8 innovative customer experience examples

What brings customers back to a brand? While pricing and brand identity matter, there’s another decisive factor that can’t be ignored: customer experience (CX).

According to a Zippia survey, 64% of customers prioritize customer experience over the product price and 96% consider it a major driver of brand loyalty. This signals a notable shift in customer values and emphasizes the role of positive customer experiences in maintaining brand relationships.

From the initial interaction to post-purchase support, every touchpoint is an opportunity to impress, engage, and retain your customers.

In this article, we’ve curated eight inspiring customer experience examples to help you enhance your own CX strategies and become a CX trendsetter. 

8 CX examples that drove conversions and reduced churn

To deliver a memorable CX, you first need to gain a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, preferences, and behaviors. In these eight success stories, we’ll see how innovative CX optimization strategies were used to deepen understanding and gather even better customer insights.

We’ll also dive into how these companies used insights and analytics to drive conversions in their business and improve their CX throughout the digital journey. 

1. Mastercard: Test user experiences early

It can be frustrating for brands to be recognized solely for one standout product that comes to represent their entire brand identity. That was the case for Mastercard, which was only seen as a credit card company. 

But Mastercard offers 435 products and services worldwide and is a leading technology company in the payments industry. They aim to innovate at scale in areas like quantum computing, the metaverse, and Web3 technologies—and deliver outstanding CX as they do so. Their recipe for success? They conduct robust user testing to validate their ideas.

Using WEVO, MasterCard conducts testing for every experience and concept before launch and identifies winning designs. Items that meet a minimum UX score against industry benchmarks will move forward in development, and those that fall short are either redesigned or discarded.

As a result, Mastercard can:

• Innovate quickly, and understand which products and services will appeal to their customers
• Run studies and tests faster, requiring only 30 minutes of a researcher’s time instead of 50+ hours of CX research
• Generate reliable results based on a small sample size of 120–150 test subjects
• Use WEVO to summarize key findings in a way that’s easy and accessible to understand
• Visualize the analysis and breakdown of each diagnostics, also through WEVO

2. LAKE: A website that hits customer pain points

LAKE wanted to revamp its website to enhance its UX while remaining true to the LAKE brand framework and preserving the simplicity of its website.

The Vaan Group—a leading digital agency—took up this challenge and conducted an initial review, which revealed a few key areas for improvement:

• LAKE’s product collections were not showcased effectively.
• Despite many customers purchasing LAKE pajamas as gifts, options for gift sets and wrapping were under-emphasized.

Vaan then combined an in-depth analysis of LAKE’s existing data from Google Analytics and Shopify Plus with qualitative insights from their CX research partner, WEVO.

Using this data, Vaan outlined its major challenges:

1. They needed to improve how well webpages outlined the product benefits and key values to visitors. This was based on WEVO CX data that measured five qualitative sentiments: Appeal, Clarity, Credibility, Experience, and Relevance. Lake got a low Appeal score of 13—well below the industry benchmark of 19. 
2. As LAKE’s pajamas were often bought as gifts, this emerged as a great way to increase their average order value (AOV) through gift wrapping and merchandising matching sets.
3. Leveraging WEVO’s insights, Vaan uncovered that 63% of their website visitors wanted better prices and 41% sought more style variety.

Vaan set out to refine LAKE’s online presence, aiming to enhance user engagement and ultimately drive conversions, by: 

• Introducing a “Best Sellers” section below the hero image for quick access to popular items
• Adding curated merchandising spots on the homepage for dynamic content, encouraging repeat visits
• Implementing a “Shop by Fabric” feature on the homepage and product detail pages, catering to fabric-specific searches
• Integrating gifting options across the website to streamline the gift-giving process
• Upgrading the shopping cart page to facilitate upselling and cross-selling
• Using LAKE’s lifestyle photography throughout the site, to weave the brand’s story into the shopping experience

As a result, LAKE saw a 12.77% increase in mobile conversion and a 25.27% increase on desktop. Their WEVO Appeal score grew to 21. 

On the merchandising and functionality side of things, they worked to: 

• Enhance Lake’s product imagery to vividly showcase what customers would receive
• Introduce upsell and cross-sell modules, including dual “You may also like…” suggestions on product pages and promotional tiles on product listing pages 
• Incorporate gift box suggestions on product pages

As a result, LAKE’s AOV scaled by 2.6% and 1.68% in mobile and desktop respectively and the gap in meeting customer price expectations and style variety narrowed by 31% and 24% respectively. 

3. JetBlue: Making customer success a full-time job

The airline industry has a bad reputation for having low customer satisfaction. The year 2022 saw a drop in customer satisfaction by 8%. 

JetBlue is one of a select group of airlines that are known for putting their customers first. Even during the pandemic, the airline secured the top airline rating for customer satisfaction, with an American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) score of 79 (out of 100) in the 2021–2022 period—well above the industry average of 75.

Here’s what JetBlue does differently:

• They take customer data and feedback seriously and refine their offering. For example, they found their passengers don’t care much about free luggage, and prefer cheaper tickets. So they rolled out different pricing plans. 
• After noting a customer’s disappointment at the lack of airport shops and amenities that open early in the morning, JetBlue started passing out water, juice, and coffee to show that they care.
• They have a Chief People Officer who makes a point of performing “random acts of kindness,” which involves helping and supporting customers and employees in whichever way possible. 

As an added demonstration of their commitment to creating great experiences, they celebrated their 50th anniversary with a challenge: to complete one million acts of kindness. They invited the general public and their employees to take part. 

With these initiatives, Jetblue strengthens its relationships with its community and customers, leading to improved customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty—and its positive reputation as a customer-centric airline.

4. CXperts: Gathering hundreds of data points quickly

First-rate customer experiences are built from strong datasets. But collecting data and feedback from a large and diverse user base can be challenging. 

Traditional methods, like focus groups or usability studies, are often limited in scale and may not accurately represent the broader target audience. Plus, this approach is time-consuming and expensive to execute—from the recruitment of test subjects to processing and analyzing data. 

CXperts, a digital agency that specializes in omnichannel CX solutions, use WEVO to efficiently gather high-impact CX insights for the brands they work with. As a result, they gathered thousands of data points, from hundreds of users—in a matter of weeks, not months. 

With WEVO, they could uncover both macro and micro views of data, and gather insights into the overall user flow as well as individual elements present in the solutions being analyzed. This made it easy for them to assess where customers were engaged and where their attention was lost. 

• They collected feedback from a large group in a short timeframe and analyzed and consolidated findings with WEVO’s AI—which fast-tracked their decision-making.
• They performed more targeted A/B testing and experimentation. 
• They made more informed optimizations and improved key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversion rates, bounce rates, and user retention.

5. M&M’s: Personalized approach to customer experience

M&M’s goal was to double its revenue and expand its direct-to-consumer customer base by building close-knit relationships with 30 million new buyers.

That’s a big goal for a customer interaction that’s typically purely transactional. But Huge Inc. agency was up for the challenge and set out to craft a people-centric, brand-oriented approach to completely revamp M&M’s digital presence.

After observing that since gift-giving drove 90% of the sales on the M&M’s website, they made this the focus of their work. They conducted extensive research across three different countries and analyzed digital-to-physical touchpoints to understand what was driving these buyers.

As a result, they streamlined M&M’s e-commerce platform to target the Gen Z demographic and presented an authentic brand narrative infused with purpose, action, and credibility.

• Every interaction on their website showcased the essence of M&M’s, where they balanced the user experience with moments of joy and surprise.
• Their “Design the M’s” campaign helped buyers personalize their product and connect with the brand. It allowed buyers to customize their M&M’s with colors, photos, and even text that reflected them as individuals.
• Their revamped e-commerce experience reflected the brand’s broader goal—to create moments of joy for buyers.

As a result, M&M’s saw a 5% increase in the average value order and a 15% increase in conversion with their website redesign.

6. Tamara Mellon: Host events tailored to customer interests

Tamara Mellon, a women’s luxury footwear brand, wanted to set up an unforgettable and ultra-shareable pop-up event at the Create & Cultivate conference. 

The brand approached ElevateMyBrand Agency with the challenge and tasked them with creating out-of-the-box ideas to capture the attention and interest of the 1,500+ conference attendees—despite the competition posed by other vendors and an exciting array of events.

Their solution? A one-of-a-kind shopping experience, courtesy of a luxury, walk-in shoe closet. It was the perfect fit for the conference attendees—entrepreneurial women interested in excellence, building their businesses, and discussing the challenges of being a woman in the workplace. 

The event generated record-high social media interactions for Tamara Mellon: over 20,000 unique impressions, plus over 1.8 billion media impressions.

7. R-C Ranch: Engaging customers on social media

R-C Ranch—a top producer of Wagyu beef—approached Firebelly Marketing with three performance goals. They wanted to increase their brand visibility, improve their content quality, and outperform their competitors. 

Firebelly began by gaining a lay of the land. They conducted an intensive competitor review, a detailed content analysis of the content posted by R-C Ranch, and examined how customers were responding.

Firebelly made a number of recommendations to help R-C Range meet their goals, including:

• Increasing their posting cadence
• Adding video content
• Building a social media presence on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest
• Investing in paid ads across multiple social channels
• Focusing on user-generated content
• Hosting giveaways

They also recommended that R-C Ranch work to share its brand story, as a family-oriented business based on a Texas ranch, so that viewers could connect with them on a deeper level.

As a result, Firebelly was able to exceed its marketing goals and hit triple and quadruple-digit growth across all relevant performance metrics.

They saw results like:

• Growing their social audience and impressions by 68% and 30% accordingly
• 90% more page engagements compared to all competitors
• 242% increase in Instagram engagement

8. Toast: Experiences tailored to customer sentiments

Toast is a provider of restaurant SaaS tools and hardware, ranging from point of sale to online ordering and even payroll. They were looking to accelerate growth and optimize their page structure from the get-go—so they could provide their audience with the best possible digital experience. 

First, they wanted to investigate if they were targeting the right audience with their testing. Following that, they wanted to gauge user sentiment all along the user journey, and uncover if they were missing the mark, if audience members needed more information, or expected a more tailored digital experience. 

They turned to WEVO to validate their ideas and provide them with consolidated UX data paired with key findings. Aside from their own A/B and user testing, they wanted to understand how specific kinds of users really felt when engaging with their website, so they could confidently roll out design and development decisions—already knowing they’re aligned with customer expectations.

As a result, they were able to:

• Shorten production timelines and optimize their pages from the outset
• Meet the needs and wants of their targeted customer groups and prepare their user journey for mass appeal
• Quickly identify the gaps in their current digital experience
• Improve the performance of their website

Create a customer experience backed up by real data

A CX research tool like WEVO makes your CX research process effortless, instead of spending hours upon hours creating and running user tests, and manually analyzing your findings. 

Eliminate the guesswork, and uncover meaningful customer insights and trends within minutes. WEVO brings you the best of high-volume feedback, expert human insights, and AI-powered analysis to help you finetune your digital experiences. 

You get expert CX insights, validated by both AI and human users and can rest assured that your respondents are automatically screened for quality. Discover where visitors are getting stuck, what they like about your pages, and how you can meet their expectations better.

Ready to get started? Let’s talk!