Consumers are paying more attention to experience than ever, putting the pressure on businesses to deliver better experiences. Customers crave branded, personalised moments at every point of engagement and it’s all about showing up for the customer when and where they need you, with consistency.
What is Customer Experience & why is it important?
Customer experience refers to how a business engages with its customers at every point of their buying journey—from marketing to sales to customer service and everywhere in between.
A positive customer experience can massively boost your business. It can help retain clients and encourage them to refer your company to others. In fact, 84% of customers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, according to BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey.
Here are our 5 tips for improving your customer experience strategy:
- Go straight to the source
We see far too often that business marketing campaigns guess at what the customer wants. Yet, an easier way to understand the customers’ needs is by asking them. You company can learn valuable information about the pain points of customers and how to better cater to their needs, leading to a business model that’s viable in the long run.
- Offer Personalised Engagements
If your top-funnel visitors have to dig to find relevant information on your website, you are creating more effort and driving a huge wedge between you and them, especially considering that your competition is likely investing in these top-funnel, personalized experiences. Also, don’t neglect your valued customers by displaying information that is geographically and contextually irrelevant to their account, needs, or past experiences with you.
- Provide Clear Paths to Resolution
When the path to resolution is anything but a seamless straight line, it adds effort to the customer journey and puts a damper on the customer experience. Customer service should therefore be a focus for your customer experience. Create a valuable relationship by offering a quality service. Address their concerns and answer emails in a timely manner to show they are a top priority. This lays down a foundation of trust, leading to returning customers.
- Don’t Forget to Remember Customers
Remembering your customers is a process linked to gathering and analysing the details of your target audience through market research. Assuming that your company is not the first service they’ve used within your industry, learn the defaults of the previous companies they worked with and use these shortcomings to better your own service and hone your strengths in a highly saturated marketplace.
- Automate where you can
Reduce cognitive load by automating the process where possible. Automate any steps that are least dependent on human involvement such as reminders, feedback requests, scheduling etc. If you can automate the basics, you can reduce the workload for those involved, leaving your staff with more bandwidth to make a personal connection with the individual customer.
If you’re serious about growth, then strategy must come first – it’s the only way to avoid scatter-gun marketing. We can help you decide what you should be doing and (more importantly) what you shouldn’t.
