Providing a positive customer experience (CX) does wonders for your company. From promoting customer loyalty and retention, there are many rewards to gain by meeting your customers’ expectations. Get to know how your business can improve customer experience.
Like many businesses, e-commerce cannot rely solely on its product to be competitive. This statement is especially true for companies that have been in the market for a while. Meeting customer expectations and giving excellent service are factors that promote customer loyalty and grow your customer base.
Thus, making customers happy leads to more purchases, happy reviews, and referrals. This article will discuss what and how to deliver a superb customer experience. Let’s start by defining what CX is.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience is what your customers think about how your business treats them. Broadly, CX covers everything. It is the moment people hear about your brand until they stop doing business with you.
Treating your customers right will result in them continuing to avail of your products. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) study shows that 73% of customers state that excellent CX is one of the primary reasons they chose a brand.
Why is CX Important?
Providing an excellent customer experience is not an option but a necessity. For your business to thrive, you have to meet your customers’ needs. PwC’s study states that 82% of the top-performing tech and digital companies pay close attention to human experience.
Therefore, superior customer experience is one of the keys to attaining high customer loyalty. Beyond the price and quality of your service, here are some factors that can affect CX:
Convenience
One of the reasons why e-commerce is thriving is because it provides ease of looking and purchasing. Companies lose buyers because it took them a while to find or their products are out of stock. Spending time looking for your products can turn away your customers even if they prefer your brand.
Customer Service
The way you support your product will make a difference. For instance, warranties and quick resolutions to complaints can improve the customer experience from disappointment to satisfaction.
Rewards
Who doesn’t love getting rewards? Customers will appreciate it if your business recognizes their loyalty. Offering discounts and bonuses will make your customers feel rewarded for loyalty. Thus, rewards can keep them from looking at your competitors.
Relationship
Many clients not only consider what they are buying but also who is selling them the service. Hence, your salespeople and customer service representatives must cultivate rapport and relationships with your clients. By building relationships with clients, your frontliners will be more attentive to your customer needs.
Expectation
Your products and services must always meet your clients’ expectations. You have to continue delivering the promises and guarantees about your services. A disappointed client can lead to dissatisfaction. They may look towards your competitors.
Reputation
In an increasingly transparent world, how your brand is perceived will affect customer relationships. How you present your brand in both commercial and social media will influence your target market. Customers are more scrutinizing as they realize their purchasing powers could affect society.
Outreach
This factor relates to your brand reputation. Companies that participate in community outreach and programs give their customers more reasons to remain loyal. Your customers will feel that they are also contributing to a social cause when availing of your products.
7 Ways to Improve CX
Don’t overlook the importance of an excellent customer experience. It affects how your target market sees your brand. Developing an exceptional customer experience will help in cultivating a brand reputation. Here are seven ways to improve your CX:
Creating a Feedback System
A customer feedback system will help you know the insights of your clients. Through this system, your customer can tell you what they expect from your service. Customer feedback will allow you to understand what changes they want, where they are having a hard time, and more.
Additionally, creating an internal employee feedback loop is helpful. Your sales agents and customer service people can aggregate the customer feedback. The system will also let your agents tell you the factors that prevent them from delivering excellent service.
By acknowledging the feedback and acting on them, you build trust from your customers. They will feel that you are not just doing lip services but helping them have the best customer experience.
Developing an Omnichannel
An omnichannel is a CX strategy to create consistent and connected communication channels for customers. This strategy will enable you to be constant with your communications with your customers. Client texts, history, and other interactions with your business will travel with them across channels.
Omnichannel customer service is essential to improve customer experience. For example, a client contacts your company due to a problem. The client can use a chatbot, email, or contact center. However, the information they shared should be available to all channels to avoid the redundancy of their action.
Certainly, having the ability to transfer client interactions seamlessly to different channels will create an outstanding CX.
Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
Most of the time, customers find it a hassle to contact customer service. To help them with this, you have to develop a data-driven content marketing strategy.
So, provide clients with helpful articles or chatbots will help in pointing them in the right direction. Make sure that your digital content is continuously updated and accurate. In contrast, an unhelpful article will escalate a simple interaction to a terrible customer experience.
Personalize Your Customer Services
In the case of customer experience, tailoring support to customers is a must. Gather information on their preferences, habits, personalities, and contact methods. Thus, by using this information, you develop more personalized services that provide satisfaction.
Use AI to Empower Customers
In 2022, Gartner predicts that most customer interactions will involve emerging technologies. So, businesses will be engaging customers via chatbots, mobile messaging, and virtual assistants.
These AI-powered tools are handy in interacting with customers with repetitive and simple tasks. However, they have their limits. Therefore, your customer service teams should always be on hand to assist clients.
Offer Proactive Experience
It is no longer enough to react to customer complaints and demands. You have to be a step ahead and anticipate your customers’ needs. Remedying a problem before it becomes an issue prevents possible inconvenient experiences.
For example, an e-commerce business can employ chatbots to answer questions as buyers head to the checkout page. Or, a company can send a text or email to clients regarding an upcoming update in the system.
Pay Attention to Analytics and Data
The numbers in your data and analytics tell many stories. They will provide insights into your customers’ wants and preferences. The numbers also inform you how efficient your support organization is. Additionally, it will also tell you about how your engagement satisfaction levels.
Refining and analyzing these data will help you make adjustments and improvements. By constantly doing so, you can develop strategies to give an outstanding customer experience.
How to Measure Customer Experience?
There are no exact ways to measure customer experience. But, you can collect data and analyze it to understand better how to improve CX. You can do this by:
- Regularly do a customer satisfaction survey.
- Let customers rate how easy it was to resolve their problems.
- Study your churn rates, expansion rates, and customer lifetime value.
- Test your CX efforts to targeted customer segments.
- Make your community forum a virtual focus group to gather data.
- Get the inputs of your customer-facing teams.
CX Matters
Customer experience matters. No matter which industry, customers will always look for alternatives when unsatisfied with the products or services. Therefore, investing in CX is always worthwhile, whether your business is big or small. After all, for your business to survive and thrive, you need loyal customers.