Even if you know your customer experience (CX) needs improving, it can be difficult to know where to start. Customer experience transformation can seem expensive and overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be.
Small businesses don’t need big teams or massive budgets to make real improvements. You just need a well-planned strategy.
This article will act as your roadmap to customer experience transformation. You’ll learn what it is and how digital transformation is driving customer experience. You’ll leave with actionable steps to take on your transformation journey.
What is customer experience transformation, and why should you care?
Customer experience transformation is the process of rethinking and redesigning how you interact with customers across every touchpoint.
It extends across departments, using technology, data and change management to deliver more personalized and meaningful interactions that delight the customer.
Other benefits include:
Meeting customer expectations. Research shows 86% of B2B customers expect companies to know their personal information during interactions.
Reducing customer churn. Companies that excel at personalization are 48% more likely to have exceeded revenue goals and 71% more likely to report improved customer loyalty.
Increasing brand reputation. Exceptional customer experiences generate word-of-mouth marketing, with Forrester finding that 90% of B2B buyers trust recommendations from industry peers.
Transformation is also a way of mitigating CX issues before they lead to serious business consequences.
If you’re suffering from one of the five problems below, a CX transformation effort can stop customers from leaving for competitors who offer smoother and more personalized experiences.
5 signs your CX isn’t working:
1. Low customer retention rates
2. An increase in negative complaints
3. Low customer satisfaction scores
4. Difficulty tracking customer journeys
5. Slow customer support resolution times
In some cases, transformation efforts can make the customer experience the reason prospects choose your brand over a competitor.
For example, Fujitsu Europe used customer experience transformation to improve the B2B buying experience. In the four years from 2020 to 2024, the company saw an almost 30-point increase in its Net Promoter Score (NPS) for IT services and a 42-point increase in NPS for its digital transformation services, leading to contract renewals and extensions.
While a successful transformation requires expertise, strategy and company-wide buy-in, new technologies offer one of the easiest ways to improve the customer experience.
Tools and tech that power transformation without an enterprise budget
Tech is a core part of any customer transformation initiative, helping you automate processes and personalize interactions.
To see success, though, you don’t need to implement half a dozen new tools or have an enterprise-level budget. Use the information below to pinpoint the right tool for your customer experience needs.
A CRM to fix fragmented customer data
A customer relationship management (CRM) system centralizes prospect and interaction data, giving your teams a 360-degree view of each customer.
When you have all your customer data in one place, support staff can have more informed conversations, sales reps can follow up promptly and handovers can become smoother. In other words, no customers fall through the cracks.
For instance, Pipedrive’s customizable pipeline lets you easily see which customers are at each stage of your sales funnel:
Pipedrive also integrates with hundreds of other business applications, including:
Customer support solutions like Intercom and LiveChat
Analytics platforms like Google Analytics and Scoop Analytics
Integrating all these platforms ensures you capture and store data from every interaction across all touchpoints in one place.
Doing so helps companies like DashThis improve client relationships. The digital marketing reporting software provider’s account managers use interaction history to personalize every conversation and adapt responses to improve customer satisfaction.
By centralizing customer data, your CRM also lets you personalize customer interactions across multiple channels.
If a company integrates its CRM with an advertising platform, email marketing tool or e-commerce platform, it can use customer information to:
Run retargeting ads based on previously browsed products
Send personalized upsell emails that relate to a recent purchase
Serve up personalized product recommendations based on their recent purchase history
Customers feel known no matter the channel, and every interaction becomes meaningful and intentional.
AI and workflow automation to fix inconsistent engagement
Artificial intelligence (AI) and workflow automation use predictive analytics to forecast customer behavior and deliver information before they have to ask for it.
The technology lets you be proactive, saving your employees time while ensuring customers receive the support they need.
Compare a company that doesn’t use AI and automation when engaging customers to one that does:
Without AI, sales and support teams at the first company must remember to speak to customers at key points of the journey, like at the start of the onboarding process. If employees forget to message customers, customers will feel neglected or struggle to get started with the product. Both scenarios can erode customer trust and satisfaction.
With AI andautomation, staff at the second company can send automated welcome emails packed with useful tips. AI agents can even help sales reps prioritize their best customers and personalize messages according to each prospect’s needs.
For example, Pipedrive’s AI-powered Sales Assistant helps reps engage meaningfully with the prospects most likely to convert. It constantly analyzes each of your reps’ deals to identify the hottest leads and recommend actions that move deals forward.
Customers receive personalized and helpful messages that let them take action toward their goals. Sales reps are also more responsive, meaning customers don’t have to wait weeks for a sales demo or additional product information.
AI can even help your team create more relevant messages much faster.
Instead of referring to CRM notes when writing an email, sales reps can use Pipedrive’s AI email writer to create a highly personalized message from a simple prompt using generative AI.
AI tools keep Spark Interactive’s sales reps focused, motivated and able to deliver effective sales communications. As a result, the company has averaged a 12% annual increase in its bottom line over the past few years.
Chatbots to fix long customer resolution times
Chatbots and self-service tools effectively reduce long customer resolution times – one of the biggest sources of frustration in the customer experience.
The technology works by allowing customers to solve their own customer support requests.
For example, small businesses can configure Pipedrive’s chatbot to:
Collect customer information
Direct customers to knowledge base resources
Handle low-level requests
Handover customers to human agents
You can tailor the chatbot to reflect your brand and offer different messaging on specific pages:
Along with using chatbots in customer support, the Pipedrive team uses chatbots to qualify leads and schedule meetings.
Chatbots improve the CX by helping users achieve their goals faster, whether finding an answer or scheduling a product demo. Fast responses mean they’re less likely to seek help from a competitor and less likely to fall out of the funnel because a sales rep didn’t reach out to them in time.
Email sequencing to fix ineffective and unpersonalized messaging
Email sequencing automates personalized outreach at scale, ensuring every customer feels important when you interact with them.
If your email marketing software integrates with your CRM, you can use customer data to automatically personalize email templates.
With Campaigns by Pipedrive, for example, you can create a ready-made template using a drag-and-drop interface and add placeholders for customer data like their name, company and customer preferences.
Create triggers to send emails automatically after pre-defined events, such as completing a sales demo, closing a sale or onboarding a customer.
Using a tool like Pipedrive to store customer data and send campaigns doesn’t just improve personalization, it also saves small businesses like Trainify money, simplifies their tool stacks and reduces human error.
Email sequencing keeps customers informed throughout their journey and ensures everyone receives the same high-quality, personalized experience. It also results in higher-quality conversations because reps aren’t rushing to send menial messages.
Technology is only one part of a digital transformation customer experience. Next, you’ll learn how to implement them effectively step by step.
A 5-step roadmap to customer experience transformation
Customer experience digital transformation doesn’t require flashy tools or help from expensive consultancies. Every small business owner can make meaningful improvements that make things easier, faster and better for their customers.
Below is a step-by-step guide to delivering a successful digital transformation and customer experience strategy without hiring a consultant.
1. Map your customer journey
Your customer’s experience is shaped by their journey. Mapping that journey helps you identify customer needs, opportunities and touchpoints where you can improve engagement.
Without customer journey mapping, you risk delivering inconsistent experiences – telling a different story to customers on social media than through email.
You’ll want to identify all of the touchpoints customers can have with your brand from the moment they hear about your company to the point of purchase and beyond.
At each touchpoint, analyze customer behavior. Think about what they’re doing, how they feel and what might stop them from progressing further down the funnel.
Example: At the awareness stage, a customer finds Pipedrive by Googling “best CRMs for small businesses”.
They read product landing pages and blog posts to learn more about the CRM and how it can solve their problems.
They might be overwhelmed by the number of CRMs available or the range of features each tool has.
It’s a lot of information to track, so it’s useful to write everything down in a customer journey map template like the one below.
Download our customer journey map template
Here’s what the template looks like:
By the end of the process, you’ll clearly understand how customers act and what they think when they interact with your company. This understanding will make it easier to see what’s working and improve CX-based decision-making.
2. Collect and integrate customer data
A unified view of customer data is essential for delivering personalized experiences at every stage of the customer journey.
Imagine you’re struggling with a fragmented ecosystem, where data is siloed in marketing, email and social media platforms. You can’t use information from one interaction to personalize another.
Start by using a CRM like Pipedrive to consolidate all customer interactions into a single contact record. Centralizing this info will make it easy for marketing, sales and customer success teams to understand the context of a customer’s journey and tailor their messages accordingly.
For example, your team can use Pipedrive’s contact timeline to get a visual representation of activities over time:
Each contact has a detail view that contains essential information like:
Contact information
Deal status
Recent interactions
Pipedrive captures most of this data automatically, but employees can also add notes or files to each contact.
Connect your CRM with other key apps, such as your marketing platform, customer management software and accounting tools, to collect even more data. Pipedrive integrates with hundreds of these apps, allowing information to flow automatically between systems.
You can find relevant integrations by searching the Pipedrive Marketplace or using SmartApp recommendations, which will give you personalized integration suggestions based on your company size and industry.
Don’t be shy when it comes to integrating other apps. The more customer data you store in your CRM, the easier and more effectively you’ll be able to use technology to improve the customer experience.
3. Implement technology, automation and AI
AI, email marketing software and other tools let you use customer data to inform, automate and personalize customer interactions. Customers receive more frequent and meaningful messages that can increase sales and improve customer loyalty.
Once you know which type of software will solve your CX challenge, find the right tool by looking for the following features:
A user-friendly interface | Ensures your team can adopt and use the tool quickly without heavy training or tech support |
CRM and other integrations | Keeps customer data synced across platforms, so teams stay aligned and workflows stay seamless |
Real-time data tracking and reporting | Lets you track key metrics and uncover customer insights specific to the buyer’s journey |
Team collaboration tools | Enables cross-functional alignment between sales, support and marketing to deliver seamless experiences |
Scalability | Grows with your business, supporting more users, data and advanced CX functionality as you expand |
Once you’ve chosen the perfect tool, combine it with your customer data to personalize every interaction.
For example, your sales reps can use customer data from Pipedrive alongside the platform’s workflow automation, email marketing and AI and machine learning features to quickly create a personalized follow-up email after a sales demo:
Sales reps can customize pre-built templates with information from your CRM, like the prospect’s name, goals and pain points.
Alternatively, they can use AI to write a personalized email using a short prompt.
Either way, the recipient receives a relevant message that speaks directly to their needs and makes them feel valued. As a result, the prospect is much more likely to move down the funnel.
4. Create customer feedback loops
Customer feedback provides vital information on the impact of your transformation efforts from the people who matter most. It doesn’t matter whether you think your CX improvements are great if your customers haven’t noticed a discernible change.
Feedback will naturally occur through customer support requests, but there’s no need to wait for customers to give their opinions.
Solicit feedback using the following methods:
Send customer satisfaction surveys. Send regular CSAT or NPS surveys via email to measure customer sentiment.
Request for feedback at the end of chatbot conversations. Add a persistent, low-friction feedback form to your website’s chatbot.
Ask for feedback during customer calls. Alternatively, assign customer success reps to contact a handful of customers every month.
Use in-app surveys. Place short, targeted surveys inside your app or website to catch users in the moment.
Send automated follow-up emails after purchases. Ask for feedback while the experience is fresh and customers are more willing and able to leave a detailed review.
Once you’ve collected customer feedback, store it in your CRM so every team member can access and analyze it.
You can create a custom pipeline in Pipedrive like the one below:
Use customer feedback to find more ways to improve the user experience (hint: the most pressing issues will be the ones customers complain about most).
Imagine a scenario where customers frequently speak to support teams after they’ve made a purchase or leave negative reviews about difficulties getting started with your software.
This feedback suggests that you should automate and optimize your sales onboarding process so that customers can get useful information without having to call customer service.
5. Measure your success
Use customer service metrics to measure your customer experience and digital transformation efforts. Tangible data makes it easy to track how your experience evolves over time, see what’s working and align teams on a common view of CX performance.
The KPIs also highlight new trends and identify additional problems to fix. Here are the metrics you should be tracking:
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score | Shows how happy customers are with a product, service or interaction |
Net Promoter Score (NPS) | Quantifies customer loyalty by asking how likely someone is to recommend your business |
First contact resolution (FCR) | Measures how often your team solves customer issues in just one interaction, without the need for follow-ups |
Customer engagement score | Reflects how actively and frequently a customer interacts with your brand across touchpoints like email, support and product usage |
Customer churn rate | Tracks the percentage of customers who stop doing business with you over a given period |
Time to first value | Measures how long it takes a new customer to experience the core value of your product or service after signing up or purchasing |
Customer lifetime value (CLV) | Estimates the total revenue customers will generate during their entire relationship with your business |
You’ll notice that many of these measurements use customer opinions, which is why creating a feedback loop is important.
Don’t just track these metrics. Turn insights into action.
Start by adding them to your sales and marketing dashboards to increase visibility. Many of your peers already do this, with Forrester finding a 55% year-over-year increase in CMO dashboards that include a customer health score.
Here’s what a CX dashboard might look like in Pipedrive:
Make these metrics even more actionable by:
Setting clear benchmarks for each KPI – you’ll know what success looks like and can measure progress toward a specific goal
Reviewing them regularly – a monthly check-in with other stakeholders will help you spot trends
Implementing new initiatives – customer experience transformation is a continuous improvement, so use the data to find ways to streamline processes further
Tracking customer experience metrics helps you monitor the impact and ROI of your transformation efforts, ensuring you continue to spend budget wisely and make measurable improvements.
Customer experience transformation pitfalls and how to avoid them
While success isn’t guaranteed when transforming the customer experience, you can make it more likely by identifying common pitfalls in advance.
Use the table below to see common customer experience challenges for small businesses and how to overcome them.
Pitfall | Solution |
Fragmented or siloed customer data | Use a CRM or customer data platform to unify data across the customer journey, improve handovers between teams and deliver more consistent and personalized experiences. |
Resistance to change and lack of buy-in | Build a customer-centric culture by involving employees early in the process and offering training and support. |
Poor integration across channels | Adopt an omnichannel customer experience strategy to deliver more consistent experiences using multi-purpose tools like Pipedrive. |
Lack of customer feedback | Gather feedback using multiple methods, including surveys, customer support tickets and in-app feedback prompts. Centralize information in a tool like Pipedrive so product, marketing and sales teams can see and act on customer sentiment. |
Inability to measure CX impact or ROI | Track proven customer experience metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) in centralized dashboards to increase visibility and measure progress. |
Addressing these pitfalls early ensures that your transformation efforts deliver measurable and profitable improvements without consuming your entire marketing budget.
Final thoughts
Customer experience transformation doesn’t have to be the preserve of enterprise companies. Nor does it have to cost a fortune. With the right tools and CX strategy, every small business can take meaningful steps to deliver personalized and meaningful interactions.
You often don’t need to invest in new tools at all. Pipedrive has everything you need to centralize customer data, personalize messages and automate interactions.
Try Pipedrive free for 14 days to see how far one tool can improve your customer experience.
