In today’s world, businesses are recognizing the power of customer experience (Cx). In fact, improving customer experience is the prime focus of brand owners because it can make their brand stand out.
A positive customer experience is vital for the success of any business. Only satisfied customers convert to loyal ones and help boost revenue. So, if you’re wondering how to improve the customer experience for your business, bookmark this article. Today, we will discuss various ways to do that.
But first, let’s understand what exactly customer experience is.
What Is Customer Experience?
Customer experience or Cx, in simplest words, is the customer’s emotions, perception, and opinion about a brand or a product.
When you discover or buy a brand/product, you make an opinion about it after using it. Sometimes you like it, and sometimes you don’t.
Most companies have company representatives for a brand or product. You can talk to them if you want to share your feedback. This is your experience with the product/brand.
Before moving on, let’s make an important distinction here.
Is Customer Experience The Same As Customer Service?
In the business world, these terms are not interchangeable. They have completely different meanings. Cx is the experience or impression customers have with your brand.
Customer service, on the other hand, focuses on helping customers, solving their problems, and answering their questions.
Cx doesn’t always need interaction with the company’s representative. It is your first-hand experience with the product or a brand. While Customer service is your first-hand interaction with the company’s representative.
Customer service is part of the customer experience phenomenon. When there is some issue with the product. You interact with the company’s representative. The way they deal with you and your satisfaction increase trust. This is a positive customer experience.
Why Is Improving Customer Experience Important For Businesses?
A business can not exist without its customers. Satisfaction of customers is the key to boosting a business. Therefore, improving customer experience is vital.
Benefits Of A Good Customer Experience
You can understand its importance by knowing about the benefits of a good customer experience. Some of them are as follows:
Boosts Sales Conversions
A good customer experience has a positive impact on the business. Satisfied customers generate more revenue. When you value your customers, they will come again and again. Studies show that companies whose main focus was Cx had an 11% increase in overall conversion rates.
Increase Customers Loyalty
Staying in touch with your customers makes them feel valued. A quick response will leave a positive impact when a customer faces a problem with your brand. Not just that, but a good customer experience builds trust and loyalty. And loyal customers are more likely to repurchase your products.
Higher Client Retention
Client retention is a company’s ability to turn customers into repeat buyers. When a customer wants to come back to your business, it means they’re satisfied with your services or product.
And they will not prefer another brand over yours. Customer retention shows the success of a company. So, improving customer experience will increase customer retention.
PS: Customers who have had a positive experience will talk about your business in their circle. They will revisit your brand. They can also leave a good review on online review websites, leading to a positive impact on your business.
Impact of A Bad Customer Experience
One bad customer experience can ruin customers’ confidence in your brand. Expectations of customers are high these days. If your brand does not meet their expectations, you’ll lose a customer for life. Think about it, there are so many alternatives in the market. One slight mistake and your customers will likely turn to a new one next in line.
Moreover, customers having negative experiences will advise others not to buy your products. This is how businesses delivering poor customer service lose customer loyalty, profits, and reputation. And, needless to say, it has a long-term negative impact on how your business fares in the market.
10 Ways To Improve Customer Experience
Let’s discuss some tried and tested ways to create a good CX strategy to help you improve customer satisfaction.
1. Create A Clear Customer Experience Vision
This is the first step in your customer experience strategy. A company gains a reputation through the conduct of its staff. So, you have to set a clear vision of what you want the customers to feel when they come in contact with your business.
It means to create a set of statements that act as a guiding principle. Every member of your company should know these principles and follow them with heart and mind. These principles should become the behavior of your company. Not just the company’s behaviour but the behaviour of employees. Consider an implicit bias workshop to promote the right behaviour.
2. Build A Multi-Channel Strategy For Better Customer Experience
Do you know what makes a great customer experience? It’s your response to customer complaints. And that is easily achievable with multi-channel access!
When you have multiple channels for sales, customer support, and marketing, it leads to a better customer experience. There are two main benefits of having a multi-channel strategy.
First, such a strategy empowers customers to interact with your brand the way they like without compromising the quality of interaction. Whether it’s online, or offline, social media or your website, they know their experience won’t get soiled.
Second, a multi-channel strategy helps you understand your customer journey in a much better way. You can then take various actions to improve any aspect of the business that requires your attention.
3. Understand Who Your Customers Are
A brand needs to understand customers’ needs and wants. Only then can they deal with the customers well. In addition, customers like personalized interactions.
They always want brands to know them better. So, you have to bring to life different types of customers who may come into contact with your support teams.
A popular way to achieve that is by segmenting your customers and creating customer personas. A customer persona or profile is based on what they know about a customer. By creating personas, your customer support team can recognize customers. And they can guide and understand them better.
For instance, you can create a persona for Tina, who’s 30 years old. She likes new gadgets and is tech-savvy enough to watch a video tutorial on your youtube channel. Likewise, you can create a persona for John, who’s 45 and needs clear instructions to complete his buyer’s journey.
4. Train Your Customer Service Teams
As the old adage goes, the first impression is the last. Your customer service teams are the first people a customer will interact with. They are your first impression. Therefore, regular workshops and training programs can help your support, sales, and marketing teams deliver better customer experience.
Now, there are two key areas to focus on:
Product or Service Knowledge
Your teams should have a complete understanding of your business. Conducting extensive product training helps you impart crucial information about your services and products.
Most importantly, it helps your employees understand customers’ needs faster and offer quick solutions to their complaints.
Soft Communication Skills
Training your teams with basic customer service etiquettes like empathy, patience, and anger management can build a strong customer relationship. But that only comes with fostering effective soft communication skills. With better communication skills, your teams can:
- Understand customer complaints in a better way and deliver quick support
- Reduce the number of touchpoints
- Reduce the sales cycle and increase conversions
- Personalize conversions
5. Optimize The Customer Journey
It is important to consider the customer journey to create a good CX. It means you need a clear understanding of the overall customer experience. And how did you interact with the customer at each point?
We’re living in the era of social media. Customers will search for a product even before they consider making a purchase. How you interact with a customer is important.
Map out and analyze your current user experience. Then interact with the customer to direct or influence a customer’s behavior.
When you focus on a customer’s journey, you can identify the problems. You can offer new opportunities. This enables your team to create ideas to improve growth and business relationships.
6. Create An Emotional Connection With Your Customers
Humans are emotional animals. Our emotions shape the attitude that drives our decisions. Customers become loyal only because they get emotionally attached to a service or product and they remember how they feel using it. Therefore, having an emotional connection with your customers increases the growth of the business.
You can create an emotional connection by:
- Sending warm wishes and regards on different occasions
- Offering them special discounts
- Sharing brand stories on your social media
- Sharing video testimonials on your social media AND website
- Communicating in a human and personal way
- Showing you care
- Being honest about your product/services
7. Capture Customer Feedback In Real-Time
How can you tell your customers are having a WOW experience?
You need to ask. Ideally, you can do so by getting real-time feedback. Real-time feedback is a live review. Companies request their customers to review their services on their websites or mobile app using live chat tools.
Afterward, they send a follow-up email as part of a post-interaction survey to capture customer feedback. You can ask your customers about their experience with your services on the spot.
Engage with your customers. Live chat, on-site chatbots, and proactive chat invitations can help. With real-time data, you can create a good environment. It makes a customer’s experience positive and productive.
Feedbacks help companies become aware of the things they didn’t know. It informs them about their flaws, and they can take action.
8. Get Regular Employee Feedback And Act On It
Sure, it’s not one of the innovative ideas to improve customer experience. Most organizations take an annual or bi-annual survey where they capture their team’s feedback. But this is not as beneficial as regular surveys can be.
Regular feedback allows staff to share their experience to improve customer service. In fact, it serves two purposes. First, it will enable the staff to share their ideas on how you can improve the overall customer experience. Second, it also helps the manager to see how the team is working and taking an interest in the business.
For instance, you can use any project management software like SurveySparrow, Inspire, 15Five, etc., to create a closed employee feedback environment.
9. Measure The ROI From Delivering A Great Customer Experience
After taking all the necessary measures, how do you know your hard work is paying off? The answer is in business results. Most companies use the “Net Promoter Score” or NPS to measure CX. It collects information by asking a simple question. Like:
- How likely are you to rate our product? 1 to 5
Or
- How likely are you to recommend us?
Most companies use it as a standard CX measurement. It is simple to implement and shows the customers that the company cares. You can use the feedback to open up a dialogue with the customer. NPS helps you understand customers’ issues, and you can solve them quickly.
10. Develop A Customer-Centric Culture In Your Company
When you’re customer-centric, it means developing policies for delivering a positive customer experience throughout the buyer’s journey. It drives more repeat customers to your business and increases customer loyalty.
Recent research by Touche and Deloitte showed that companies with a customer-centric culture are 60% more profitable than others that don’t put the customer first.
Being customer-centric can give you access to a lot of valuable user data. You can then use it for a complete 360-degree understanding of your customers. You can also use this data to identify opportunities to bring products or services to the right audiences.
Conclusion
Improving customer experience offers excellent opportunities that can directly impact your performance. With the right CX strategy, you can improve customer experience and make your company more customer-centric. Therefore, whether you are a mere startup, or an experienced enterprise, focusing on better customer experience can go a long way toward your success.
We hope now you understand how to improve customer experience and the above strategies refine your interaction with customers. Good luck!
