If you actually wish to get ahead in your business, you need to have an excellent strategy for customer experience. A well-planned and executed strategy for customer service will accentuate the lifetime value of a customer, increase the satisfaction level of the customer, and better your revenue. This is to ensure you have a reduced churn rate.
If you check the Gartner records, 81 percent of the firms were expected to maintain their competition either completely or mostly based on their customer experience. However, most companies do not understand what customer experience actually is? To state in laymen’s terms, it is the aggregate of all communications between a customer and a business, including discovery, getting initiated, buying, service, and finally advocating.
Every stage within the customer journey creates an impact on customer loyalty, also how your customers talk regarding your brand online and offline.
Reasons why customer experience matters
Let’s check some interesting facts:
- An Oracle survey mentioned that 74% of the senior executives mentioned if customers were made brand advocates, it impacted customer enthusiasm.
- A study done by American Express said 60 percent of the participants were ready to pay more to receive a better customer experience.
- Research that was conducted by Bain and Company found that 80 percent of their companies believed they had great customer experience.
So, CX has the power of bringing a lot of value, however, since many companies don’t understand how to get it right, it still comes with a fair enough competitive advantage.
How to understand good customer experience
Customer experience is all about interaction, which was the initial belief of the companies. However, from the extensive work we conducted with SaaS companies, it feels there is more in it. Interaction is important but more significant is touchpoints or availability and how deep the interaction plus engagement are. Let’s check what it denotes:
Touchpoints – These are points where a customer will come in contact with you. Maybe through an employee or product, or a brand message and this happens across several devices and channels.
Engagement – Looks at your quality of interaction.
Interaction – It’s a communication process between the employees and customers.
Your Touchpoints
- Ads and posts on social media
- Recognizing what is the brand image of a company on digital media
- Exploring the e-store and website
- Collecting emails
- Reading the annual reports, blogs, news, and updates of the company
Interactions
- Making communications with salespeople or agents
- Contacting or messaging the support team
- Filling the company’s form or sending an email
- Sharing the resources of your company on social media
- Interacting with the product of the company
Engagement
- Signing for a free trial
- Signing to attend webinars
- Agreeing that you will call a salesperson
- Buying a service or product
How do you differentiate between customer service and user experience in customer experience?
Customer Service and user experience together constitute a part of the CX. The communication that website and app visitors have with your software together constitutes the user experience, while the support from your organization provides customer service. If you know how to create good customer service along with seamless UX, you will be able to create a wonderful overall CX.
Methods of creating a superb customer experience strategy
Gather an understanding of your audience to form buyer personas
Gather a good understanding of your customers. Who they are? What motivations do they come with? Only if you gather in-depth knowledge will you be able to gather the required depth in knowledge.
You have two ways of doing it:
- Create a profile of the types of customers your team is working for every day. This is one excellent way of understanding your customer’s needs.
Once you have created substantial information, your need to build buyer personas. Create maximum effectiveness by real people representation. If you understand the emotion of your customer, you have tapped the key to a great customer experience.
Create an analysis of business processes, mission, and vision
In case you are looking for a successful customer experience strategy, you would have to clearly understand what your business objectives are.
You need to clearly understand your business’ main goal, if you are entering a new market, in case you are launching products in your existing marketplace, etc.
- Review your brand studies and find out what the barriers are and how you could overcome them.
You need to create goals that are long-term. Understand how you can overcome them. Build goals for the long term and find out how your strategy for customer experience can be built keeping customer happiness in mind. If your customers are happy, you have a successful business.
Question yourself on the following:
- What kind of technology, processes, or people would be needed towards fulfilling objectives using the strategy of customer experience?
- What are the existing gaps between customer experience and expectation?
- How good are your internal processes towards customer support?
- Which tools could be used to make your CX better?
Emulate the experience you are looking to deliver
- In order to provide your customer with the best experience stages of your brand, list your company’s stages of customer experience. Where do you have opportunities to create an impression?
- Focus on the practical problems, even if they are really small.
- Use some of the best customer experience tools to autofill on the forms so that your user’s time is saved. Small works make a lot of difference.
Hire your team players and make them involved in the process
Employees are your key to creating a wonderful customer experience. Personalize customer experience and train your employees to work on proving personal attention.
With the help of these tips, try finding the right kind of people:
- Pay attention to skills that would impact. Interpersonal skills, the quality of interacting and connecting with people, and keep calm in situations of crisis.
- Create certain principles that you can follow, so that you run a consistently smooth customer experience.
Right in the beginning, eliminate bad elements
User experience is your main element. Website design with app design does matter, but customer experience design is highly important.
Customers come from all channels, looking to get something from your brand. They could be merely one experience from leaving your brand forever.
You need to plan each stage of the customer experience meticulously, right from discovery to buying and advocacy, you can control the customer experience.
When you find your website traffic hitting 500-2000 visitors every day, you could also turn it into a steady revenue source using contextual or programmatic ads that complement your user experience rather than interrupting it.
Attend to the customer needs plus avail the feedback loops
According to Bain & Company’s research, 80 percent of the companies trust in the kind of customer service they provide, yet only 8 percent of the customers agree with their brands.
How can you identify your customer’s requirements if you don’t ask? How could you assess the value of your brand with asking? Hence it is essential that we create feedback loops through:
- Use real-time feedback and post-interaction surveys. Follow up over calls with customers for finer details.
- Pay attention to what is getting said about your brand on social media. It’s usually on social media where customers are most honest.
If you listen keenly, you can hear exactly what your customers exactly want.
Carefully research your competitors and build your objectives and goals
Analyze your competitors plus market trends towards building a clear picture. Use both internal as well as external tools. When you realize where the improvement is required, you could use this to bridge the gap between where you currently are and where you would want to stay in the future. Create strategic objectives and goals that help towards the implementation of a successful strategy of customer experience.
Build systems so that you get fast and effective resolutions
If you have completed the customer feedback, now you need to respond. Every stage within our customer lifecycle needs to have an obtrusive system of support in place. Put control in the hands of the customer. Never force your support on your customers, just show them it is present and how they could access it.
Certain ways of providing customer support are:
- Live chat features are easy for customers that browse your website. Remaining unobtrusive, it can be easily accessed when you need it. Provide additional opportunities for video-based assistance, and your customers would be actually satisfied.
- Your social media team needs to be active all the time as customers tend to vent their anger on social media mostly.
Bring in a memorable brand persona
There are some brands that make the maximum profit beating all competitions. As a brand, you need to create such situations that will create a unique and remarkable brand persona for you.
Conclusion
There are several other customer experience software and metrics that when incorporated with the ones mentioned can create a complete customer experience for you. You need to carefully pick your metrics understanding your business and its requirements and further maintain them to create an impeccable impact on your customers.
