Customer experience has been in the spotlight over the last few years. Taking your customer experience to the next level is the key to building lasting relationships with your most loyal patrons. You may have the best and high-quality products in the industry but if you are not able to deliver a great experience to your customers, it’s not worth it. Statistics reveal that customer experience will be the top brand differentiator in the coming years and if you don’t work on your customer experience, you will lose the business of your most loyal users.
How important is it to deliver a great customer experience? 32% of all customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience. If that isn’t enough, 78% of customers will bail out of a product they intend to buy because of bad service. Delivering great customer experience translates into improving customer satisfaction, reducing churn, and increasing revenues. With customer experience becoming the new norm for brands, it’s never been more important to make customers your top priority.
Now that we know the importance of customer experience to your business? How do we go about improving the experience? Read on and be guided.
Steps In Improving Customer Experience
- Identify Your Customer’s Needs
- Focus On Value Not Volume
- Build An Omnichannel Experience
- Offer Self-Service Options
- Determine Pain Points Across Customer Journeys
- Personalize The Experience
- Act On Customer Feedback
- Train Your Team On Customer Experience
- Measure Your Returns
- Build A Customer-Centric Culture
Steps In Improving Customer Experience
As a business owner, you need to always keep in mind the impact of a bad customer experience on your business. According to a report by research firm NewVoiceMedia, an estimated $62 billion is lost to businesses every year due to bad customer experience. In the coming years, customer experience will become the key differentiator and by doing it well, businesses can drive customer acquisition and retention. Here are the steps for improving your customer experience.
- Identify Your Customer’s Needs
It’s easy for your brand to create content and messaging centered around your own products but it should not be that way. It should be about your customer and how you can resolve their pain points. According to the “State of the Connected Customer” study of Salesforce, 66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. The same study reveals that 84% of customers are more likely to buy from companies that understand their goals.
Customer expectations are rising and for this reason, you need to take your customer experience to the next level or lose your customers to the competition. Unfortunately, only 10% of consumers strongly agree that most brands meet expectations for a good experience. In addition, while customers share their positive experiences with an average of nine people, they share their bad experiences with an average of 16 people.
Customer needs can be classified into four categories: price, quality, choice, and convenience. As a business owner, you need to identify and fulfill their needs to become successful. In order to deliver value to your customers, you need to have a full understanding of their needs.
- Focus On Value Not Volume
When deciding on brand loyalty, 66% of customers care more about the experience than price. As reliance on digital experiences grow, the need to create human connections becomes more imperative. In shaping the customer experience, you should provide offerings that drive emotional connections through value.
One way of driving value is by providing content that caters to the needs of the customer. Show them that you understand their needs through your content. Creating value for customers is important because it can help increase your brand’s reputation, profit, and long-term success. The aim of providing value is to increase customer confidence and trust in what your company is offering.
How can you make the customers feel valued? It is through creating positive interactions with your customer. You can enhance the customer experience by sending thank you emails or personalized notes or stickers every time they purchase. Resolving customer concerns as soon as possible can help create a positive impression of your business.
- Build An Omnichannel Experience
In today’s digital age, customers will now come to you through different channels. It means they will come to you not just from your website but also from Facebook, YouTube, email, and other channels. Nowadays, reaching customers with the right content at the right time through the right channel has become a necessity. 9 out of 10 customers expect an omnichannel experience with seamless service between communication methods.
Whatever the channel you are interacting with them is, customers expect the same level of experience. You need to ensure a seamless journey across all channels for a consistent omnichannel customer experience. An effective omnichannel strategy can provide you with crucial insights into customer interactions and their behavior across their life cycle.
Omnichannel experience empowers customers to connect with your brand using their preferred channels. In addition, you can better understand the customer journey and provide you with helpful insights so you can take action in improving various aspects of your business. You can help streamline customer interactions under one platform.
- Offer Self-Service Options
Nowadays, customers want to find the answers themselves instead of being put on hold or waiting for an agent or customer service representative to reply to them. While having a dedicated customer support team is vital, being reactive can only get you far. For this reason, you can give customers the option to be proactive. A self-service option can do just that.
Self-service channels can save your customer support team time while helping customers locate the information they need themselves more quickly by using information from past problems. 70% of customers expect a company’s website to include self-service options such as support content, walkthrough videos, case studies, etc.
With a self-service channel, customers can expand their knowledge and provide them the tools they require for solving other similar issues in the future. It offers better perks that traditional customer support cannot offer thus providing an improved customer experience. Self-service options strengthen brand reputation by creating positive client interactions.
- Determine Pain Points Across Customer Journey
Every customer has their pain points during their journey to making a purchase. This could lead to frustrations and a negative sentiment toward your brand especially if your competitor can manage to turn that frustration into an easy resolution. Customer pain points can be classified into the following:
- Financial Pain Points. This is when the customer feels that they are paying too much for a product/service.
- Process Pain Points. This refers to road bumps that happen along the customer journey. It will not only affect customers but will also impact your support team.
- Support Pain Points. These are internal issues that may restrict businesses from resolving customer pain points quickly or effectively.
- Productivity Pain Points. These pain points may decrease an agent’s productivity and diminish the efforts behind the customer service offered.
In order to identify their pain points, you need to ask them the right questions. Conduct a survey and allow them to share their feedback in detail. See if your customer has left an online review on your website and act on it immediately. Nowadays, you cannot underestimate the power of online reviews. 92% of B2B buyers are more likely to purchase after reading a trusted review.
Dealing with their pain points can help with customer satisfaction and can drive more revenue to your business. If you are not able to resolve their pain points, they could be prompted to move their business elsewhere to one who can provide solutions to their concerns. It is more costly to acquire new customers than to retain current ones so focus on delighting your existing customer.
- Personalize The Experience
Customers like to feel valued while interacting with your brand. They expect to be treated like a real person and not as a business. Personalizing customer experience can help drive a human touch while engaging with them. Depending on the scale and scope of your company, personalizing can take on different meanings. Personalization helps strengthen the bond between brand and buyer.
Personalizing the customer experience does not have to involve vouchers or discounts. It can be in the form of thank you letters or emails to customers after making a purchase, follow-up surveys, dynamic website offers based on user preferences and others. With personalized offerings, you can better understand the customer’s pain points and provide solutions faster.
Customers expect a personalized experience when dealing with customers. In fact, a report by Epsilon reveals that 80% of customers are more likely to purchase when businesses offer a personalized experience. It will not only drive sales but also increase customer loyalty. A survey conducted by Formation.ai revealed that 81% of consumers are willing to provide basic personal information in exchange for a more personalized experience.
- Act On Customer Feedback
Keeping your customers happy and satisfied is one of the key objectives of your business. If they have some complaints and grievances about your products or services, you need to address them immediately. Although 80% of customers believe they deliver a great “customer experience”, only 8% of customers agree. This means that you have to take your customer experience to the next level.
Acting on customer feedback is another excellent way to deliver a top-notched customer experience. There are various channels that can help you gather customer feedback like live chat, in-app, or chatbots. By acting on their feedback, you are showing customers that their opinions are valuable, which can help develop an emotional attachment to your business.
Only 1 out of every 26 customers are likely to bring up their complaints. The other 25 customers will simply walk away and take their business elsewhere. Thus, it is important to let customers know that you are listening to them. By listening to their comments and feedback, you are strengthening client satisfaction and providing opportunities for sales conversion.
- Train Your Team On Customer Experience
When a customer comes to you with a complaint from their preferred channel, your customer-facing teams will be the first people they will interact with. For this reason, you need to ensure that your customer service team is properly equipped and has the knowledge to deal with the customer. Providing your team with regular training programs can help your sales, support, and marketing team to deliver seamless customer experiences.
Your customer-facing team should have a comprehensive understanding of your business and your product offering. With product knowledge, your customer service team will be able to respond to customer queries with confidence. When your team knows about your product, they can deal with customer complaints effectively.
Aside from product knowledge, your customer service team should also possess great communication skills. In addition, they should be trained in customer service etiquettes like patience and empathy to better promote your brand to future customers. They should have knowledge of how to learn the customer problem better to effectively and promptly deliver faster customer support.
- Measure Results
Sustaining an effective customer experience strategy is not a one-time task. Measuring the success of your strategy can help you identify what went wrong with your previous strategy leading to a poor experience. If you don’t measure your success metrics, you could be missing out on valuable information which could help boost the entire customer experience.
By measuring the results of your strategy, you will be able to identify the customer behavior and improve your parameters according to their expectations. It is now easy to measure the results with the proliferation of tools and technology that can help further enhance your customer experience strategy. These tools can help you measure customer satisfaction in real-time and deliver a unified experience to your audience.
Research shows that 94% of customers who have an effortless experience are likely to buy from you again. In addition, 81% of customers who put in a lot of effort are likely to share their experiences. Thus, always check your Net Promoter Score, which you can obtain from delivering a great customer experience.
- Build A Customer-Centric Culture
Making customer experience the focal point of your business is vital to driving repeat customers and increasing loyalty. Research by Deloitte and Touche reveals that customer-centric companies were 60% more profitable compared to companies that were not customer-focused. With the right strategy, it can become the sky’s the limit as far as customer experience is concerned.
Don’t expect customer experience to change overnight. Make your entire company laser-focused on improving customer experience. Being customer-centric should be instilled in the hearts and minds of every employee in your organization. Having a customer-focused mindset starts with understanding the customers by knowing their insights and listening to what they say.
When done right, a customer-centric culture can drive higher revenues for your business. Armed with data on customer behavior and interests, identify the best opportunities for offering products and services to the right customers to enhance your customer experience.
As the battlefield shifts to customer experience, it is important for businesses to understand the importance of keeping customers satisfied. Keep these tips in mind to ensure the success of your customer experience strategy.
Boost Customer Experience with airisX
Companies come to us to optimize existing customer support channels and/or to leverage new ones. We focus on incorporating existing processes into your desired channels, and help you scale to other ones as your requirements grow.
We aren’t your run-of-the-mill, inflexible outsourcing center. We combine deep BPO experience with the flexibility of pioneering startup spirit. From building a customer support team from scratch for an app startup as it grew from 0 sales per day to 4000 sales per day to spearheading voice and texting support for a large Amazon seller with multiple brands selling across over ten product verticals, we aren’t afraid of tackling big challenges faced by SMEs and changing how things are done to fit our clients’ business models.
We also aren’t afraid to bring up when things aren’t working. We give you feedback every quarter with game changing optimization plans, to help your company evolve as systems mature. Your business changes and moves quickly, and so do we.
Need help with your manpower requirements? Get in touch with us at contact@airisx.com and we will help you find a solution that fits your budget and needs.