A pleasant interaction of a customer with your business is called customer experience. A customer experience constitutes the entire cycle of customer interaction, starting from the first contact towards becoming a happy customer.
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1 . What is customer experience?
2. Customer experience vs. Customer service
3. How important is the customer experience?
4. Impact of bad customer experiences
5. Ways to improve the customer experience
A satisfied customer brings in more business, and an angry customer could curtail your business.
A study by Oracle has revealed that 74% of senior executives agree that a happy customer willingly acts as a loyal advocate. That’s why it is vital to invest in customer experience.
A customer experience is positive if he/she is satisfied with every step of the interaction.
Irrespective of the niche of your business, there are tons of companies offering similar products/ services.
So how does your business stand apart? While price, additional offerings, ease of use, and USPs are some of the best tips to stay unique, offering an excellent customer experience throughout the cycle may be the only way out!
What is customer experience?
A customer’s perception towards a business/ brand should be positive, which means the customer should be satisfied with the interactions at every step.
An excellent Customer experience not only results in happy customers but also helps boost the overall brand awareness. One happy customer can generate more leads than a virtual sales team.
Brands need to strategize their customer experience to generate leads, improve brand awareness, and create a potential base.
Customer experience vs. Customer service
Customer service is a part of customer experience. A customer interacts with different executives throughout the process of conducting business, and the customer’s perception of the entire process should be positive.
From calling a customer service desk to an email interaction, all the touchpoints should be a positive experience for the customer to term it an excellent customer experience. A customer seeks help from the service department for any challenges, and this is called customer service.
While customer service concentrates on resolving an issue the customer faces, customer experience is a positive interaction of a customer throughout the cycle with multiple touchpoints.
How important is the customer experience?
Collecting data/ feedback about customer behavior, thoughts, feelings, and service expectations are key factors that contribute to an excellent customer experience strategy.
One unhappy customer can lead to many challenges and a dip in the number of sales. Like a happy customer bringing more business, a dissatisfied customer experience can lead to negative brand awareness.
Several factors contribute to the negative or positive feedback of a customer. Measuring customer experience periodically and collecting feedback from customers can help businesses/ brands make improvements and constantly help create a positive customer experience.
Impact of bad customer experiences
Lengthy turnaround time, lack of attention to detail, lack of training to the executives, and unprofessional behavior could lead to bad customer experiences. A bad customer experience means one v valuable customer is lost.
However, it will also reduce the number of conversions, lower sales numbers, and hurt the overall brand image.
Ways to improve the customer experience
1 . Define expectations
Customer experience begins when a potential buyer clicks on that advertisement/web page to understand the company/ product better. It is crucial to align the company’s values in line with the expectations of customer experience strategy.
It helps the team executives adhere to a set of guidelines and ensure a customer interaction at every touchpoint remains the best experience.
Surveys suggest that a whopping 49% of buyers make impulse purchases due to the personalized experience they receive.
2 . Understand your customers
No matter how good a product/ service is, its success is dependent on the marketing strategies. Engaging with the customers through various channels, using polls and other survey methods better to understand the customer, their tastes, demography, and further details enable companies to realign their marketing strategies.
It also helps to design their offerings to best suit the needs of their customers.
Surveys suggest that customers are ready to pay premium prices of up to 18% for luxury services when they receive a great customer experience.
3. Emotionally connect with the customers.
A personal touch makes a significant difference, whether it is to provide a great customer experience or convert them into loyal customers.
Finding out little facts about the customer’s personal life and offering/managing something they would have struggled with in the buying process makes them happy and makes them stay loyal to the brand.
Customers are loyal to a brand because of the emotional attachment. Emotional connect seems to have outperformed the competitors by 85% in the sales numbers.
4 . Real-time customer feedback
Every company works hard to offer a WOW experience to its customers. But how do they know if they are successful or not? Data is self-explanatory.
Another way of finding out the customers’ feedback in real-time through a survey, live chat, or a follow-up email can offer many exciting facts and inputs for companies to change their process/ system to improve customer experience.
As per Gartner’s research, companies with successful customer experience ratings regularly collected and analyzed customer feedback in real-time.
5 . Alignment of the vision, mission, and processes with the customer experience strategy
One of the first few things to consider while improving the customer experience strategy is to ensure that the company’s vision, mission, values, and processes stay in sync. It is easy to manage customer experience strategy when all the executives are on the same page.
Surveys suggest that up to 66% of the customers feel that their opinion about the brand changes with a bad website experience.
6 . Framework
Identifying training needs, considering customer feedback, and assessing the executives’ communication with the customers over phone/email can all work in sync.
It is essential to ensure the training, assessments, and feedback work towards building a framework that addresses an overall customer experience by adhering to and conducting proper scrutiny at every touchpoint.
Esteban Kolsky suggests that 72% of customers with a positive experience will share it with six other people. In contrast, 13% of unhappy customers share it with more than fifteen others.
7 . Act upon regular employee feedback
Most companies work on an annual employee feedback system to capture the critical data points from their team. However, it means that the data for the eleven months usually gets old and unregistered.
More detailed and regular employee feedback enables brands to nip any issues at the bud and achieve an excellent customer experience. Self-service seems to be the future.
More than 67% of the customers prefer to solve their online knowledge problems rather than speaking to a representative.
It might lead to brands utilizing bots to manage billions of their service tickets.
8 . Customer experience with teamwork
Customers interact with executives at various levels. All the employees need to stay on the same page and offer customers a unique service that makes them feel valued. Even if one executive/ team fails at adhering to the standards, it means the overall customer experience will be negative.
Surveys suggest more than 90% of customers report dissatisfaction over the website navigation on mobile devices.
9 . Eliminate bad design early in the game
While customer experience requires teamwork, it is also essential for the companies to ensure their internal processes, designs, and documentation.
Any internal issues that create a hassle for a customer require realignment because a customer doesn’t care about its internal process. Problems/ challenges at any level require attention way before there is an actual unhappy customer to stay ahead of the game.
Despite understanding the importance of customer experience, research reveals that only 44% of the companies intend to increase their customer experience strategy investment.
10. Measuring ROI
While it is vital to invest in customer experience strategy, it is also essential to measure its results. Asking a direct question to your customer whether they would refer the brand to a friend/ relative would be the best approach.
Numbers are the best answer providers. That’s why companies use the “Net Promoter Score” to collect feedback from the customers.
PWC report- 2020 says there has been an increase in the number of companies investing in omnichannel experience from 20% to 80%.
Conclusion
Companies have realized the need to increase their investment in customer experience.
Training executives at all levels, aligning the customer experience strategy with the internal processes, investing in AI-based bots, improving the quality and access of content on their website are some of the best ways to improve customer experience.
A holistic approach towards the customer experience strategy can guarantee an increase in revenue growth of any organization.
