans with assigned roles and deadlines to make sure they actually happen.

Activity 5: Feedback Reflection

Feedback reflection is essential for translating customer insights into actionable improvements. This activity ensures your team learns from customer feedback and accordingly applies those lessons.

Follow these steps:

1. Review feedback. First things first, share what you’ve learned from interviews, surveys, or observations with the team.
2. Identify themes. Group feedback into categories — think: positives, pain points, and surprises. This is the stage where I start paying attention to any emerging patterns.
3. Reflect as a group. Talk about how this aligns with or challenges what you thought you knew. Encourage open conversations to dig deeper.
4. Document takeaways. Write down lessons learned and turn them into action items. Make sure these insights shape your next steps.

Improving Everyone’s Experience

And there it is — the structure and activities you can tweak to fit your customer experience workshop. With this solid foundation, I’m confident you can create a memorable workshop that makes a difference.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February 2022 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Customer service training courses can help boost customer satisfaction rates, enhance employees’ confidence in their roles, and increase overall sales.

I’m no stranger to customer service courses. Over three decades, I’ve worked in a host of client-facing positions, each of which needed its own approach to customer service and support.

Not sure where to get started? I’ve compiled a list of 14 top certifications and courses to help take your customer service to the next level.

Table of Contents

• 7 Types of Customer Service Certifications
• Best Customer Service and Support Training Programs
• Why do you need a customer service certification?

Customer service training is essential because it helps your business retain and satisfy what keeps your business running — your customers. If support reps couldn’t communicate with customers, answer questions, find solutions, and be there for general support, customers would go to a business that met their needs and expectations.

When applying for customer service jobs, a great way to demonstrate your expertise in customer service and solving for the customer is with a customer service certification.

Why do you need a customer service certification?

A customer service certification gives employers confidence that whoever they hire has a higher-than-average ability to do the job, and a certificate from a reputable organization demonstrates competency in customer service that a non-certified rep wouldn’t be expected to deliver.

Certifications aren’t a one-time commitment. They typically require ongoing training to stay up to date with the latest best practices and trends.

Aside from the professional competence associated with certifications, many employers and hiring managers also place a monetary value on them. If you’re looking for a raise or seeking new opportunities, I recommend certifications as a tool you can leverage to negotiate pay, benefits, and responsibilities.

1. Customer Service Certification

Whether you’re new to customer service or an experienced rep, a customer service certification offers a real-world environment to hone your skills. Many certifications are offered online or in person with instructor-led classes tailored to your organization’s specific goals. This certification helps you become a better problem solver and communicator through role-playing exercises and group discussions about concepts you’ll rely on to serve customers.

Earn your support services certification from:

• Service Strategies

2. Help Desk Certification

When choosing a help desk certification, prioritize options offered by your help desk software provider. It’s a tactical certification with an immediate return on investment as you’ll be able to apply what you’ve learned fairly quickly and spread that knowledge among your team.

Once you’ve mastered your help desk software, you can take advanced courses like HDI-CSR which explains the strategy behind using customer service tools to enhance soft skills in communication.

Earn your help desk certification from:

• HubSpot
• Axelos

3. Call Center Certification

Many customer service professionals begin their careers working in call centers, and a call center certification validates the technical, communication, and service skills of reps working with inbound and outbound calls.

To earn this certification, you’ll establish a baseline assessment of your skillset, improve your performance, and substantiate your skills with an assessment. Companies like Microsoft use this certification to manage call center metrics, implement best practices, and increase performance within their teams.

Earn your call center certification from:

• Management and Strategy Institute
• The Call Center School

4. Client Services Certification

The client service specialist certification (CCSS) is ideal for entry-level professionals as it provides a foundational understanding of the customer service industry. To earn this certification, you’ll need to demonstrate the right blend of knowledge and skills in both customer service and sales functions, and it will mold you into a well-rounded and key player on your team.

Earn your client services certification from:

• COPC
• CCPC

5. Client Service Manager Certification

The client service manager certification is offered from a leadership point of view. If you’re a customer service rep, you can forge a path to a leadership position with this certification. It certifies your skills in applying best practices for customer service, sales, coaching, and leading.

Earn your client service leader certification from:

• Service Institute
• Business Training Institute

6. Customer Experience Certification

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the customer experience transcends any one function and is often the responsibility of every team, but customer service reps champion that experience by becoming certified customer experience professionals. When a company can craft processes and responses that make the customer feel valued, seen, and appreciated the entire business benefits. With this certification, you can help lead a key function within your organization.

Earn your customer experience certification from:

• Disney
• Service Institute

7. Customer Service Leadership Certification

A customer service manager certification is worthwhile for any service rep working towards senior leadership positions. In these certifications, you’ll learn strategy, technical skills, and practical ways to apply your knowledge of customer service. You can use this type of certification to leverage a promotion, transition into a new role, or boost your resume if you’re considering a career in consulting.

Earn your customer service leadership certification from:

• Service Strategies
• American Public Power Association

Customer service and support training programs come in a variety of formats. Some can be extremely extensive and provide in-depth coverage of a topic, while others discuss general knowledge of customer service fundamentals.

This list features a diverse group of options that are helpful for any customer service team.

1. HubSpot Academy

HubSpot Academy offers customer sevice training courses that provide useful customer service lessons, like the Inbound Certification course that features recent updates to the Inbound Methodology.

Other courses include the “Customer Success & Account Health Check“ course that covers the steps to nurturing and delighting customers over time, or There’s also a ”Managing Your Sales to Customer Success Handoff” course that helps Sales and Customer Success teams work better together.

HubSpot Academy also offers training specific to HubSpot’s users. For example, its “Service Hub” course explains how to use Service Hub tools throughout the reps daily workflow, like setting up a knowledge base and connecting your support inbox to the conversations tool.

Pricing

HubSpot Academy courses are free. It includes comprehensive certifications, single-topic courses, and targeted lessons to help enhance customer service skills.

“One of the standout features is the integration with other HubSpot tools. The platform teaches you not just marketing theory, but how to apply that knowledge using HubSpot’s own CRM and other software, which can be a big productivity boost for teams already using these tools. It’s also incredibly flexible in terms of pacing—you can take a few minutes here and there to chip away at a course, making it ideal for busy professionals.” — Carlos G.

Learn more about our Free Customer Support Training Template

2. Customer Service Training by Alison

Alison’s customer service training program is for all stages of customer service careers. It introduces the basic concepts of customer service through an online course, and the goal is to teach reps how to handle difficult customer interactions while understanding why they occur in the first place.

The course also dives into creating a customer-focused approach, handling inquiries and complaints, and reading stressful situations to determine the best outcome. The skills and fundamentals obtained from this training program are essential for delivering consistent customer satisfaction.

Pricing

Alison courses are free. They require users to register with the Alison community — after that, you have access to more than 50 free courses.

“This was my first online study with Alison.com. I enjoyed the flexibility to studying at my pace. The course content was easy to understand. Also studying for free was a bonus as tuition fees can be very expensive. I will certainly recommend Alison.com to everyone I know. I look forward to studying more courses this way. I look forward to starting my new career too. Thank you Alison.” – Nomantshintshi Dube

3. Support Professional Training by Service Strategies

Service Strategies helps technical support reps provide high-quality customer service by training effective communication techniques when providing technical solutions. Sometimes technical concepts can be challenging to explain and understand, so it’s important to know how to communicate these solutions clearly.

Service Strategies offers three ways to attend the training: on-site, public, or online. For on-site training, Service Strategies sends an instructor to the company to administer the course, while public training occurs at various locations in groups of 15 attendees. Its online course is self-paced and available for 60 days after registration.

Pricing

Virtual training classes from Service Strategies cost $1,395.

Self-paced classes range from $199 for service representatives to $399 for field service engineers. On-site courses are also available; contact Sevice Strategies directly for pricing.

“This course certainly did take a bit of work; that only made the final result that much more satisfying. Excellent content, and a real pleasure to have a course geared towards my profession in my own industry. Excellent networking with peers from other companies. Great teaching style as delivered by Steve Brand – highly recommended.” – Matt Furlong

4. Call Center Customer Service by Universal Class

Universal Class offers a notable course called “Call Center Customer Service” that covers the different responsibilities of a customer service rep, as well as the skills needed to succeed when working in a call center. It also discusses common call center etiquette and the roadblocks that a service or support rep can expect to experience in a customer service position.

The course is taken online for six months and concludes with a cumulative final exam.

Pricing

For $95, you can take the course but won’t receive a certification or any continuing education units (CEUs). For $125, you get the course, certification, and CEUs. You can also purchase a platinum subscription for $189 which gives you access to all courses and certifications for one year.

“I have to give this class and the instructor five plus stars. It was a great learning tool and the instructor was very informative and encouraging.” – Rachel R.

5. Customer Service Advantage by Bonfire Training

Bonfire offers team training that “uniquely personalizes[s] the development experience for each person.” Its “Customer Service Advantage” course helps customer service teams come up with an action plan for addressing tricky customer interactions with the goal of motivating reps to find effective solutions instead of offering apologetic explanations.

Bonfire’s customer service training courses are consistently updated and can get attention in-person, 90-minute real-time virtual training sessions with an instructor, or an online course with unlimited access over a 60-day period.

Pricing

On-demand online training from Bonfire Training is $224 per course. You get 60 days of access to training materials and can download the modules to your LMS network. Live remote training is $1,700 per session, and in-person training comes in at $3,200 per day.

“Bonfire training is an integral part of customer service training for our CSRs. They crave and need the tools that Bonfire provides them. What’s more, our customers expect and deserve the superior level of service that Bonfire provides to our internal and external customers.” – Citizens Energy Group

6. Customer Service Refresher Training by Business Training Works

The “Customer Service Refresher Training” by Business Training Works aims to re-energize depleted customer service and support workers by explaining how customer service is changing over time, and discussing evolving customer expectations.

The training program is a three-hour session on-site at a business or in a virtual classroom, and the topics covered range from best practices for routine interactions to problem-solving.

Pricing

For in-person training, expect to pay $4,200 for up to six participants. Virtual training is less than half the cost at $1,750 for six participants.

“All attendees provided very positive feedback and have been looking for opportunities to apply what they learned, as soon as we came back to our workplace. – Luz-Elena G

7. 7 Essentials to Excellent Customer Service by GoSkills

GoSkills offers a variety of online career development programs. This one covers the fundamentals for providing excellent customer service and is great for people who don’t have much experience in the customer service field.

This course is 90 minutes long and has 22 practice tutorials. It reviews concepts like creating positive interactions and engaging with customers by focusing on verbal and nonverbal cues. At the end of the program, participants are given a certification for completing the course.

Pricing

Individuals can access GoSkills training for free with a 7-day trial, then pay $27 per month or just $13 per year for access to all courses.

Organizations can get a free plan that offers limited course access, pay just over $9 per learner per month for full LMS access, or $13 per month for access to all GoSklils courses.

“This course was very helpful and the instructor provided great examples to explain his customer service techniques. Thanks.” – Patricia Debassige

8. Online Customer Service Courses from Coursera

Online learning platform Coursera offers a host of customer service courses focused on service fundamentals, customer relationship management, and enhancing the customer experience. The company also offers solution-specific courses such as those from HubSpot or Google.

For example, the Customer Service Fundamentals course is composed of modules which take approximately 23 hours to complete at your own pace.

Pricing

Coursera for individuals is available from $199 for a year of access. For companies with between 5 and 125 users, Coursera is $399 per user, per year.

“With Coursera, we’ve cultivated a well-rounded, competitive technical workforce that is passionate about professional development.” – G. Wetze, VP of Data and Analytics, Equifax

9. CSM Certification Program by The Success League

For most customer service reps, becoming a customer service or customer success manager is a logical next step in their career. So, if you‘re looking to build the skills you’ll need for professional development, this comprehensive course can provide you with everything you need to land your next job.

This 15-class course takes a deep dive into the fundamentals of becoming a customer success manager. Classes are one hour long and cover an extensive range of customer service and business management lessons. This includes topics like driving customer advocacy, creating long- and short-term customer goals, and preventing customer churn.

Pricing

The CSM full certification program is $1,795 per person. While it’s among the more expensive courses on our list, it also includes expert Q&A for each session..

“I truly appreciated the thoughtful care and attention Kristen dedicated to tailoring the program to my team’s unique needs. The sessions struck an excellent balance between reinforcing familiar tactics we already knew and introducing fresh, practical strategies for us to implement.” – Tess Gibson J.

10. ITIL® Training and Certification by Skill Soft

If you’re a part of an internal customer support team, like an IT team, you may be interested in completing your ITIL certification. This is a widely recognized, entry-level qualification that most reps earn before or during their IT careers.

Skill Soft offers an approved ITIL training program that’s recognized by Axelos. Participants learn about the link between IT and business strategy and how to improve their service skills to provide the best output for the company.

Pricing

For individuals, SkillSoft offers a 45-day trial. If you choose to continue the cost is $20 per month. For teams (up to 50), the cost per user is $55 per month, along with a 30-day free access period.

“I like the wide range of courses that Skillsoft offers. It offers the great benefit of saving your progress in each course. I really believe that it has a course for everyone. I’ve recommended several trainings from Skillsoft to my team members to improve their work performance.” – Salman Khan

11. Communication Toolkit: Conversing with Customers by BizLibrary

BizLibrary provides courses that range between 10 minutes and one hour, depending on what you want to learn. For example, the Conversing with Customers Toolkit is just 7 minutes long, while more in-depth courses such as Email Essentials clock in at 47 minutes.

Other topic areas include leadership and management, business skills, and workplace safety.

Pricing

BizLibrary offers three tiers — BizComply, BizEssentials, and BizSkills. BizComply is the most basic, providing access to 200 courses and a best-practice curriculum. BizEssentials focuses on upskilling and self-directed learning, while BizSkills is all about career pathing and succession planning. Pricing for all three tiers is quote-based.

“BizLibrary is allowing us to complete employee compliance training virtually, but also offer professional development.” – Dustin H.

12. How to Become a Better Communicator by SkillPath

SkillPath’s How to Become a Better Communicator course provides valuable lessons about communication skills that are imperative to customer service. Topics include building rapport and credibility, developing clear and assertive communication skills, and polishing your image and professionalism.

Learning about these skills is great for employees who may lack professional experience, and courses are offered both online and on-site at varying prices and duration.

Pricing

The price for this webinar course is $149. Businesses or individuals can also choose SkillPath annual passes. The SkillPath Unlimited pass is $249 per year and gives access to all online courses. The SkillPath Unlimited + LIVE pass is $499 per year and includes live instructor-led virtual seminars and broadcast webinars.

“As a busy working professional, SkillPath Unlimited offers a terrific means of on-the-go learning on topics that are relevant and substantive for my professional development. SkillPath’s offerings, including its instruction and materials, are excellent and serve as a key element in my training journey.” – Daniel B., SELCO Community Credit Union

13. Attitudes for Service by Dale Carnegie

Most customer service training courses focus on technical skills and high-level communication concepts. These are great for introducing people to the basics of customer service, but they don’t teach them how to put these practices to best use.

Dale Carnegie‘s “Attitudes for Service” course focuses on attitude over aptitude. The idea is that it’s more important for reps to be personable and friendly than it is to be technically savvy. This three-hour course teaches reps how to increase their self-awareness and how to ask questions that will return meaningful responses. That way, they‘ll find the information they’re looking for, while still generating a delightful customer experience.

Pricing

Attidudes for Service is offered as a live online session. The course is 1.5 hours long and costs $399 to attend.

“Getting outside my comfort zone to better understand both the people & situations I find myself in on a routine basis. Speaking in front of a group, sharing with those whom which you know very little about, thinking more about others & the lives they live outside of your interactions with them; these were all things I learned that I feel are unique to Dale Carnegie training.” – John Y.

14. A+ Customer Care by WorkLifeBalance

This 5-step training program is designed to help reps identify customer needs and resolve service problems in a timely manner. It’s built around five customer-centric steps that are focused on sharpening internal and external customer service skills. This makes it an excellent choice for training both customer-facing and internal support teams.

WorkLifeBalance offers its courses both on-site and online. It also provides options to sign up for courses as individuals or as a sponsored group.

Pricing

To get more pricing details for onsite or online course options, contact WorkLifeBalance by filling out their contact form or getting in touch directly at 1-877-644-0064.

“There is a clear ROI from the 5 Steps Training. Turnover is down. Performance is up. It has strengthened our culture of respect and appreciation. It has moved us higher as an employer of choice and strengthened the results in our employee surveys…There is a sense of less stress in the organization and people are happier.” – VP, Fortune 50 Company

Enhance Your Customer Service Skills With a Certification

Customer service certifications are a great way to enhance your skills and help move your career forward.

If you’re considering a certification or customer service training course, I’ve got two pieces of advice. First, not all courses are created equal. Take your time, do your research, and find one that is both recognized in your industry and offers reputable training.

Second, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to training. Different industries have different sales and service priorities — for training to be effective, it needs to align with business goals and deliver on customer expectations.

Ready to get started with customer service courses? Enroll at HubSpot Academy today.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Outsourcing is a tightrope walk for businesses. Choosing not to outsource can slow growth, but handing your customers over to outsourced call center agents (also called BPO) who you haven’t personally hired takes a lot of trust and certainty.

As a customer, I can vividly recall my worst BPO call center experience. That patience-testing 6-hour conversation with customer support has been burned into my memory; it also ended without resolution. I canceled my plan after only being a customer for two days — even though I paid for three years upfront.

That company lived every business‘s biggest BPO fear: a poor outsourcing experience that causes customers to leave. So, is it worth it for companies to partner with a BPO vendor? For some companies, the answer is a resounding yes. For others, the drawbacks will outweigh the benefits. Let’s look at the pros and cons of this path, plus how to tell when you’re ready to take the plunge.

In this article, you’ll learn:

• What is a BPO experience?
• What is a BPO call center?
• Pros of BPO Centers
• Cons of BPO Centers
• When to Use a BPO Center

What is a BPO experience?

BPO stands for business process outsourcing, which involves outsourcing individual business tasks.
A BPO experience is a more holistic approach to business outsourcing with a focus on long-term partnerships. A good BPO experience helps improve core business functions and usually cuts costs by outsourcing services for your business to lower-cost areas, though this must be done ethically.

BPO vendors can cover core competencies like:

• Market research.
• Customer support.
• Manufacturing.
• Supply chain management.
• Order processing.
• Human resources.
• Technical assistance.
• Content creation.
• Data entry.
• Graphic design.
• Accounting.
• Legal services.

It’s a wide umbrella, but the BPO industry often focuses on customer service operations (email, chat, and voice support).

What is a BPO call center?

A BPO call center is an outsourcing provider that specializes in phone support for businesses. This can cover both inbound and outbound calls. Call centers have been popular outsourcing choices for decades.

Despite customers having abundant contact options online, phone support is still an essential point of contact for businesses in 2025. More than half of call centers saw an increase in inbound voice calls from 2022 to 2023.

In terms of juxtaposition to your company, there are three specific types of BPO call centers:

• Onshore outsourcing — local outsourcing, which often reduces cost savings but reduces language, culture, and timezone barriers.
• Nearshore outsourcing — nearby outsourcing, such as a French company outsourcing to Morocco. This offers geographic flexibility, but it reduces timezone conflicts.
• Offshore outsourcing — outsourcing anywhere around the globe, offering great potential cost savings, plus language and timezone availability.

Pros of BPO Centers

Let’s look at the primary advantages of choosing a BPO experience.

Scalability

Company growth often comes hand in hand with a difficult question — when are you ready to hire additional staff? And how can you handle onboarding them yourself if you’re already stretched too thin?

Working with a quality BPO center allows you to strategically scale your operations. A good provider will be a partner with you and will alleviate a lot of the pains of scaling independently.

Focused Expertise

Customer service reps have to deal with increasingly demanding customer expectations and, more importantly, with clientele that are increasingly vocal about their experiences. One bad customer service interaction can result in a poor review on TrustPilot or an angry video on TikTok.

According to our State of Service report, 21% of customer service representatives find it challenging to keep up with increasingly demanding customer expectations.

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Why not hand it over to the pros? Enlisting the services of a BPO provider means you hand over your customer service needs to a larger team that is more specialized and more capable of dealing with today’s customers.

Cost Efficiency

According to the Deloitte Global Outsourcing Survey, cost savings are the top motive for outsourcing business operations. This is probably the most well-known reason for outsourcing, but the desire to cut costs alone isn’t a good enough reason to pursue BPO services.

“There are serious risks in allowing cost savings alone to guide your outsourcing decisions,” Vidya Plainfield penned in Forbes. She goes on to cite ethics concerns that we’ll dive deeper into in a minute.

Language Availability

If your company operates beyond your country’s borders, it’s very likely to run into customers who prefer to speak multiple languages. With the large selection of BPOs on the market, you can have your customers be answered by native speakers in almost any language.

Cons of BPO Centers

Some companies will choose a BPO experience and lose customers as a result, like the company that I had a negative experience with. Here are the disadvantages that you face when choosing BPO.

Growth Challenges

What‘s your company’s service philosophy? Do you have tried-and-true SOPs and service scripts? Clearly defined roles? If you don‘t have those already, you’ll have to make something up to onboard the center agents.

Established companies will have fewer issues with setting up their BPO team for success, but some businesses will discover a lot of holes during this process. In particular, startups that have scaled quickly may find themselves needing to quickly develop service level agreements (SLA) on the fly to hand over to the BPO center.

Growing too quickly is a hole that many companies have fallen into.

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Quality Challenges

Quality assurance is integral to a positive customer experience. It’s a challenge for all large companies, especially those choosing offshore outsourcing. There are a few specific quality challenges with business process outsourcing:

• Cultural differences can present misaligned expectations.
• Lack of hiring control, as BPO companies hire the call center agents instead of your company.
• Indirect supervision may result in different managerial decisions being made.

If customer satisfaction is impacted by these factors, the choice to outsource can become a liability.

Time Zone Challenges

Offshore outsourcing often results in a team that’s spread across the globe. This creates challenges for managers who like to have overlapping working hours.

Important note: Time zone differences could be a pro for your company instead of a con. For example, a Canada-based company may choose to handle customer operations during their business hours. Then, after hours, customer communication is handed to BPO agents in the Philippines. Opposite time zones can be extremely valuable when leveraged strategically.

Security and Regulatory Compliance

Working with third-party vendors always creates holes where information and data can be mishandled. This is rarely done on purpose; the larger the team, the more opportunities there are for systems to get infected with malware.

According to the Deloitte Global Outsourcing Survey, three of the top five global business services are finance, information technology, and taxes. Those are all highly regulated industries that require flawless security.

Companies that process sensitive customer information, such as healthcare and banking, will need to weigh the risk-benefit heavily.

When to Use a BPO Center

While the outsourcing opportunities are endless, it‘s not right for everyone. Here are five signs that you’re ready to use a BPO center.

You can afford ethical outsourcing.

Companies that can‘t afford to pay workers fair wages aren’t ready to outsource. While you might be able to find BPO service providers with very low prices, you have to be critical of their ethics before choosing a partner.

Outsource-Philippines warns that unfair wages, poor working conditions, and graveyard shifts are some of the biggest issues.

“The outsourcing culture has drowned us economically, especially writers from countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India,” shares Muhammad Hamaz, who’s located in Pakistan. I met Hamaz on LinkedIn, and we spoke about the outsourcing issues he faces as a freelance writer.

He‘s had his work published in major publications, but he was paid low wages. He wasn’t even listed as an author. “BPO companies take advantage. There needs to be recognition of writers’ work,” he says.

There are ways to outsource morally — the ethical outsourcing guide from Outsource-Philippines covers this point in-depth.

Another great resource is this piece in Forbes by Vidya Plainfield on why ethical outsourcing should matter for your business. “If you wish to truly enjoy the lasting benefits of a strong outsourcing partnership, I believe ethics should be high on your list of considerations,” Plainfield wrote.

Quality is going down on your own.

When business is booming, and you can‘t keep up, it can feel less like fireworks and more like dynamite. If you feel like you’re exploding with customer service requests, you’re not alone.

In fact, 75% of CRM leaders say they’re getting more customer service tickets than ever before.

Are these numbers increasing?

• Customer churn rate
• Average response time
• Customer effort score

And are these numbers decreasing?

• Net Promoter Score
• Ticket resolution rate
• Customer satisfaction score

These signs might be pointing to a capacity issue that needs to be addressed. Poor service is a costly road for a business to go down.

88% of customers in our State of Service report say that the experience a company provides is as important to them as its product or services.

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Pro tip: Choose scalable BPO center services to avoid hitting another ceiling with your growth.

“Evaluate how the BPO scales during busy times. Understand how they handle sudden demand spikes without sacrificing quality,” shares Aljay Ambos, head of marketing and AI expert at Twixify.

“Ask about their contingency plans, how flexible their staffing is, and the technology they use to ensure smooth scaling. A BPO that’s prepared for the unexpected can help your business maintain high standards and keep customers satisfied, even when things get hectic,” Ambos says.

You know your customer’s needs.

When you choose to outsource part of your business, you let go of following the day-to-day minutiae. It‘s a good thing: you don’t need to hear about every complaint that your call center operations have handled.

But moving customer-related services out of your house means no more overhearing parts of outgoing customer calls or the water cooler chatter about customer interactions. Businesses risk becoming disconnected from customers by outsourcing their communication. If you’re still figuring out your customer or your product, then this is a huge gamble.

AI has already been leveraged.

Artificial intelligence has a lot of applications that should be addressed before searching for a BPO provider. It’s a piece of low-hanging fruit to improve customer satisfaction — one that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later if you intend to keep up with your industry.

Our research shows that 84% of CRM leaders consider AI to be instrumental in interacting with modern customers.

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BPO providers can help you with this, if you choose correctly.

“When selecting a BPO partner, look beyond the immediate cost savings and evaluate their technological capabilities, particularly their investment in AI and automation — these will determine their ability to scale and evolve with your business needs,” shares Sidharth Ramsinghaney, Director of Corporate Strategy and Operations at Twilio.

“Based on my experience leading Fortune 100 transformations, the most successful BPO partnerships are those where the provider acts as a strategic partner in modernizing operations rather than simply a cost arbitrage play,” says Ramsinghaney.

Your SOPs work well.

SOPs, or standard operating procedures, are the lifeblood of productive teams. Some BPO providers will help you develop SOPs, but a specific concern comes to my mind when I think about outsourcing without a roadmap already in place.

Have you ever been a part of a disorganized team that could handle growth? I know I haven‘t been. I’ve worked on teams that have chosen outsourcing as a bandaid on the bullet wound of disorganization, and I’ve never seen it go well.

Statistic: 85% of organizations say that having a clear definition of roles and accountability is their top factor for success.

Create a working system with well-defined roles before you try to outsource operations.

When BPOs Work

Outsourcing is nothing new, but I admit I didn’t realize the depth of the BPO world until I researched this topic more deeply. The opportunities to find a trusted partner and scale together are unlimited.

In a perfect world, every business would take this step ethically and build a global team where all parties are compensated fairly for their contributions. Let’s make that a reality.

Customer segmentation matters. Take it from someone with an email inbox filled to the brim. I only click if the product advertised is something I’d actually use, and I appreciate the companies that take the time to learn about me and send me relevant offers.

The challenge? Customer segmentation is a big undertaking, and it can take your team a lot of time to sort your customer data manually. But with the right AI tool, you can get it done in no time.

Here’s a look at the benefits AI customer segmentation, the results of my AI experiment, and some of the top tools you can use to streamline segmentation.

In this article:

• The Benefits of AI Segmentation
• Testing AI Segmentation
• AI Tools for Customer Segmentations
• AI Segmentation Best Practices

The Benefits of AI Segmentation

Customer segmentation breaks your customer base into various subgroups. These subgroups can be based on multiple characteristics like:

• Demographics.
• Geographic location.
• Behaviors.
• Lifestyles, values, and interests.
• Needs.

This segmentation helps you better understand their needs and preferences. Then, you can create targeted messages that are more likely to resonate with your audience.

Here are the biggest benefits of AI customer segmentation.

Download Free Customer Segmentation Templates Today

1. Better Data Analysis

AI quickly sorts large data sets to provide an in-depth analysis. These in-depth analyses better inform your research. In fact, 63% of marketers use AI for market research today.

Think about that concerning customer segmentation. It’s likely your company has various groups of customers, each with their own needs and preferences. You can quickly and easily sort your customers using AI based on various defining characteristics.

Plus, AI can provide you with sentiment analysis, which helps you better understand how these customers feel about your product or service.

2. Bigger ROI

It’s no secret that personalization and segmentation are key to better marketing. Beyond that, with more advanced technology on the market, it’s expected. As technology advances, 73% of customers expect a personalized experience with a company.

Moreover, over half of consumers say they’ll become repeat buyers after a personalized experience. Using AI to segment your customer lists accurately can help your marketing and sales teams with revenue-driven strategies.

3. Improved Customer Retention

If customers are more likely to become repeat customers after personal experience with your brand, you also have a better chance of increasing customer retention. In fact, 62% of business leaders agree that improved customer retention is a benefit of personalization efforts.

AI can help you determine what your customer segments care about and how they feel about your product or service. Appealing to their preferences, interests, and needs is a great way to keep customers on your accounts.

4. Enhanced Predictions

Segmenting your customers into various groups can help you learn more about their behaviors and patterns and predict how they’ll behave. However, this can be a huge undertaking for one person, especially since it requires a large amount of historical data.

AI tools use historical and real-time data to predict your customers’ behaviors. This is especially helpful for planning proactive measures rather than reactive ones.

5. Saves Your Team Time

The amount of time saved by using AI tools might be the number one benefit of customer segmentation using AI. According to a Salesforce survey, marketers who use AI tools save an average of five hours per week.

Sure, that time likely accounts for content creation and other tasks, but it also accounts for market and customer research, including customer segmentation. What used to take hours to complete by hand now takes only a few minutes.

Not convinced? I ran a test to see if AI customer segmentation actually works — and it passed with flying colors.

Testing AI Segmentation

If I learned anything from my favorite professor in college, it’s this: always test things out. To see if AI can segment customers, I used ChatGPT. Here’s what happened.

The Scenario

I created a fictional health and wellness business to get the most out of using ChatGPT for customer segmentation. Then, I described my client base. Here are the most important details about my business, Fitness for You.

• The gym is open to:

• Enthusiasts and beginners
• Recreational members

• Age range: 18 to 80+
• Programs offered:

• Weight training
• Aerobics and water aerobics
• Yoga
• Cardio, including spin and treadmill classes
• Corporate programs

• There are more female clients than male clients.
• Some clients are members because of the social aspect of the programs offered.

Using this information, I want ChatGPT to sort my customers into the appropriate segments, including segments concerning:

• Fitness levels.
• Attitudes toward the gym.
• Program interests.

Running the Experiment

I first entered my company’s information to use ChatGPT for customer segmentation. The nice thing about ChatGPT is that it stores information, meaning there’s no need to keep reminding it of previous inputs.

After entering my company’s information, I asked ChatGPT to segment my customers based on fitness level. The key to using AI tools is to be specific. This is the prompt I used:

• “Using my business information, segment my clients into groups based on their fitness level. Provide a description of my clients and their fitness level. Deliver the results in a table.”

Pro tip: I’ve found that asking ChatGPT to deliver results in a table makes them easier to read. Plus, copying and pasting the results into Google Sheets is easy.

Next, I asked ChatGPT to separate my customers into groups based on their attitudes toward the gym. This is the prompt I used:

• “Using the same information about my customers and the segmented list, please segment them into groups based on their attitudes towards the gym.”

Here’s ChatGPT’s response:

I like that ChatGPT continues to deliver the results in the table. I also appreciate that the response gives a description of my client segment and a guess about their preferences.

The final segmentation I want ChatGPT to generate is groups based on my clients’ gym program interests.

This is the prompt I used:

• “Using the segmented groups, perform another segmentation. This time, segment my clients into groups based on their program interests.”

Here’s the final response:

ChatGPT’s response categorizes my fictional clients based on their potential program interests and describes why those clients may be interested in the program. Knowing this information, I could easily create marketing campaigns based on their interests and preferences and, hopefully, gain loyal clients to my gym.

What I Learned

ChatGPT’s customer segmentation of my fictional clients was spot on.

If I wanted to create customer personas and hadn’t already done that, I could use the information provided to me by ChatGPT to create a persona for each customer segment. Or, if I was short on time, ChatGPT could create the user persona for me.

With more information, like age range and fitness goals, I could segment my clients further into more detailed groups. This would help me narrow down my focus for more accurate personalization and a better customer experience.

Key Takeaways

• Using the data provided, AI segmentation was accurate
• AI performs best with specific prompts and directions (use X data, display the output in Y format
• AI was capable of multiple levels of segmentationn and classification

AI Tools for Customer Segmentations

Looking for the best AI tools for customer segmentation? We’ve got you covered.

1. HubSpot AI

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If you’re already a HubSpot CRM user, what are you waiting for? HubSpot AI is an easy-to-use AI tool that you can use throughout the customer platform.

With HubSpot’s CRM capabilities and HubSpot AI, you can create customer segments using historical and real-time data. Use this tool to create effective marketing campaigns, inform product development, and turn your customers into loyal fans.

What I like: I like that HubSpot AI is available at all points of the HubSpot customer platform. This means users get up-to-date information about their customer segments.

2. Optimove

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The more information you can obtain about your customers, the better. Optimove is a multi-channel engagement platform providing a comprehensive overview of your clients from four sources.

The platform uses cluster analysis and algorithms to separate customers into similar groups. Once the initial groups are identified, Optimove takes it further and creates sub-segments based on behaviors, demographics, and real-time interactions.

What I like: The nice thing about Optimove is that once you’ve segmented your audience, you can use control and test groups to A/B test marketing campaigns.

3. BlastPoint

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BlastPoint is an AI customer segmentation tool that provides optimized marketing solutions. It’s designed to help you understand your customers at a household level, meaning you’ll gain insights into their behaviors, demographics, and values.

The best part about BlastPoint is that, using its AI technology and your customer data, you can create as many filters as you need until you feel you have the appropriate customer segments.

What I like: I appreciate BlastPoint’s mission to help you become a more customer-centric company, regardless of industry.

4. Heap

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When considering customer segmentation, you might think of grouping clients based on characteristics, like demographics. Heap thinks about customer segmentation differently. Instead of segmenting customers based on their characteristics, Heap’s algorithm groups your audience based on their actions with your website.

Heap easily integrates with your existing technology, allowing you to create segments wherever your customers are. Heap also enables users to conduct A/B testing, create personalized campaigns, and build targeted user guides based on customer segment data.

What I like: I like that Heap focuses on actions rather than characteristics. Knowing this information is useful for creating user guides and a better knowledge base.

AI Segmentation Best Practices

Using AI for customer segmentation is an excellent way to identify the various customers on your accounts quickly. By understanding their actions and behaviors, you can boost conversions by providing relevant information and messages to your audiences.

If you plan to implement AI into your customer segmentation strategy, follow our experts’ and our best practices.

1. Define your goals.

You might choose to create a customer segmentation strategy for several reasons. For example, you might use it to redefine your marketing strategy or inform your business processes like Chuck Schaeffer, CEO of Johnny Grow.

Schaeffer’s team uses AI to dynamically map each customer into a customer segment. The segments can then be used to allocate resourcing and align business processes based on customer contribution.

For example, Schaeffer notes that the team may deliver high-touch customer support for high-contribution customers. Meanwhile, self-service support is available for low-contribution customers.

“Defining business processes by customer type or segment is extremely effective in growing revenues and margins from high-contribution customers and lowering cost-to-serve for low or negative-margin customers,” Schaeffer says.

Schaeffer’s team also uses AI to rank customer segments from most to least profitable.

“Identifying customers that contribute negative profits to the company creates an opportunity to plug those profit leaks. Reducing costs to serve these customers creates an alternative to discontinuing these customer relationships,” Schaeffer says.

2. Provide your AI tool with the most accurate data.

AI tools work best when your data is clean, error-free, and accurate. In my experiment asking ChatGPT to segment my fitness clients, I realized more data would have provided me with better results.

If you have the data available, use it. You might be surprised at the information you learn about your customers and their behaviors and preferences.

3. Catch customer interactions early and often.

Customer behavior will change throughout the customer journey. Collecting behavioral data when customers first interact with your company is best.

Ricardo Madan, senior vice president of TEKsystems Global Services, notes that these interactions — from inquiries, issue resolution, bill pay, order reconciliation, and problem — can inform AI and ML predictive analytics tools.

These insights “make these experiences more seamless for the users and more efficient or profitable for the companies they’re working with,” Madan says. “All of this is optimized when the analytics effectively segment users earlier in the customer experience.”

4. Personalize, personalize, personalize!

One of the main reasons you should create a customer segmentation strategy is to provide relevant information to your audiences. Once you understand them, use what you’ve learned to your advantage.

Lisa Richards, CEO and creator of the Candida Diet, uses AI tools to help her create segmented lists. She sends better, more personalized messages to her audiences using the information about her lists.

Richards says, “Our AI engine uses customer data, such as transaction history, quiz responses, and browsing behavior, to segment customers by their candida severity and unique needs and prepare content chunked for their context.”

For example, those who are new to the Candida diet may receive easy-to-follow meal plans, while those who are already used to the diet may be served a different recipe recommendation.

“Implementing AI-powered segmentation has resulted in a 20 percent uplift in customer engagement with content, as users are now served up resources that are most relevant to them,” Richards says.

Can AI Segment Your Customers? Yes!

Customer segmentation helps grow your company and better understand your customers. You can uncover meaningful insights using AI and your company’s valuable data in a few minutes. Talk about time saved for your teams!

The trick to using AI is to ensure your data is clean and error-free. AI tools are only as good as your data, so keep that in mind when running customer segmentation prompts!

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2024 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Customer service and customer experience are critical aspects of your business. They both significantly impact your ability to satisfy and retain customers — but they’re not interchangeable. Each means something entirely different to your business and your customers.

I’ve pulled examples of these principles being executed masterfully for us to learn from (and one really bad one). You know you’re curious! Let’s go.

In this post, we’ll cover:

• Customer Experience vs. Customer Service
• What is the difference between customer service and customer experience?
• Which is more important: customer service or experience?
• Customer Experience Examples
• Customer Service Examples

What is the difference between customer service and customer experience?

Although different, customer service sits under the customer experience umbrella. The way you help customers when issues arise contributes to their level of satisfaction. The faster you can help bring customers a resolution, the faster you can help them succeed and have a positive experience.

Continuation vs. Single Touchpoint

Customer experience doesn’t require interaction with a representative, but customer service usually does. Great customer service happens one interaction at a time, and the customer experience is a summary of that entire customer journey.

Proactive vs. Reactive

Customer service is reactive: your customer service team will respond to a help ticket or inquiry when a customer initiates a conversation. There are also proactive elements of service, though. Customers expect quick response times, an awareness of their previous touchpoints with the support team, etc.

Is each customer service representative well-trained? Do they have tools that help reduce customer wait time? That’s where the customer experience comes in: your proactive back-end investment in the customer experience sets the stage for what kind of reactive service you can provide.

Satisfaction Metrics vs. Service Metrics

Experience metrics are the sum of many touchpoints. They represent all the interactions customers have with your business across departments. A few metrics for your customer experience are:

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS®). A measure of how likely a customer is to recommend your business. This is a key metric for evaluating your business’s customer experience.
2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). Your customers’ answer to the question “How satisfied were you with your experience?”
3. Customer retention. Are you meeting customers’ needs and keeping them satisfied enough for them to keep choosing you over your competitors?

Customer service metrics show how quickly you help customers resolve their issues. A few metrics for your customer service are:

1. Average Response Time: How much time does it take for your support team to solve customer problems?
2. Customer Effort Score (CES). This measures how much work it takes for your customers to use your product or get support.
3. Ticket Resolution Rate: Are customer problems solved the first time they reach out for support, or does it take numerous touchpoints?

Service metrics in a nutshell: Are you able to delight customers with your support and customer care?

Which is more important: customer service or experience?

Experience is more important than support. Customer service is like icing on top of a cake. If the cake itself (the experience) is bad, then no amount of icing (service) can make it good.

It’s a bit crude, but I suppose this old adage says it more succinctly: “It’s like putting lipstick on a pig.” Or the vintage version: “You can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.”

Bad customer support can ruin your reputation … but some loyal customers will use your product for years without ever having a single customer service interaction. If you have a bad product, you’ll never earn loyal customers in the first place.

I can think of one paid software I’ve used for 6+ years without ever needing customer support. My customer lifetime value (CLV) for that company has been enormous. My needs are met by that software because the customer experience is excellent.

Bad support can still ruin a good experience.

Customer expectations have never been higher:

• 82% of customers expect their issues to be resolved immediately.
• The #2 challenge service representatives are struggling with is adapting to increasingly demanding customer expectations.
• 95% of consumers report that customer service impacts brand loyalty

Instead of focusing on one practice over the other, create an all-encompassing strategy that ensures you provide satisfactory customer service and, in the process, create an experience that leaves customers satisfied.

Customer Experience Examples

Let’s discuss the difference between customer experience and customer service with the example scenario of a customer visiting a storefront.

Say a customer walks in, makes a return with a representative, and continues with their day — this is a singular customer experience. That single interaction, though, makes up a small portion of their entire experience with your business that day.

For example, the directions they found on your Google My Business page helped them get there, the setup of your storefront made it easy for them to find your customer service desk, and your customer service rep helped them seamlessly make a return and process a refund.

Everything they did that day related to your business made up their entire experience, and customer service was one of those touchpoints. Here are some other popular examples.

Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs reward repeat business and offer an incentive for repeat customers. This is often in the form of “buy 3, get 1 free” or “20% off every 5th order” promotions. Even though these programs are mass-implemented, it can create the feeling of personalized experiences for customers.

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Brand Perception

Monitoring brand sentiment on social media to understand the perception of your brand. This is known as social listening. The story of a bad customer experience can spread like wildfire online, making it important for brands to listen and react to their reputation online. Curious about the perception of your brand? Try asking ChatGPT.

What’s the reputation of [brand name]? Summarize what people think in one paragraph).

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Product Design

Produce design, packaging, and branding all contribute to how customers feel about your business. Thoughtful, comprehensive product design helps customers feel valued by the company. It also contributes to (or detracts from) a business’s reputation of being a luxury brand.

An example of product packaging design that I love is the Notabag. A small piece of recycled paper teaches you how to use the product and shares company information. I‘ve purchased several Notabags, and I always find myself reluctant to throw the packaging into the recycling bin because it’s so thoughtfully designed.

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Customer Support

This is where customer support and experience come together. Let’s zoom in specifically at customer service examples and how they impact the overall customer experience.

Customer Service Examples

Every customer service experience is a single event that contributes to overall memorable experiences with a company (either good or bad). Here are some examples.

Response Time

When a customer contacts your customer service team, how long does it take for them to get a reply? The overall perception of your customer service team starts with how quickly queries are addressed.

Fast customer service makes customers feel valued — it has a huge impact on customer satisfaction. Quick responses are an integral part of a modern customer support system.

One of the fastest customer support teams I‘ve ever encountered is GreenGeeks. I’ve messaged them at every hour of the day with website issues, and they always reply immediately with an exact solution to my problem. It’s the kind of customer attention that successful businesses should all aspire to.

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Support Channels

A customer interaction can take place on almost any channel these days (yippee, right?). Yes, it’s a bit more work, but with tools like HubSpot’s CRM you can consolidate all of your customer communication into one place.

Omnichannel support options allow customers to reach out using their preferred medium. This may be email, live chat, phone, or social media. Maybe even the odd snail mail (stranger things have happened).

Just be sure to provide support to everyone. Some companies hide customer support behind a paywall and leave customers on free plans out in the cold. HubSpot provides multiple direct lines of communication to everyone — including those using their free products.

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Self-Service

Creating self-service tools for customers to help themselves helps improve many aspects of your service. A few popular self-service options are:

• Conversational AI chatbots.
• Knowledge bases.
• Detailed tutorials.

You can find a lot of exceptional self-service options online, and also a lot of half-baked ones. My favorite example is Canva’s knowledge base.

Not only does it use semantic search to understand the intent behind your query, but it also uses AI to communicate in your language. Canva automatically detects your language and uses AI to send a response in your language. Heel erg bedankt, Canva!

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Customer Feedback

Collecting and acting on customer feedback is a key part of maintaining customer satisfaction. But did you know that some huge companies don’t accept customer feedback?

For me, Pinterest comes to mind. Users LOVE Pinterest. But they have a very hard time contacting them when something goes wrong. You can find angry comments from ignored users on every single social platform. Remember the analogy of the cake and the icing? Pinterest’s product is the cake; the icing, though, people hate.

My blog post on how to contact Pinterest has sparked dozens of comments and emails from customers who have been scammed on the platform or locked out of their accounts. Their TrustPilot score is a raging 1.4/5 stars as a result. I‘ve been a Pinterest marketer since 2018 and I’d bet anything that this is the direct result of no investment in customer support.

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I still love Pinterest, but it’s a cautionary tale for brands. Alright, enough about the rage of scorned customers. Let’s end this on a positive note.

You Need Great Customer Service and Customer Experience

Both customer service and customer experience are required to scale your business. By understanding these two concepts, you can ensure customers’ needs are met throughout the entire journey, building long-lasting relationships.

Make customers feel valued enough, and they may even brag about the customer experience you’ve invested in (looking at you GreenGeeks, Notabag, and Canva).

Exceptional customer service starts with the right software — see if HubSpot’s Service Hub can help lighten your load.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2022 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

When I first started in customer success, the sheer volume of customers I had to manage felt daunting.

My responsibilities ranged from ensuring customers achieved success with HubSpot to aligning their use of the product with their unique business goals and metrics. Managing this diverse portfolio required me to become more organized.

This was when I discovered the power of customer segmentation. By segmenting, you empower your customer success, sales, and marketing teams to become more effective revenue drivers.

While I had understood the concept in theory, I had not grasped its practical impact on a company’s go-to-market strategy. As I dove deeper, I found that 80% of companies that employ customer segmentation techniques report increased sales.

I consulted many organizations on how their customer-facing teams – marketing, sales, and customer success – subdivide their customer base based on like-minded attributes, personalize their outreach, and classify their common challenges for effective engagement.

In this post, I’ll explore what customer segmentation is, provide examples, and share actionable tips to help you integrate segmentation into your strategy and enhance your customer experience.

In this article:

• What is B2B customer segmentation?
• B2B Market Segmentation Methods
• Examples of Customer Segmentation
• Tips for Customer Segmentation
• Mastering B2B Market Segmentation

Understanding this critical strategy — and the demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and other attributes your organization collects — can drive your go-to-market strategy. After all, to effectively address their requests, you need a structured way to organize your customers into meaningful categories.

Segmentation not only organizes your customer base but also reveals actionable insights about how to effectively market and sell to various buyer personas within those sub-segments.

While the concept of B2B customer segmentation is easy to grasp, applying it to your total addressable market (TAM) can feel like a significant undertaking, especially when realizing the number of mediums companies use for customer engagement.

When applying B2B customer segmentation, start by aligning it with your ideal customer profile (ICP). This ensures that your segmentation reflects the characteristics of your TAM. Often referred to as B2B market segmentation, this strategy equips your marketing and sales teams with the insights they need to deliver tailored value to prospective customers.

Below, I’ll explore five key methods for B2B market segmentation. For reference, you can use this comprehensive template to apply this strategy.

B2B Market Segmentation Methods

Method 1: Geographic Segmentation

Geographic segmentation divides customers based on their physical location, making it essential for companies with a global or multi-regional presence. It enables you to tailor marketing campaigns and sales strategies to cultural preferences, regional challenges, and localized needs.

Common geographic attributes include:

• Zip Code
• City, State, or Province
• Country
• Regions (e.g., NAM, EMEA, APAC)
• Preferred Language

Pro tip: From a customer success perspective, geographic segmentation informs workforce planning as your business grows in specific regions, ensuring consistent support and a superior customer experience. This also provides an up-to-date record of customer count by region, providing insight to plan for headcount and expand your team appropriately.

Method 2: Firmographic Segmentation

Firmographic segmentation focuses on objective attributes that define a company’s profile. This method is particularly useful for businesses targeting diverse industries, as it enables teams to tailor their approach based on company size, revenue, or industry specifics.

Much of this information can be found online or through customer data platforms.

Key firmographic attributes include:

• Annual revenue
• Industry
• Number of employees

Source

Pro tip: This type of segmentation works for customer success teams who specialize in supporting specific industries or company sizes, improving their ability to address unique needs effectively.

Method 3: Psychographic Segmentation

Psychographic segmentation delves into more subjective factors such as customer needs, aspirations, and attitudes. This is the other side of your customer’s firmographic attributes. These insights are typically gathered through forms, surveys, events (online or in-person), and customer interactions.

Since this information varies based on the contact you are talking to at a company, it’s best to identify the key stakeholders within companies and target them via social media, paid ads, and tailored content.

Attributes include:

• Aspirations
• Challenges that relate to their day-to-day
• Interests and attitudes

Psychographic data provides a deeper understanding of stakeholders’ mindsets, enabling customer success teams to tailor strategies for customer adoption and engagement. Moreover, this gives your go-to-market teams the ability to understand the mentality of your key stakeholders as they adopt your products and services.

Pro tip: Psychographic segmentation is especially valuable in the B2B space, where sales cycles tend to be long and involve multiple decision-makers.

Method 4: Behavioral Segmentation

Behavioral segmentation focuses on customers’ interactions with your brand, products, and services. By analyzing this data, you gain insights into customer priorities, product usage patterns, expansion opportunities, and renewals.

You can capture this through your CRM, marketing automation platform, website content management system, and product app.

Behavioral attributes include:

• Pages viewed
• Form conversions
• Email marketing interactions (opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and spam)
• App interactions (logins, feature adoption, custom event completions)

Pro tip: This segmentation is vital for companies scaling products with multiple features. Furthermore, behavioral attributes can give your go-to-market and product teams insight into widely used areas of your product, potential pain points, and opportunities for upgrades or enhanced usage.

Method 5: Technographic Segmentation

Technographic segmentation categorizes customers based on the tools and systems they use, offering a clear view of their technology stack. For products that address many use cases, understanding what technologies your customers have is worth understanding to better serve them.

By understanding a customer’s tech stack, sales and customer success teams can recommend specific solutions, forecast renewals, and personalize marketing campaigns. Technographic segmentation also provides opportunities to position your product against competitors in the customer’s ecosystem.

Technographic attributes include:

• Device types (desktop, mobile)
• Applications (CRM, marketing automation, customer service platforms, sales outreach tool, content management system)
• “Back office” software (HR, Finance, IT tools)
• Cloud or on-premises systems

Leveraging these broad categories, your teams can move from market-level insights to applicable customer segmentation strategies. This can drive meaningful engagement and deliver value at scale for your customers.

Pro tip: This method is particularly useful for businesses whose products integrate with or complement existing technologies.

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Examples of Customer Segmentation

Below are examples of B2B customer segmentation, and how they are applied in customer success.

Tier-Based Segmentation

Tier-based segmentation aligns with account-based marketing (ABM) principles, grouping customers based on firmographic, behavioral, and psychographic attributes to ultimately assess fit and interest. Your resulting ABM tiers inform strategies your customer success team can prioritize their resources and engagement.

• Tier 1 accounts. High-value customers that receive strategic, consultative support from dedicated CSMs.
• Tier 2 accounts. Strong fit with moderate interest. Focus on identifying opportunities to grow investments and engage stakeholders with your products and services.
• Tier 3 accounts. Lower priority customers that show some fit and interest, who can be served programmatically using automation and self-service resources to scale.

Pro tip: Tier-based segmentation is ideal for organizations with a large number of customers, enabling resource optimization while maintaining meaningful engagement from your customer success team.

Industry-Based Segmentation

B2B customer segmentation by industry leverages firmographic data to address industry-specific needs, use cases, and challenges. Customer success teams are aligned by industry expertise, enhancing their ability to deliver tailored insights.

Benefits:

• Helps teams understand customers (companies are 60% more likely to understand your customer’s challenges if you have the right data).
• Provides focused feedback loops for improving your product and overall user experience.
• Aligns marketing, sales, and customer success strategies based on evolving industry trends.

Pro tip: Industry-based segmentation is particularly effective for companies targeting specific industries with tailored products and services. Furthermore, this can help your CSMs specialize and optimize the customer journey.

Region-Based Segmentation

B2B customer segmentation based on region or geography groups customers by location and preferred language, offering a dual-layered approach that aids in resource allocation and planning.

Key features:

• Enables tailored support by region, country, and preferred language.
• Informs hiring decisions for culturally and linguistically-aligned CSMs.
• Facilitates deeper understanding of regional marketing preferences and trends.

Pro tip: Region-based segmentation is critical for organizations expanding into new regions or scaling within existing markets. Companies who implement this segmentation model can build further layers based on the customer profile in that region, resource allocation, and growth trajectory in those regions.

Company Size or Revenue-Based Segmentation

B2B customer segmentation by company size or annual revenue focuses on firmographic attributes to address their unique needs as they scale.

• Smaller or midmarket organizations: Require more proactive customer success involvement but offer significant growth potential.
• Enterprise customers: Characterized by complex use cases, multiple stakeholders, and larger growth opportunities.

Using these segmentation examples, your customer success team can provide tailored experiences for specific groups while driving operational efficiency. Whether based on tier, industry, region, or company size, effective B2B customer segmentation ensures that resources are allocated strategically, growth opportunities are maximized, and value is constantly delivered to your customers.

Pro tip: This type of segmentation is effective when you have a scalable product, and cater to businesses of varying sizes – employee size or annual revenue.

Tips for Customer Segmentation

B2B customer segmentation requires successful organization, patience, and persistence. The upside is that it enables you to engage with your customers effectively, regardless of the size of your book of business.

Here are some tips to help you succeed.

Tip #1: Ensure your data is clean, connected, and up-to-date.

To execute a viable B2B customer segmentation operation, data cleanliness is essential. Beyond that, your data must be integrated into the rest of your technology stack, monitored, and routinely refreshed.

The importance of maintaining clean and up-to-date data cannot be overstated. 91% of organizations reportedly face common data quality issues, according to Barley Laing from Melissa. Furthermore, integrating your data across platforms ensures that all teams access the same insights, leading to 1.7x higher customer retention.

This principle has been a core aspect of my experience consulting with various companies, regardless of size, region, or target market. Clean data fosters clarity in decision-making and empowers teams to measure the success of their segmentation strategies.

Tip #2: Identify data gaps for better segmentation.

While the theory behind B2B customer segmentation is simple, collecting the data can be challenging, especially if your organization already struggles with poor data quality and consistency.

To resolve data gaps quickly, companies can take a multi-pronged approach through their customer success teams:

• Collect psychographic and behavioral data through customer interactions, and update the CRM and other relevant tools.
• Leverage a customer data platform (CDP) to consolidate customer information and enrich existing data. CDPs can fill in these gaps by providing accurate, up-to-date firmographic and technographic insights.

Identifying and addressing gaps effectively enhances your segmentation approach. Infoverity reports that 88% of CDP users observe improvements in realizing customer upsells. This allows your customer success team to drive meaningful growth by applying data-driven insights.

Tip #3: Create multiple customer segments.

While I outlined a few examples of B2B customer segmentation, it’s crucial to create multiple layers of segments.

The average company uses 3.5 segmentation criteria, combining various methods to form segments tailored to the company’s unique needs, products, TAM, and growth objectives.

Many companies I’ve worked with employ multi-layered B2B market segmentation strategies, such as segmenting by region, tiers, and annual revenue. This approach helps your company structure customer success teams to align with specific segments, providing a scalable foundation for future growth while ensuring support where needed.

Tip #4: Engage multiple stakeholders.

In the B2B space, it’s vital to consider the psychographic attributes of the entire organization, not just those of your point of contact. While your primary contacts may influence purchasing decisions, they might have the final authority or the leverage needed to champion your solution internally.

Your customer success strategy should involve multiple stakeholders, addressing their unique needs, interests, and challenges.

Engaging multiple stakeholders strengthens your segmentation strategy and helps maintain a comprehensive understanding of the overall customer experience. As Gartner notes, the typical buying process in B2B organizations involves an average of 7 stakeholders for companies with 100-500 employees, underscoring the need for a well-rounded engagement approach.

Tip #5: Use segmentation to optimize your customer journey.

Applying your B2B customer segmentation strategy in real-time engagements is crucial for assessing its effectiveness in meeting your company’s business goals.

However, it’s equally important to continually analyze and iterate on your segmentation approach to keep pace with the evolving customer landscape. By not having a feedback mechanism, 72% of companies fail to gather the data needed to assess their customer journeys.

This iterative feedback loop is a practice I advocate for when consulting on segmentation strategies.

It allows organizations to see firsthand how segmentation impacts outcomes, enabling data-driven improvements in areas like:

• Customer success engagement
• Customer marketing campaigns
• Customer success-sales alignment
• Customer growth strategies

Refining these areas allows companies to enhance both their internal processes and customer satisfaction.

Mastering B2B Market Segmentation

Despite the availability of data, only 56% of companies use it to evaluate which customer segments to nurture. This figure doesn’t even account for firmographic or other data collected during the sales process, which could provide a fuller understanding of customers before they transition to your customer success team.

While I’ve long recognized the importance of B2B customer segmentation, I continually discover the untapped potential it offers to many organizations.

To master B2B customer segmentation, you must leverage insights from the sales process, build on them to understand customer challenges better, and then put it all together to use it to identify new opportunities for engagement and growth.

As a marketer, I’ve had to use products that cut across CRM, instant messaging, scheduling, project management, and many others.

These software products caught my attention through various forms of marketing. But marketing is insufficient to keep anyone as a customer, no matter how brilliant it is. The core element that makes me continue using software is my product experience (PX).

In this article, I will explore what product experience means, why it matters, and the key elements that help brands make their products stand out.

In this article:

• What is product experience?
• Product Experience vs. User Experience
• The Importance of Product Experience
• The 4 Key Elements of Product Experience
• Designing Product Experiences That Count

A great product experience is prioritized by companies focused on customer-centric marketing, where customer feedback is at the forefront of product updates.

There’s no perfect formula for a successful product experience. As David Pereira, CEO of Omoqo GmbH, explains, brands only need to focus on three key stages:

• Product strategy (deciding the direction)
• Discovery (building the product)
• Delivery (releasing it and gathering feedback)

Product Experience vs. User Experience

While product experience covers the entire customer journey within a product, user experience (UX) is much wider.

According to Don Norman, the co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and one of the first persons who coined the term user experience, “User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”

While there can seem like a lot of overlap here, I like to differentiate the two by reminding myself that PX is the customer journey within a specific product, while UX looks at the user’s broader interactions.

Product Experience vs. Customer Experience

Product experience and customer experience (CX) also differ.

I consider customer experience a broader term that describes every touchpoint a customer has with the brand beyond the product itself. As I mentioned, product experience covers the entire customer journey within a product. However, customer experience covers the whole picture — including product, marketing, customer service, and branding.

A great customer experience will quickly increase word of mouth for your product. For instance, a simple word from a fellow marketer I trust is sufficient to make me buy a product. That is what a great CX looks like. But what keeps me as a retained customer is a great PX.

For example, below is a Slack conversation I had with some colleagues — you can see how CX pulled me in, but the PX is what will keep me using the product (or have me abandon it).

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Improves Product Value and Revenue

An excellent product experience increases how quickly (time-to-value) new users see value in your product. The more effective your product experience is, the faster this happens, but this timeframe varies by industry.

In a recent product metrics survey of 547 SaaS companies across seven industries, the average time to value was 1 day 12 hours. I don’t think this time is bad, but what’s not good is what companies lose by resting on their oars. According to the same survey, a 25% increase in time-to-value brings a 34% increase in monthly recurring revenue in a year.

Pro tip: I recommend a simple onboarding process to help customers get more value through their product experience. By cutting unnecessary steps and using pre-built templates, in-app guides, or user manuals, new users can get on with what they want and derive value. Software products can also highlight key features with hotspots, banners, or tooltips to guide users effectively.

Raises Customer Retention

Customer retention is famous for being cheaper than customer acquisition in the product space. However, in an interesting article by Emanuele Porfiri, the senior data analyst at FT Strategies, only 24% of subscribers typically renew after the first month. While this raises a question about the worth of monthly subscribers, I prefer to focus on the solution, with one being to improve the product experience.

With a strong product experience, I believe businesses can increase this percentage to create consistent growth and a reliable revenue stream.

What this looks like in practice: When grammar checkers like ProWritingAid and Grammarly send me my weekly achievements with their products, it drives me to use the product the next week. Such a simple action creates a great impression and makes me continue as a customer.

Onboarding is another element that sets the tone for a user’s journey. If it’s seamless and engaging, it can build trust immediately. But beyond onboarding, your product must address real customer pain points.

One of the recent cautionary tales is that of Tupperware. They shifted their focus to branding and image, ignoring customers’ need for affordable, high-quality products. This misstep led to bankruptcy, showing what happens when a brand loses touch with its audience.

Increases Referrals

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve recommended a product I love. If I enjoy it and it works, I share it on my blog, in Slack groups when members ask, or on LinkedIn. (You saw it in practice in the Slack conversation I shared above!)

Turns out, I’m not alone. Studies show that 94% of customers are happy to recommend brands with great products and excellent service. In my experience, the product matters most. If it’s exceptional, customers rarely need much support. A great product experience is the real test of your customers’ satisfaction and loyalty. It speaks louder than any marketing campaign ever could.

A perfect example of referrals in action is the story of DANG, an international skincare brand. When I talked to the founder, Ifedayo Agoro, she said referrals have become their growth engine because their product works.

“We’re a very tightly knit community of women, so it makes sense that when someone discovers that Dang skincare works for them, they tell their friends, family, and coworkers. Sure, we run other marketing campaigns, but honestly, most of our new customers and Instagram followers come from good old-fashioned recommendations,” says Agoro.

Increases Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate

Before SaaS products, companies gave out free samples of physical goods so potential customers could try them out. Whether someone became a paying customer depended entirely on the product experience and quality.

The same principle applies to software: a great product experience turns free users into paying customers.

Beyond making the product easy to use, there are several ways I’ve seen different software companies attempt to convert me as a user:

• Using welcome surveys to collect my information and personalize my experience.
• Including in-app product demos that show paid features.
• Providing virtual and interactive walkthroughs within the product.
• Presenting upgrade prompts to higher product tiers.

The 4 Key Elements of Product Experience

Feedback, analytics, prioritization, and clarity are the four key elements that can help you create a great product experience. Let’s dive into each:

1. Feedback

In the 2024 State of Product Management report, 99% of product managers say customer feedback is vital and responsible for the biggest increase in product effectiveness. This feedback can come in structured (surveys, interviews) or unstructured (customer service conversations, sales interactions, community conversations) formats.

Agendor, which provides web and mobile solutions for sales professionals, is one brand that can testify to the impact of structured surveys.

When the CTO, Tulio Monte Azul noticed their mobile app wasn’t as popular as the web version, he did a survey and found the complex onboarding process as the culprit. In response, his team shortened and gamified the onboarding process, resulting in a surge in mobile users and improved product value.

For new products, community conversations are one of the easiest ways I have seen early-stage founders get product feedback. This feedback could come from sites like Product Hunt, where founders generate buzz, or Appsumo, where they generate paid users and gather tons of useful feedback.

Pro tip: When using feedback, I’d recommend you tread carefully and handle it well. Don’t over-rely on input from just a few power users. This can skew your product updates and alienate the desires of most users. And don’t ignore negative feedback, too. While they are easy to dismiss as outliers, negative comments can highlight issues you must address to improve the overall product experience.

User research and feedback shouldn’t be a one-off task. Make it a continuous part of your product development process. Regularly check in with users to ensure your product evolves with their changing needs and expectations.

2. Analytics

In the past, companies relied on anecdotal observations, gut instincts, and the opinions of the loudest stakeholders to determine product improvements. Today, companies use data analytics tools and AI forecasting to analyze data and gain insights to create a great product experience.

However, without these sophisticated tools, you can manually sift through data and feedback with different departments. While this is time-consuming, it offers a more human perspective on how each team member might solve user issues.

A common issue that delays product teams from moving beyond the analytics or discovery stage is the belief that they need more data or user feedback to gain accurate insights. In an episode of The Product Experience Podcast, Frances Ibe emphasized that no set amount of data is required to provide useful insights. She describes searching for user insights as “a goal that is progressively moving forward, which shouldn’t stall the product team.”

In his newsletter, The Product Pulse, Sandeep Singh Rajput also highlighted a key analytics pitfall: confirmation bias. This is when you search for data and insights that confirm pre-existing beliefs about the product, causing you to ignore valuable insights that challenge your assumptions.

To avoid this, Sandeep advises approaching user research with an open mind and asking questions that challenge your beliefs, allowing you to uncover the real needs of your users.

3. Prioritization

All product development requires prioritization to decide what to build and when. In terms of product experience, prioritization should be driven by analytics and user feedback and not by what the company wants to achieve, which may only sometimes align with user needs.

The impact of doing the latter has resulted in 80% of SaaS features going unused.

The cost? An estimated $30 billion in wasted research and development — a clear sign of a sub-optimal product experience.

One way to prioritize product tasks is by assessing the risks involved in delaying or advancing each task. These risks can be measured against user experience impact, technical feasibility, and alignment with business goals.

Another approach is to have open-ended conversations with customers to gain deeper insights into pain points. This method comes after gathering and analyzing initial feedback, providing the product team with a comprehensive understanding of customer needs.

Unfortunately, stakeholder influence often plays a significant role in prioritizing product tasks. According to the 2024 State of Product Management Report from Product Plan, 31% of prioritization decisions are influenced by stakeholders.

In The Product Experience Podcast, David Pereira advised product teams to avoid falling into this trap. He suggested that teams highlight the potential consequences of prioritizing stakeholder-driven tasks versus team-driven tasks and assess how each option impacts the bottom line.

Pro tip: To prioritize correctly, I recommend that product teams concentrate on their north star metric (NSM), the single outcome that delivers the most value to users. By focusing on the NSM, the team can identify tasks that need immediate attention while pushing less critical tasks forward.

4. Clarity

Imagine creating a product experience without understanding the users’ needs or the intended outcome. This process is bound to fail, as conflicting priorities and disorganized efforts often lead to poor results.

When Arne Kittler appeared in The Product Experience Podcast, he highlighted time pressure, misconceptions, and personal discomfort as barriers to product clarity.

I agree with him because product managers, in a rush to meet deadlines, might skip essential steps to gain clarity. Product managers can also sometimes avoid pushing for clarity to maintain relationships with colleagues, which leads to poor product outcomes.

While clarity is critical, product teams shouldn’t mistake it for certainty. Clarity means understanding the direction and purpose of the product experience process. Certainty assumes that every decision or outcome is guaranteed and unchangeable. Clarity is fixed, while certainty can shift according to the product strategy.

To gain clarity, the product team must foster a collaborative environment at the start of designing the product experience process.

While this is a mix of strategic and tactical planning, the key is to invest time upfront to get all stakeholders on the same page. Everyone needs to get involved through interactive exercises, such as discussing expected outcomes. This provides the clarity necessary for execution.

Designing Product Experiences That Count

When it comes to the direction of your product, everyone has an opinion. Sales might want one feature, customer success another, and the tech team could prefer a more complicated solution — each offering solid reasons for their choices.

However, having the right feedback and insights can outweigh the validity of their opinions, allowing you to focus on product tasks that your customers will love. Demonstrating the impact of your product experience on the company’s success shouldn’t be hard.

As a user of different products, I’d recommend you focus on an agreed-upon North Star metric — this will make it easy to demonstrate the effects of product investments.

Remember, you don’t need every tool or resource to start creating good product experiences. Without customer feedback, you can use hypotheses, test them, and identify high-risk assumptions. If you lack a clear prioritization of tasks, use lightweight data prototypes to test options on a small user group to gauge their response and adjust accordingly.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2024 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Does anyone else value experiences more than, well, stuff? The older I get, the more it’s clear that I would rather spend money making memories than spend my money on something I’ll have to store somewhere.

Plus, every now and then, the spirit of Marie Kondo descends. If an item isn’t nailed down to the floor, it’s in danger of the donation pile.

More and more consumers think like I do. In fact, a recent study conducted by Barclays found that nearly 60% of consumers would rather spend money on memories than material items. This shift in thinking (and spending!) has led to a boom in the experience economy.

To understand this shift, I spoke with Kayla Smith, the director of public relations and travel advisor for Sojourney Travel. Today, I’m sharing what I learned and giving you tips on how to make the most of the experience economy.

Table of Contents

• How to Make the Most of the Experience Economy
• What is the experience economy?
• Why the Experience Economy Matters
• Examples of the Experience Economy

What is the experience economy?

The experience economy focuses on selling memorable experiences rather than goods and services.

I asked Smith to give me her definition of the experience economy. She told me, “I would define it as sort of this cultural shift of people seeking out experiences over material things. I hate to bring COVID up, but that was a time when there was this sort of broad-spectrum cultural shift.”

Smith mentioned that the COVID pandemic helped people realize that some experiences are here only for a moment. And once the moment has passed, it’s gone forever. Smith said, “It’s the concept of ‘you don’t really know what you have until it’s gone.’ And so you had this generational shift of people saying, ‘Okay. When we get past this, I want to build memories. I want to live life to the fullest.’”

She continued, “I think it just created this atmosphere of people seeking out experiences more and more to the point where there is this huge economic shift where people are taking more trips.”

A travel business is the most notable example of a company that operates well in this economy. However, other kinds of businesses do well in this economy, too. We’ll look at some great examples later on. But first, let’s dig deeper into why the experience economy matters.

Why the Experience Economy Matters

Given the term, it’s easy to understand that a customer’s experience is the top priority for brands that rely on the experience economy. However, even if your brand doesn’t provide an experience, like a once-in-a-lifetime trip or a class to learn craft skills, core principles of the experience economy matter, and you can apply those same concepts to the service you provide your customers.

So, what are the core concepts of the experience economy? Good question. Let’s look at them.

1. Experiences help build relationships.

Building a relationship with your clients helps improve the customer experience, even before they spend any money with your brand.

When your brand goes above and beyond to provide a memorable customer experience, you have a higher chance of gaining a loyal customer. It’s why 31% of customer success leaders look for ways to maximize customer retention strategies.

Smith said when people ask about her job, she doesn’t tell them she’s in the travel business. Instead, she says, “I’m in the relationship business. On the business side of things, it’s the opportunity to expand the relationship, to keep it going, and to have a personal connection with each of your clients.”

Smith told me that looking for ways to improve and maintain the customer relationship is the core of the experience economy. She said, “I think it’s a great opportunity to build relationships with your consumer. It is a continuous relationship.”

For Smith, that continuous relationship makes a difference for Sojourney Travel. She said, “Consumers have the comfort of knowing that there’s a continuous person that they can reach out to and that they built that relationship as well. So on the consumer side, they don’t have to search for someone new every time they want to plan a trip.”

2. It’s easy to personalize based on customers’ needs.

Creating those lasting relationships leads to another reason the experience economy matters: personalization.

And customers notice — 62% of consumers say that personalized recommendations are better than general ones. Personalized recommendations tell your customers that you are listening to and hearing their needs. If you can personalize your offerings based on your customers’ wants and needs, you’re working to elevate the customer experience and deepen your relationships.

Smith made a good point about personalization when it comes to strengthening connections. She told me that when you build personalized relationships, customers keep returning to you. She said, “They come back to you, and they’re like, ‘Hey, I worked with you last time. I know you have these notes about me.’”

In fact, 59% of customers think businesses should use the data they collect on consumers to personalize their experiences. Moreover, 68% of customers would rather work with a brand that keeps notes than spend time repeating themselves to customer service reps.

When customers explicitly tell you what they want, pay attention. Reviewing your notes and records is an easy way to modify your services to meet your customers’ needs better.

3. Focusing on the customer experience can increase your revenue.

Remember how Smith and I mentioned that personalized relationships mean repeat customers? Brands that emphasize improving the customer experience and getting to know their clients better will have more opportunities to increase their revenue.

Amazingly, 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience, which can lead to increased cross-sells and upsell opportunities. In fact, 42% of businesses focus solely on the customer experience to increase the chances of these sales opportunities.

From a customer perspective, I can say this rings true. When my husband and I went on our honeymoon earlier this year, we stayed in a great little Airbnb. The hosts were super responsive and made our stay memorable. A few months later, when booking another stay, I specifically looked for rentals through our previous hosts. I knew their clean cabins provided the extra amenities my husband and I wanted.

Going the extra mile for your customers can help create more revenue opportunities, even if they’re a few months away.

Use HubSpot’s free customer journey map template.

Examples of the Experience Economy

Let’s look at some examples of brands that make the experience economy work for them.

1. Sojourney Travel

Sojourney Travel, the company Smith works for, is an excellent example of the experience economy. Sojourney Travel helps its clients book memorable travel experiences without the headache that booking and planning usually bring.

For Smith, the travel experience is more than just creating memories in new, exotic places. Instead, it’s often about the togetherness created between families during their travels. Smith said her clients are simply seeking out opportunities to be together. She said, “People are just seeking this human interaction more and more than before.”

I asked Smith why customers choose Sojourney Travel as their travel agency. She told me they focus on solving travel issues before the customer is even aware of the problem. This helps reduce the friction and frustration travelers experience, leading to a better vacation and more positive experiences.

And it leads to happy, repeat customers.

2. DIYBooks

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When I think of the experience economy, I automatically think of travel brands. However, DIYBooks is an excellent example of an experience economy that goes beyond traveling.

DIYBooks connects individuals with ghostwriters to help tell their personal stories. According to Barbara Basbanes Richter, founder of DIYBooks, they “help people write their life stories through a guided journey of memory, reflection, and storytelling.”

I asked Richter why DIYBooks works. She told me, “Writing is both thinking and feeling — it’s how we make sense of our experiences. At DIYBook, we guide writers through this process, helping them uncover memories and connect stories in ways they hadn’t expected. When writers share their completed books with families and friends, they often spark conversations that might never have happened otherwise.

“Stories that seemed ordinary become touchstones for deeper family connections. This transformation from ‘writing a book’ into ‘discovering and sharing your life story’ makes DIYBook part of the experience economy. We’re not selling a writing platform; we’re helping people preserve their stories in ways that matter.”

Like Smith and Sojourney Travel, DIYBooks is in the business of building relationships — both with its customers and between its customers’ families.

3. Declare to Dare

Debbi Sluys, a vision board expert and founder of Declare to Dare, helps her clients create the life of their dreams. Her vision board classes allow participants to develop connections to their deepest wants and desires. Sluys’s approach to her classes intentionally creates a welcoming and inclusive space to dream. Plus, she provides participants with the tools to make their dreams a reality.

Sluys’s business is a unique experience, and her local tourism board took notice. Sluys told me, “I’m in Ontario, Canada. Our municipality approached me as an experience for their tourism offers. So on the website, it has me, and then it has me connected with one of our local boutique hotels as well as a local brewery.”

She said, “And then it becomes a whole experience for a girls’ weekend because people are looking to do, to create an experience, to create that memory. And so what they receive with me is definitely the experience at the moment, but then it carries on afterward because they actually have something tangible they’re going to take home, and I’ve taught them how to use it.”

4. Flygreen

In my opinion, Flygreen is another great example of the economy of experience, especially for travelers who want to travel conveniently and in style.

Flygreen offers flyers a personalized chartered jet experience. Travelers can be in the air in as little as four hours, enjoying their preferred amenities made possible by the help of Flygreen’s aviation directors.

When I asked Pascal Couture-Trembaly, vice president of operations at Flygreen, why the customer experience is central to the brand, he told me it’s more than customer satisfaction. It’s efficiency, too.

Couture-Trembaly said, “At Flygreen, customer experience means delivering more than just a flight — it’s about offering unmatched efficiency and thoughtful expertise. For us, this translates to ensuring that a customer can make an inquiry and be ready to take off within four hours. In private aviation, time is a luxury our customers value far more than a glass of champagne or a leather seat.”

He said, “Exceptional service involves understanding the purpose of every trip and seamlessly matching it with the ideal aircraft. A fishing expedition requires something entirely different from an in-flight business meeting, and our job is to make those decisions effortless for our clients.”

It’s important to remember that customer experience transcends far beyond brands that fit neatly into the experience economy. What I mean by that is even if your brand doesn’t sell a direct experience, like a hotel stay, a guided tour, or a private class, you can still benefit from the concepts that make the experience economy great.

Here’s how.

1. Listen to your customers.

Smith told me the biggest way to make the experience economy work for your brand is to “focus on the relationships. Listen to the people.”

She said, “All in all, you’re not selling a product. You’re selling yourself and your services. You’re selling an experience to the client. You’re selling memories and the opportunity of togetherness.”

When you approach customer experience from a blind perspective, providing the experience your customers want and need can be challenging. This is why open conversation and dialogue is critical.

2. Dig deep into your customer’s “why.”

As you create opportunities to listen to your customers, take some time to understand why they are spending money with your brand.

Smith told me that it’s vital to understand why a customer is seeking out your services. Digging into their “why” is how you can provide the best, most personalized experience.

If you’re unsure of their reasonings, ask the deep questions. Smith said it’s as easy as asking them why they’re seeking out your services. Send a customer survey or contact your clients just to catch up and ask if you can do anything to support them. You might be surprised at how easy it is to tailor the experience when you clearly understand their needs.

3. Promote the human connection.

If I learned anything through my master’s of education program, it’s that connections are a basic human desire. I appreciate brands that focus on human-to-human interaction, and I think it’s one of the top takeaways of why the experience economy works so well.

According to Smith, it’s what people want to experience with a brand. She told me, “You know, I think people seek experiences because of the overall human connection that they desire.”

She said, “I think that they are going to want more of that because it is a basic human desire to connect with others and other like-minded people. When you feed into that when you talk to people, get an idea of what they’re looking for, and really form these relationships, you’re going to have a successful business model.”

Focus on the Experience

As I learned by chatting with Smith, consumers seek opportunities for experiences and memories.

No matter your brand, whether you sell an experience like DIYBooks or goods and services, listening to your clients will help you create a better customer experience. A positive customer experience will keep your clients coming back for more, helping to increase your revenue and bottom line.

When I research companies online, I don’t just want to hear the company’s pitch; I want to hear from its customers. That’s where customer testimonials come into play. But what makes some testimonials so much better than others?

In this post, I’m sharing 25 testimonial examples showing how customers can build hype for your business. I’ll also share insights from marketers and business owners to teach you how to source, write, and distribute testimonials effectively.

Table of Contents

• What is a testimonial?
• How to Write a Testimonial
• 10 Testimonial Examples
• How 13 Companies Leverage Testimonials
• Why are testimonials so effective?
• How to Ask for a Testimonial
• 10 Different Types of Testimonials
• Testimonial Design Best Practices
• Where and How to Share Testimonials
• Testimonial Page Examples: What elements make a good testimonial page?

Effective testimonials go beyond a simple quote that proclaims your greatness. They need to resonate with your target audience and the people who could also potentially benefit from the work you do in the future.

The best testimonials tell a story with friction and resolution. At the end of the day, your customer is the hero, but your brand helps them reach their goals.

Why are testimonials so effective?

Testimonials are a powerful tool used across multiple customer touchpoints, from marketing materials to sales conversations. Here’s why they are so effective:

Social Proof

When people are uncertain, they often seek validation from those who have already taken the leap. Testimonials as social proof allow potential customers to rely on others’ experiences to guide their decisions.

As Marissa Taffer, founder and president of M. Taffer Consulting, explained, “Testimonials are critical to my business. As a consultant, the field can be crowded, and having past (or current) clients paint a picture of what it‘s like to work with me can help me win a new piece of business better than if I try to explain what it’s like myself.”

Storytelling

Testimonials add a storytelling element to your marketing. They transform customer experiences into relatable narratives that potential clients can connect with.

When I spoke to Nadine Heir, an organic marketer at Tukki, she shared that in her work with B2B companies and tech SaaS companies, they “rely heavily on testimonials to add a story element to their marketing.”

By connecting with prospects through relatable stories, businesses humanize their brand and establish a deeper connection.

Demonstrating Impact

Testimonials do more than tell a story; they demonstrate real impact.

Heir highlighted this when she told me, “Without testimonials, it’s hard to demonstrate how technology or services move the needle for customers.”

Rather than simply telling potential customers about your offerings, testimonials highlight the tangible results your service or product has delivered.

Building Trust

Testimonials are essential for trust-building as they show potential clients that others have had positive experiences using your product or services. For service providers, in particular, this is often invaluable.

Nathan Ojaokomo, a freelance content writer, emphasizes this point: “Using testimonials makes it easier for potential clients to trust me.”

How to Ask for a Testimonial

I’ve learned that there’s no one-size-fits-all system for collecting testimonials. Businesses approach this differently depending on their type of business, product, customer/client base, and available resources. The key is tailoring your approach to your specific needs and goals.

Here are some of the most common strategies businesses use to gather valuable testimonials.

1. Make a direct ask.

Sometimes, the simplest and most effective way to collect testimonials is by directly asking your customers for them.

This is especially true for service providers or businesses that can’t allocate resources for more complex systems or lengthy interview processes.

But how do you ask for these testimonials?

Asking for a testimonial might seem awkward, but with practice and systemization, it becomes easier.

A great place to start is by sending a personalized email. As Ojaokomo explains, “I just ask them in an email. Something like, ‘We’ve been working together for a while now. Do you mind saying a few things about our work together? You can mention any from my communication, the quality of my work, and the results I’ve generated for your business.’”

The key is to make the request feel natural while clearly outlining what you need from them.

2. Conduct customer interviews to uncover insights.

Interviews often reveal in-depth stories about how your product or service has addressed specific challenges and delivered value.

Eric Doty, content lead at Dock, shared with me that, “Most of our testimonials come from full customer case studies based on 30-minute customer interviews.”

Similarly, Stella Inabo, a content marketer at Float, also shared with me how their customer interview process led to in-depth customer testimonials: “In our case, we conducted 30-minute interviews with everyone we spoke to. I started with the usual questions: ‘What’s your job? What are the hard parts of your job? How does our tool solve your pain points? What do you like or dislike about it?’ If someone mentioned something interesting, I let them elaborate or asked a follow-up question. As a result, I ended up with very comprehensive insights.”

3. Document and analyze customer interactions.

Some of the best testimonials happen organically during customer interactions. However, many businesses miss the opportunity to collect these valuable testimonials because these interactions aren’t properly documented.

“Many companies miss out on excellent, organically shared feedback because their product, sales, or CX teams don’t know what to look for, or they aren’t documenting every customer call,’ Heir explained to me.

At Tukki, she takes this a step further: “We record everything, which allows us to follow up with customers later via email, saying, ‘In our call, you mentioned XYZ. Do you mind if we share that with our audience in marketing materials?’”

4. Systemize testimonial collection.

While the methods mentioned above are effective, setting up an automated system to collect feedback regularly can make the process even more efficient. This can take various forms like:

• Prompt customers to leave a review after each purchase. You can do this on your website or a site like Yelp or Google My Business.
• Add a review system with star ratings to your online store.
• Prompt customers to complete a customer satisfaction survey. HubSpot customers can do this easily through the Service Hub survey tools.

Customer Satisfaction Survey: Proven Tips for HONEST Answers

Tips for Collecting High-Quality Testimonials

How you collect testimonials can make or break the process, determining whether you can gather feedback at all and the quality of the testimonials you receive.

Here are some real-world tips and best practices to help ensure you get meaningful, high-quality feedback.

1. Know your target audience.

Before collecting any testimonials, clearly defining your target audience is essential. This information will be crucial in determining which segment of your customer base to include in your customer outreach.

As Ojaokomo shared, it’s crucial to “ensure the profile of the people leaving testimonials matches the profile of clients or customers you want to attract.”

If the people providing testimonials don‘t match the profile of the audience you’re trying to reach, even the most glowing testimonials are unlikely to resonate.

Once you’ve identified your target audience, the next step is to pinpoint the specific concerns or objections your testimonials should address.

Doty explained, “We have relevant testimonials based on the use case the customer is looking at. For example, we have testimonials that focus on onboarding to use with clients who are specifically looking at using Dock for onboarding.”

2. Ask at the right moment.

The timing of your request can significantly impact the willingness of a customer to leave a testimonial.

When a customer shares positive feedback, seize the opportunity to ask for a testimonial while their enthusiasm is fresh. As Doty pointed out, “Whenever we get glowingly positive feedback in an email or an Intercom support chat, we‘ll ask if that customer is willing to leave a review for us. They almost always say yes if we ask them right after they’ve given that positive feedback.”

3. Provide a framework and/or examples.

Giving your customers some direction can improve the quality of their testimonials by helping them provide more focused responses.

Doty explained to me how this approach works at Dock. “To get better answers out of them, I send them a customer story guide,” he explained. “I also send them sample questions, but not the exact questions I’m going to ask to make sure their answers are off-the-cuff, authentic, and unscripted.”

4. Use software to support the process.

Using software tools can streamline your process and make it easier to capture valuable insights.

Doty mentions Riverside and Descript as his go-to tools, while Inabo is a big fan of Maven. She shares, “Maven is great because it helps take specific notes, transcribes accurately, and uses AI to surface highly targeted insights.”

5. Share your final draft with the customer before publishing.

While it may seem like permission is implied once a testimonial is given, securing explicit consent before making it public on your business assets is essential.

Heir emphasized this, saying, “We send a contract to get explicit permission to share their words or videos. We also ensure they approve the specific wording before posting anything publicly.”

Inabo also noted, “We typically don’t have things like this happen at Float, but there was an instance where one software company said their legal team had to look through what we had written.”

Taking this proactive step helps prevent any potential issues down the road. It ensures the customer can review the testimonial, get approval from relevant stakeholders, and request any necessary amendments before it’s shared publicly.

Now that I’ve covered how to collect testimonials and customer feedback effectively, let’s discuss how to get the most out of this feedback.

In this section, I’ll share expert tips on how to turn that feedback into compelling testimonials.

1. Highlight Customer Pain Points

The most compelling testimonials are built around a story — and every story begins with a problem. “When presenting testimonials, businesses should highlight customer pain points and how their service provided a solution,” explains Safia Marmon, project lead at Sunbowl.

Highlighting the pain point in a testimonial is crucial because it allows your target audience to put themselves in the customer’s shoes and envision themselves overcoming the same challenge with the help of your product or service.

2. Keep the Customer’s Success Front and Center

One powerful lesson I learned while speaking to Inabo was Float’s approach to crafting compelling testimonials.

“We‘ve found that people want to feel like they’re good at their job, can spot a great tool, and implement a solution,” she explained. “It’s important that the customer’s success comes first, with our tool serving as the aid.”

A strong testimonial doesn’t just praise your product — it highlights the customer’s achievements. By spotlighting their success, you make the testimonial more relatable and inspiring.

3. Balance Emotion With Data

A compelling testimonial blends emotion and statistics to create a story that resonates and proves tangible value. “Emotions and statistics are the bread and butter of a standout testimonial,” Heir shared.

Doty also emphasized the importance of emotional appeal, noting that this can make testimonials feel more genuine and credible. “Having a bit of raw emotion, unfiltered honesty, or a specific anecdote in the testimonial versus having a perfectly polished quote makes them resonate more,” he explained.

But how do you strike the right balance between emotional appeal and data?

This balance emerged out of necessity for Inabo, but became a powerful strategy. She shared, “When I started conducting customer interviews at Float, I sent out questions beforehand, specifically asking them to come prepared with metrics.

However, many of them came with ‘feelings’ instead. Rather than sharing concrete data, I would hear things like, ‘It feels less chaotic. It feels like we’re more efficient. It feels like projects are faster.‘ So, what we ended up doing was blending those emotions with public data, which led to headlines like ’This company became more efficient in handling 200 staff.’”

4. Be Specific

Vague statements like “It was great!” don’t add much value to a testimonial. Instead, aim for specific feedback that highlights the benefits customers experience. Instead of using blanket or ambiguous statements like “made more money,” provide specific data and quantitative results, such as “grew our sales by X%,” to add credibility and detail to the testimonial.

Ojaokomo echoed this point, sharing, “The testimonial should be specific, so potential customers can see that the client didn’t just use a template or make a blanket statement. If possible, include real numbers.”

5. Keep It Short

People have short attention spans, which is evident from a recent Wistia study. The study found that the longer a video testimonial is, the lower its engagement: 45% of viewers stayed engaged with a video testimonial under one minute, but that number dropped to just 23% when the video exceeded five minutes.

If your testimonial is unnecessarily long, your readers will disengage and move on to reading something else. I recommend keeping written testimonials to two or three paragraphs or a video/audio testimonial under three minutes.

6. Attribute the Testimonial

Get permission to attribute a quote with the customer or company name whenever possible. An attributed testimonial is much more powerful than an anonymous one. If you can’t attribute a quote, use as much detail as you can, such as the person’s first name, location, and age or type of company.

To personalize a testimonial, add before and after images, a speaker photo or company logo, and other images that help readers connect emotionally.

10 Different Types of Testimonials

Testimonials can be collected and shared in different formats and platforms/mediums. In this section, I’ll cover ten testimonials and briefly discuss how they can be leveraged in your sales and marketing strategies.

1. Quote Testimonials

Quote testimonials display positive statements about your company in a customer or brand evangelist’s own words. This review style can be significantly more effective than traditional advertising methods, as most consumers will trust a peer over a paid actor. Include an image of the person to make it even more effective.

If your company wants to attract customers of a different demographic, finding testimonials with the same profile as your new audience can help make the connection.

2. Video Testimonials

Video is one of the fastest-growing content mediums, with 46% of companies using video to create video testimonials, according to Wyzowl’s 2023 study.

This shift towards video is evident in the approach of companies like Sunbowl, where, as Marmon shared, “We’re now focusing on authentic video testimonials, shifting away from our previous approach of using written reviews.”

Seeing another person share their story is more compelling than words on a page. 87% of marketers report that video has helped them to increase leads and sales, meaning they carry a powerful punch.

Consider this two-minute video testimonial that HubSpot created with a happy customer, ClassPass.

52% Increase in Lead Conversion Rate | ClassPass x HubSpot’s Customer Success Story

3. Audio Testimonials

Audio is similar to video in how it can influence and motivate your audience. For example, you can use an audio testimonial in a podcast, radio ad, or LinkedIn content.

One great benefit of audio is that it‘s cost-effective. You don’t need an entire production crew and tons of expensive equipment. You only need a microphone, recording software, and a quiet room to record in. With those tools, you can tell an inspiring customer story by threading different customer quotes together in one track.

4. Case Study Testimonials

A case study is an in-depth analysis of a customer’s experience with your company. These pieces — compelling for B2B companies — use a more scientific approach to prove how your business played a role in the customer’s success.

For example, case studies often use facts and observations to demonstrate how certain products or services benefit actual customers of your business. You can also use data visualization and storytelling to illustrate your benefits.

5. Social Media Testimonials

When people have an emotional brand experience (good or bad), they want to tell someone about it. That’s where social media testimonials come into play.

When you see customers talking about your brand on social media, engage with them. Like and comment on their post for added exposure. Be sure to ask permission before sharing those experiences on your website or other content.

6. Customer Interviews Testimonials

Customer interviews are an excellent way for your business to ask customers about specific aspects of your business and how they played a role in their success.

This format lets you show off your different products and features and lets potential leads see their real-world application. You can repurpose a customer interview over multiple mediums: written, video, photos, and audio.

7. Authority Testimonials

Also known as “influencer testimonials,” authority testimonials are pieces of content that include a celebrity or spokesperson supporting your company.

Often, this person is a significant influencer of your target audience and helps build your business’s credibility.

The most effective spokespersons are the ones who share the core values of the business and deeply connect with the target audience. Influencer testimonials can be expensive, and finding the right influencer can be challenging. Still, when they succeed, these campaigns can pay dividends for your company over time.

8. Peer Review Testimonials

Peer review testimonials are feedback that customers post on review sites like Yelp, Angi (formerly Angie’s List), or Trustpilot. These reviews can influence customers as many consumers look at these review sites during decision-making, particularly when using a company for the first time.

Studies show that 54% of consumers will only consider buying from a business if they have four or more stars on a review site.

These reviews can be quickly captured, reformatted, and shared on your company’s website, bringing social proof to your site.

9. Blog Post Testimonials

A blog post can be an informative way of displaying customer testimonials. You can write about a customer’s story in-depth and break down subtle details within the customer’s journey.

Once completed, the post can be shared either on your blog or on another blog that’s popular in your industry.

10. Press Review Testimonials

For growing companies, getting your business featured in the news (for the right reasons) is a big accomplishment.

Just like the restaurant Five Guys decorates its walls with press accolades, consider how to highlight positive media reviews. Capture quotes, buy reprint rights, and share your brand’s media coverage on social media.

Are you feeling inspired yet? Good, but before you start crafting your customer testimonials, it’s important to understand some of the best design practices.

In the next section, I’ll cover key design fundamentals you’ll want to focus on when creating customer testimonials.

Testimonial Design Best Practices

While customer testimonials can appear in many formats, there are still some standard guidelines to follow, regardless of your chosen approach.

Including the following elements in your customer reviews will make your customer testimonial feel more genuine for your target audience.

1. Get inspired.

Testimonial pages should feel unique yet familiar. Often, the best way to learn is to be inspired by successful examples. Testimonial pages are no different.

That’s why I’ve compiled a guide filled with the 25 best testimonial pages from companies we’ve seen online. Download the guide to get inspiration for your testimonial page.

[ADD FWCTA HERE INSTEAD OF OLD CTA]

2. Make it visually engaging.

The best testimonials paint a picture with words so readers can understand your purchasing value. Be sure to feature testimonials with descriptive language that’s enthusiastic and detailed to help convince your prospects to make a purchase.

Take your testimonial page one step further by incorporating more visual elements like images, videos, and social media feeds.

These are relatively easy ways to make testimonial content more engaging and prove to readers that the testimonial comes from a real person.

3. Keep it aligned.

Highlight testimonials that align with specific features of your product or service. Then, connect the dots for readers by linking to different product or tool pages. This allows readers to learn more about what they’ve just read.

All the better if there are relevant images or demo videos you can share alongside these specifically aligned testimonials.

4. Use a website page builder.

A testimonial page should be well-designed and visually appealing to maximize its intended impact. You can use a free website builder with themes and templates to quickly make a testimonial page that stands out.

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What do these look like in action? Check out the testimonial examples below to find inspiration for your testimonial page.

1. Stio’s Brand Ambassadors

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Testimonial Type: Authority

Outdoor enthusiasts need to know that a product is durable and safe (sometimes in extreme conditions!) before they will purchase it. Stio’s approach adopts brand ambassadors who wear its products and advocate on the company’s behalf.

In its testimonial pages, Stio’s brand ambassadors answer interview questions about their interests and excursions for inspiration. The ambassadors mention Stio products and include a product carousel for their favorite gear at the bottom of each testimonial page.

A quote I love: “That the Outside is for Everyone! My passion is to support my community in getting outside.”

The testimonial introduces the reader to someone they can empathize with. This testimonial has a link to a blog post that further promotes the business.

2. Blue Apron’s Instagram How-To

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Testimonial Type: Social Media, Authority

Testimonials can be simple. In fact, this testimonial by Instagram influencer Cody Tries Stuff is excellent because it’s easily shared via social media or the company’s website. That way, the brand can engage with leads on their most comfortable channels.

It’s also incredibly effective and has a foodie audience. Plus, it shows you how to use the meal kit with a discount code. Consider this comment from one of Cody Tries Stuff’s followers: “This is without a doubt the greatest blue apron ad that’s ever been created. The only time I’ve considered giving it a try.”

Pro tip: For social media reviews, consider inviting an expert to showcase your products, and don’t hesitate to include more informal elements like cute animals. (Ultimately, of course, it depends on your industry.)

3. Villa’s Tacos LA Times Review

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Testimonial Type: Press Review

Sometimes, testimonials don’t have to come from customers. In this example, a Los Angeles-based restaurant was given an excellent review by a critic from the LA Times.

While these testimonials don‘t come every day, it’s important to seize these opportunities and put this content on blast for potential leads to see. It’s also incredibly effective for a party unrelated to your business to review your product publicly.

For example, if you own a restaurant, you can potentially send pitches to editors, and if you sell a tech product, consider pitching your solution to tech publications. These reviews generate buzz and offer a uniquely unbiased yet editorialized view of your offering.

A quote I love: “Among choices of meat, I savor the nubbly beef and chorizo but take particular pleasure in the rich, hashed chicken leg that absorbs the mesquite smoke most profoundly.”

Getting this specific testimonial from a reputable third party inspires readers to desire your offering.

4. Fabletics’ #MyFabletics Hashtag

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Testimonial Type: Social Media

Fabletics leverages social media to collect testimonials from its customers. For example, it encourages customers to post themselves on their Instagram pages wearing Fabletics products and tagging “#MyFabletics.”

This provides a surge of engagement for the brand’s social account and creates free advertisement through customer advocacy.

This is one of the most cost-effective methods for collecting unbiased customer testimonials. You can create a hashtag and easily start promoting it on Instagram or TikTok without paying a single dime.

What I love: Even if users don‘t write a lengthy caption singing praises to your product, a picture will more than say enough. The quality of the product and the user’s emotion in the photo will show that your product works.

5. Harry’s Trustpilot

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Testimonial Type: Peer Review

As you can see in the image above, Harry’s has done a great job of building up its credibility on consumer review sites like Trustpilot.

Trustpilot is a highly regarded review site. High ratings give personal care company Harry‘s a major vote of confidence. You’ll rarely find a negative review, though it’s worth noting that a few negative reviews can lend credibility by making the reviews seem authentic. A TrustPilot account also enables you to analyze the reviews, pinpoint trends, and identify areas of improvement.

A quote I love: “How to solve my issue with my razor’s lubrication strip disintegrating was explained promptly and politely. And a free pack of cartridges was sent to compensate. Excellent service.”

6. Ahrefs Customer Quotes

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Testimonial Type: Quote

While Ahrefs doesn’t have a lot of quote testimonials on its homepage, the quotes used are catchy, specific, direct, and inspiring. In addition, the customer quotes come personalized with photos.

I love the simple carousel format and how you can click through different industries for quotes. The testimonial featured above is from Maile Waite, head of content for Ahrefs client CloudApp.

A quote I love: “Using Ahrefs’ data to plan our content strategy helped us increase visits to our blog by over 200% compared to the previous year.”

7. FASTSIGNS Customer Testimonial Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgMyk8jJIpA

Testimonial Type: Video

FASTSIGNS’ testimonial video focuses on several customers who love to use their product. It’s simple storytelling at its best and emphasizes the impact and end result of the products. This three-minute video has more than two million views.

8. BambooHR’s Case Study Testimonial

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Testimonial Type: Case Study

The big smiling picture of Angie stands out and invites readers to consider how BambooHR helped her organization. This is a real person that I’d love to trust.

The case study above focuses on the challenge, the solution, and the result. In addition, quotes from Angie are included in the content to personalize the testimonial and make it more relatable to readers.

A quote I love: “I can have training with the supervisors on how to utilize goals or assessments [in BambooHR], or how to do one-on-ones. And across the board, it’s the same, no matter the location. That brings that consistency you must have with multiple branches in multiple locations.”

9. OptinMonster’s Case Study Testimonials

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Testimonial Type: Case Study, Testimonial Quote

OptinMonster leverages social proof at scale by showcasing a large testimonial page with a pull quote and photo for each. When you click on one, it opens a complete case study with quantitative results illustrated at the top, followed by a narrative about the customer journey.

A quote I love: “We are all in on OptinMonster. It works seamlessly for us. It has allowed us to dramatically increase our email subscribers.”

10. Zendesk’s Customer Stories

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Testimonial Type: Case Study

Zendesk has a dedicated customer page that contains success stories of companies that use the product. The testimonials work for several reasons. Let’s take a look at the example above.

First, there are quote testimonials from the main players at Tile, offering social proof to readers. Second, the case study is also specific by highlighting the company’s challenges and how Zendesk helped.

A quote I love: “With the Zendesk and Ada integration, we were able to not only save costs on seasonal headcount, but we were also able to see revenue growth from customers who were being served at faster rates.”

Now that you’ve seen some excellent testimonial examples, let’s look at how to create your own testimonials.

Where and How to Share Testimonials

After you’ve collected several valuable testimonials and designed them the way you like, it’s time to consider how you’ll distribute them. I advise repurposing and adding them everywhere your potential customers might be! Look beyond the testimonial page with these placement ideas.

1. Share them on your website.

This is a simple use case for most businesses. For example, at Dock, Doty shared that they have testimonials on the home page and throughout the website.

Similarly, consider sprinkling social proof into your landing and services pages by adding a relevant quote or link to a case study on each one.

Creating a dedicated testimonial page to house all your testimonials and case studies is also important, providing potential customers with a central hub to visit when evaluating your product or service.

2. Use them in ad creatives.

Customer testimonials are powerful assets that can be repurposed into engaging ad creatives. Doty shared with me how the team at Dock uses customer interviews to create video clips for paid ads.

He explained, “As marketing collateral, we turn customer interviews into video clips and run paid ads to them on LinkedIn.”

3. Leverage them for organic content.

Testimonials can also be integrated across various types of content. For example, Inabo emphasized the importance of case studies in her content creation process at Float.

“For blog posts specifically, once we have testimonials, we use them in several ways: generating content ideas, writing ‘how-to’ sections in articles, and finding opportunities to incorporate them into upcoming content we want to optimize.”

4. Turn them into sales collateral.

Doty shared how Dock embeds customer testimonials and video clips into their sales strategy, saying, “For sales, we embed customer testimonials and video clips in our digital sales rooms.”

Similarly, Marmon explained how Sunbowl uses testimonials as social proof in its sales process when she told me, “They are primarily used in our sales strategy to show clients the work we’ve accomplished and how they can achieve similar results on their Shopify site.”

For service providers, testimonials can also be a great sales tool to support pitches and outreach. For example, as a freelance writer, Ojaokomo uses testimonials as social proof when pitching potential clients. He shared, “I use them on my website and also include them in my pitches to potential clients as a form of social proof.”

5. Use them to train internal AI tools.

This is an exciting and often underutilized use case, which I discovered through an interesting example shared by Inabo. She explained, “After we wrote the customer stories, my manager took them and plugged them into ChatGPT to train a model. This gave us a custom GPT that draws from the case studies to answer questions.”

6. Distribute on external review sites.

Publishing testimonials on third-party review sites can be a great way to expand their reach.

Doty shared, “We also ask if the customer is willing to leave a review on G2. Having that review publicly available on G2 gives more legitimacy to the testimonial when we feature it on our website.”

Testimonial Page Examples: What elements make a good testimonial page?

While many companies spread testimonials throughout their site, creating a dedicated testimonial page is also a good idea.

Testimonial pages are often one of the most visited pages by potential customers. Here are some critical components to include in your company’s testimonial page.

Choose headlines carefully.

Even though testimonials provide a wealth of value, many customers won’t take the time to read every one you put on your testimonial page.

One way to ensure potential customers easily find the testimonials most relevant to them is to use descriptive headlines. Instead of summarizing the entire testimonial into a headline, try only including the most essential part. It may be a comment on a specific product or a result the customer received by working with your company.

Ultimately, you’ll see better engagement rates if you keep headlines to around five to seven words.

Paint a complete customer profile picture.

As stated earlier, people are more likely to buy a product if a peer has had a good experience with the company or service. One way to connect a potential customer with a current client is through a customer profile.

In your testimonials, include all the information you can about the customer — age, gender, occupation, company, etc.

The more data you can share about the person, the more likely someone visiting the page will personally connect with the testimonial.

Consider featuring a single testimonial.

There are many ways to organize your testimonial page, but one of the most impactful is to consider featuring a single testimonial above all the others.

For example, if one of your company‘s key differentiators is your team’s customer service, you‘ll want to pick the best testimonial you have around a customer’s experience.

Having the glowing review be the first thing potential clients see can help drive home that your company prides itself on delivering exceptional service.

Now, let’s see how other companies utilize their pages to drive leads.

1. HubSpot

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On our own testimonials page, HubSpot features enthusiastic customer reviews detailing the benefits, quantitative results, and implementation journey to HubSpot. The teaser for each case study shows the company’s industry, size, and hubs used, letting readers pick a case study that’s closest to their experience.

What I love: The testimonials make it clear that the change was worth it for the customer.

2. Bluebeam

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Many companies struggle to grab people’s attention using their testimonial pages, but Bluebeam does a great job of catching your eye as soon as you arrive on the page.

While it’s technically called a case studies page, the first thing you see is a set of project examples in the form of large, bold images that rotate on a carousel.

What I love: Scroll down, and you can also click on video case studies and view customer panels.

3. mHelpDesk

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Visit mHelpDesk‘s testimonial page, and you’ll see videos and text testimonials equipped with pictures.

Some of the testimonial videos don’t have high production quality.

However, they get the message across and cover useful and relevant information — which shows you don’t need to invest thousands in production to get some testimonial videos up.

What I love: In line with the theme of earning trust, the testimonial page displays awards and badges of recognition.

4. ClearSlide

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One of the first things I noticed about ClearSlide‘s testimonial page is how creatively it’s named — “What They’re Saying.”

It includes a smattering of customer quotes, topped with client logos from big names like The Economist and Starwood.

Pro tip: If you have celebrities or influencers within their community, include and even highlight their testimonials on your page.

5. FocusLab

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FocusLab took a unique and very cool-looking design approach to its testimonial page — which is fitting, seeing as it‘s a design agency. Again, it’s technically a visual catalog of both previous projects and works-in-progress.

Instead of just listing client quotes, the page opts for a card-like design with interactive, rectangular elements you can click on to see the complete case study — with quotes occasionally appearing in between.

What I love: FocusLab not only covers the challenges faced by clients and how FocusLab helped solve them, but the case studies also include some of the steps in the design process.

6. 99designs

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99designs takes an unconventional approach to its testimonial page. Using a star-rating system not usually seen in the B2B sector, the page is headlined with an eye-catching video with customer reviews below it.

What I love: The page allows users to sort through customer reviews by category so they can read the ones most relevant to them.

7. Slack

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Slack’s customer testimonials are under a section they’ve called “Customer Stories,” highlighting an individual company per post.

Slack uses individual testimonials to highlight key product features and how the customer used them — a genius way to give a product tour while letting happy customers sing your praises.

What I love: Each review features a quote that summarizes how Slack helped the customer’s business. From each blurb, visitors can click to learn more about the specifics of that customer case study to get even more insights.

8. Dribbble

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Dribbble’s “wall of love” is clean and simple, with highlighted quotes, names, and photos. What I love about this page is how honest and straightforward the user reviews are.

It’s quickly clear to a reader that these testimonials haven’t been altered or edited — which lends the site a degree of authenticity and trustworthiness that might convince someone to start using the product.

Pro tip: Avoid over-editing your customer’s testimonials. Otherwise, it’ll sound like you wrote them even though you didn’t.

9. BioClarity

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BioClarity’s cruelty-free, plant-derived skincare line is about one thing: being green. Green is all over the website, and its Instagram is covered in images of people applying green serums to their faces.

In this case, pictures serve as better testimonials than words — but BioClarity still uses both.

On its reviews page, visitors can see pictures of items, star ratings, and words of recommendation — all in a soothing green theme.

What I love: Visitors can click on the reviews page to read in-depth product reviews from real customers from the results page.

10. Kissmetrics’ Customer Quotes

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Kissmetric’s testimonial page features quotes from three customers who describe how the software helped them achieve their goals.

Notice how they highlight different features that Kissmetrics offers and how using the software directly impacted their business.

What I love: This is a great example of a testimonial page that showcases the brand’s value.

11. Xero

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Xero’s customer stories page is beautifully designed and highly user-friendly. It features detailed biographies of its customers and really makes you feel connected to their stories.

In one example, we meet Amy, who’s using Xero’s software and services to run her business.

Her testimonial page includes quotes, videos, and plenty of pictures showing not only how Amy uses Xero but also showing off her interests and personality as well.

This makes Amy’s testimonial more relatable because it feels genuine to Xero’s target audience. And, since I feel like I know Amy through her page, I’m more likely to trust her testimonial.

Pro tip: Use storytelling elements to bring your customers’ experiences to life.

12. REI

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Here’s an excellent example of a blog testimonial page for an outdoor retailer. REI uses this section of its blog to promote different product benefits and uses.

What I love: Customers can contribute stories, and readers can vote and comment on the posts. This structure starts valuable conversations about the business and creates a community of like-minded customers.

13. Esch Landscaping LLC

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At the end of the day, if you’re an SMB, your testimonial page shouldn’t break the bank. You don’t have to build out an entirely new sector of your site to showcase your testimonials effectively.

Instead, build your testimonial page directly into your site’s interface, like the example above.

Esch Landscaping has a clean, straightforward testimonial page integrated seamlessly into its main site. It has videos highlighting the company’s work and individual quotes from clients who were satisfied with their experience.

What I love: This is an excellent example of how SMBs can execute a cost-effective testimonial page.

Writing Testimonials That Connect with Your Audience

As I’ve worked on this piece, I’ve come to appreciate how creating impactful testimonials requires a thoughtful, strategic approach. From establishing the right processes to asking the right questions and transforming feedback into compelling narratives, every detail plays a vital role.

By sharing practical tips and real-world testimonial examples throughout this post, I hope you‘ve gained valuable insights into how some of the best in the business create testimonials that not only capture customers’ experiences but also deeply resonate with their audience.