Four very different businesses that used a variety of strategies to enhance customer experience and came up with similar results – Success! While expanding your business online growing tools are been widely used. Therefore need to be extra careful while choosing a growing service. For example, if you read real SalesLoft reviews, you will know it does not provide a quality service.
- Microsoft transformed itself in the early years of the 2000s from a bureaucratic entity into a more collaborative and social media focused business
- Airbnb was quick to realize that they had two different types of customers searching for options on the same platform – those looking for short-term rentals and those who wanted stay-cations.
- McDonald’s switched their menus round to reflect customer preferences, began using higher-quality materials, and upgraded their interiors based on customer feedback.
- Southwest Airlines began investing more in their own employees, creating a culture of the loyal and committed workforce that spilled over into great customer service
These approaches translate to great customer experience strategy, used effectively and accurately to suit individual needs, preferences, and budgets.
The bottom line is, customer experience has emerged as the biggest player in this game today. No matter how big or small your business and whatever its extent and nature, today’s business culture demands that just offering a product or service is just not enough. You may produce the best in the market or your service may match world standards. But unless your customer feels good about doing business with you, you stand little chance of beating the competition.
More than 75% of companies compete on customer experience (CX) and those that lead in this field do 80% better than those that lag behind.
96% of customers report that customer service is an important factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand and 77% of customers report that inefficient customer experiences contribute to a poorer quality of life for them.
Customers will also pay a 16% premium on price if they have a great CX but 38% of customers will abandon a brand they patronize regularly after a single negative experience.
These numbers give you an idea of the importance of CX.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience and customer service are not the same things. With customer service, the responses are reactive in nature and are usually triggered by customers contacting the company. CX is a proactive and holistic approach to truly knowing the customer and giving her/him relevant, useful messaging, products, and services at the price they want.
Academics and social scientists define CX as a totality of cognitive, sensory, affective, and behavioral responses that occur during all stages of the consumer process, and continue beyond it. Some management experts have compared it to a good marriage where early experiences greatly influence the relationship and further interactions are classified as either credits or debits.
In simpler terms, it is the way in which your firm meets or matches customer expectations via every interaction.
It is also the value that builds up over the company-customer relationship through communication, loyalty, trust, and referrals. Good CX affects both sides of the relationship – it gives the customer the solution to a problem or a quest, while it enables companies to become more profitable, grow and expand.
Through good CX, you:
- Show that you value the customer’s time, effort, and money
- Stay with the customer through every stage of the journey, from the first contact to loyalty
- Address every aspect of your offering: quality, packaging, ease of use, reliability, price, delivery
- Maintain a pleasant tenor in communication
- Provide personalized and memorable interactions
- Provide reliable, knowledgeable, and unique information
- Increase customer satisfaction and not merely measure it
- Reduce customer churn and increase your own revenues
- Build the strength and durability of your brand
Enhancing Your CX Strategy
- KYC: It may sound elementary, but Know Your Customer is still the bedrock of good CX. Your entire team has to connect and empathize with the kind of situations your real customers face. Today, we have access to huge volumes of data via websites, social media, cookies, behavioral data, and traditional methods such as demographic profiles, and email marketing (Top Marketing Business). This data can be compiled to create durable and reliable personae.
- Connect Emotionally: As the poet says, people may forget what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. Creating an emotional attachment with customers makes for enduring, long-term relationships. Remembering birthdays and anniversaries, suggesting relevant products based on persona, providing loyalty discounts and special offers, previews, and exclusive experiences are the route to emotional connect. This would also include examining expectations and calibrating them to reflect a more realistic angle, investing in intuitive design, self-help resources on your website, providing more proactive messaging and transparency in price, and offering live customer support via people or bots 24×7.
- Define and Plan: Don’t rely on a one-size-fits-all customer journey. Examine the data and analyze the different routes by which customers arrive, travel, and leave. In this age of mobile technology, it’s important to meet your customer where they hang out most. Devise personalized routes and plans for different categories of customers. Remove inter-department communication silos to create a seamless CX.
- Sample and Measure: Once you’ve created your strategy, don’t simply sit back and wait for it to pan out. Use the data that comes pouring in and leverage it. Continue to sample, measure, and send out trial balloons to truly understand what works and what doesn’t.
- Omnichannel Experience: Customers connect via different devices, across different locations and time zones. They may browse through your site on desktops, comparison shop on their laptops, check reviews and feedback on their mobile phones (Online Mobile phone jobs), visit your brick-n-mortar and finally purchase online. Ensure that this history travels with them across all these channels.
- Rebuild and Revamp: Identify the bottlenecks and pain points that customers face. Abandoned shopping carts and incomplete searches offer a rich vein of information. Blogs and chatbots can help to channelize customers, providing proactive messaging about technical issues or breakdowns, site makeovers, or upcoming outages will keep customers involved and in the loop.
- Whole Picture: Address all touchpoints where you interact with customers. There’s no point in having a great website team if you have an unsatisfactory call-center department. Invest in training, new technologies, and information, and most of all, your own employees. Passionate, loyal and committed employees are the backbones of your customer service strategy.
