We live in a constantly evolving world. The scale of businesses changes every day. The landscape of the business environment is changing. While companies are looking for new innovative strategies to ramp up their game, they have understood the importance of customer experience. Customer service is important aspect of any company and has been gaining relevance specially in 2020. Customers are empowered and look for great customer experiences. With good customer experiences, companies can gain loyalty and keep the customer. Investing effort into customer experience is the focus of over 70 percent of marketers. 33% of Americans will consider switching companies after just a single instance of poor service.
Customer experience: The Base for Company and Customer success
Businesses across the globe are realising how a memorable customer experience can drive success. Companies are now using their social media to give a good customer experience. Customer experience will be insightful in understanding how customer satisfaction is. Delivering a good customer experience will help you stand out from the crowd. The customer experience strategy should be unique as opposed to a cookie cutter approach. For nearly 72% of businesses, improving the customer experience is their top priority.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience is the end result of every interaction with your business by a customer. It can be navigating the website to finding a review. It impacts customer decision on the business and is considered impactful. It is important for any business. With a good experience, you will reduce friction and customer complaints. The benefits include-
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Better loyalty
- Positive reviews
- Better word of mouth marketing
- Increased recommendations
Subscription businesses will benefit from increased retention, reduced churn, and better growth. Putting customers first is what customer experience is all about. Customer experience includes every touchpoint a customer has with your brand. These customer touchpoints are what need to be assessed to understand customer success.
Customer experience will be achieved through-
- Actively listening to customers
- Using customer feedback to make the business better
- Build a system for feedback collection and implementation
- Solve unique challenges and problems
Aspects of Customer Experience
Customer experience works well as long as it is moving in the right direction. It is not easy. It is highly subjective and unpredictable. Some of the important aspects include:
- Ease of access: Is your customer able to access your product? Are they finding the interface difficult to handle? Is keeping oneself updated with company policies tough? How soon is your product ready for customers to use? These access based questions are important to determine the real strength of the company. This is what the customer looks at in the beginning.
- Personalisation: Is the experience customised? Is it tailor made for customer needs and preferences? Do you think your product is personalised as per customer choices? Has the customer mentioned any specific preferences? This level of personalisation is important for customers to be attached to the product and feel valued.
- Quick customer complaint resolution: the backbone of customer experience is customer service. If a customer has had an unpleasant experience on your site, have you addressed it? How are you making sure the customer returns to your site in the future? Customer service is the most important thing that will set your company apart from others.
- Customer education: Is your customer educated about the product? Are they aware of how to navigate across the product or site? Are they receiving continuous support from the customer service teams?
- Communication: Every customer needs to get the right communication. Emails, calls, sales pitches, and others will definitely help if not too sales oriented. Let them know about the products and services. Give them the right info so that they make the right choices. The right targeted messaging will help customers become loyal and trust more.
- Consistency: Through a customer success software, it is possible to enable a good customer experience. Improving the website and user-experience to make it responsive and customer friendly is important. The customers who return are likely to convert better and not drop off.
5 ways you can channel customer experience to win
The right customer experience strategy for your business will pay rich dividends in the form of customer retention, less churn, and more revenue.
Map the customer journey
Invest more energy and time to understand the customer route. From product purchasing to present. It should be an ongoing exercise.
Unique interactions
Create a better experience by personalising things for your customers. Engage with them through offers, live chat, handwritten stuff, and more.
Get the best support
Improve what your customers think of support. Reduced waiting time, quick answers, automated responses, quick guides can help. 45% of US consumers will abandon an online transaction if their questions or concerns are not addressed quickly, according to Forrester.
Ask for feedback
Don’t be afraid of feedback. This will improve your efforts rapidly. A quick survey or poll can help in this regard.
Be Transparent
The brands that win customers are the most transparent ones. Being transparent will help rapidly. It will pay off without creating a doubt in the minds of customers.
Bottom line: Customer Experience Strategy is necessary for growth
It is no surprise that companies want to grow. To improve, the right feedback will help immensely. Don’t ignore customers. Making them feel important and showing that you care will help build a better experience. It is harder to convert a new customer as opposed to nurturing and saving an existing one. According to Shopify, “the probability of converting a new customer falls in the 5% to 20% range; for existing customers, it’s between 60% and 70%.”Winning back sceptics can be done only with the right customer experience strategy for your business. It is not possible to control everything. The least we can do is make sure they are happy with the product or service. Before a customer takes to social media to rant about your poor service, ask them instead how they feel and why.
