While it’s always been important for businesses to devote energy to the customer experience, now is a key moment to take it seriously.

Some brands already get it. Electronic toothbrush company Quip, for instance, made it easier to maintain good oral hygiene habits while also changing the relationship between consumers and their oral-hygiene brand. Its sleek brush, brush head, floss and mouthwash are delivered in a single package. Replacement brush heads arrive automatically when needed.

The experience is human, curated and easy to navigate. Consequently, being a Quip subscriber has become an identity.

What can brands do to make their customer experience equally memorable and satisfying? Here are four strategies:

Fix nagging CX pain points

Underwhelming user interfaces, underutilized customer portals or excessive steps to order: The list of potential customer pain points goes on and on. However, you can leverage your customer experience to make those pain points disappear.

That’s what Dollar Shave Club does. Through constant monitoring of data and incoming feedback, the company pinpoints and eliminates places of friction. This allows the brand to more precisely message the right customers at the right time to upsell and resell in a natural way. Amazon does the same thing on a grander scale by making exchanges effortless and on your terms.

Run through your customer experience. If it doesn’t feel effortless—adjust. Keep iterating until it instinctively feels right. Most important, be honest with yourself.

Rely on CX as a breakaway strategy

Every brand is looking for a way to stand out—and customer experience can chip away at category leaders. The experience can be the differentiator, which is how Amazon rose to dominance. People react to exceptionalism, which is how upstart Stitch Fix made a dent in the hypersaturated fashion market.

Stitch Fix’s customer experience is heavy on personalization. In fact, the company’s concierge service depends upon a unique mix of objective data and human intelligence. Customers feel more individually pampered, encouraging them to stay in the fold.

The lesson here is to benchmark versus your competitors and strategize how to elevate above them to make a parity product or category unique through how it is experienced by your customers.

Use CX to close the trust gap

Consumers, especially younger ones, spend with companies they feel most aligned with. The new definers of choice and preference are social, political and environmental initiatives—from sustainability to DEI.

Simply infusing a brand's inclusion or sustainability efforts and messages in an ad can come across as insincere. But threading those efforts into your customer experience to show their tangibility is a game changer. Don't just talk about your purpose; make it real so users can see and feel it without a sliver of doubt.

See CX as a means of future-proofing

No one can be sure what the future holds for brands, but one thing is clear: Brands can’t fuel up and cruise on third-party cookies anymore. They have to rely on zero-party and first-party data and then understand how to turn that data into rewarding experiences that deepen customers’ emotional investments in their brands.

A case in point is P&G’s BeautySphere metaverse. Though the metaverse is still more concept than reality, P&G is hedging its bets to be a first-to-market contributor to this burgeoning virtual environment that's so appealing to digital natives. It lets P&G showcase products in multidimensional ways and forge valuable relationships with new audiences.

In the end, metaverse experimentation is crucial. Explore new dimensions in how we will experience brands, seed connections with new groups and add worthwhile exchanges between you and customers that make it easier to build your first-party database.