Ways to Improve Customer Experience

Introduction

With 92% of customers relying on recommendations from people they know, it is essential that business owners know how to improve customer experience and take proactive measures to do so.

The Benefits of a Good Customer Experience

Great customer experience has the potential to profit your entire business. Benefits of good customer experience include-

1. Heightened customer engagement levels- Great customer experiences result in better customer engagement and customer satisfaction levels. Customer support that shows customer effort and care will create a trusting relationship between a business and its customers.

Effective use of social media across the customer journey will also increase customer engagement levels. Inquiring for customer insights and well-executed email marketing campaigns can keep your customers feeling connected to your products and services, even when they are not making a purchase.

A customer centric experience will not only increase customer engagement but also increase customer loyalty long term. Increased customer loyalty decreases customer churn and strengthens customer retention rates.

2. Improved customer retention and conversions- It is much more cost effective to keep existing happy customers than to acquire new customers. Finding leads and retaining a new customer is time consuming and expensive.

A focus on the entire customer journey will increase both customer retention and conversion rates. Make sure to focus on building customer relationships over revenue, and your bottom line will profit from developing genuine connections. Similarly, treat new customers as prospective lifetime value customers instead of one-time shoppers.

3. More effective marketing- Your marketing and service team spends a lot of time and money trying to develop and sell your products. Customer feedback that results from a customer centric approach will help your business to understand the specific needs and wants of your customers. Customer feedback will decrease the amount of time your marketing and service team needs to spend on researching and increase customer satisfaction levels.

Every customer should be provided the opportunity to give their feedback on their customer service interactions and customer experience with your company. This feedback should be used in your customer experience strategy as well as in updating best practices for your business.

Great customer experience can decrease marketing costs by providing free new customer acquisitions. Instead of having to follow leads or create marketing campaigns, your loyal customers can serve as brand ambassadors who refer your business to others.

If your business is undergoing a digital transformation it is very helpful to use customer feedback and case studies to implement the best practices possible. Make sure to apply customer feedback on your user experience to improve the customer journey online.

Additionally, make customer feedback even more accessible through social media and other digital platforms. Your customer service team should analyze feedback when engaging with-

• Email marketing including collecting a new email address
• Customer support hotlines
• Social media interactions
• Live chat conversations

The Best Ways to Improve Customer Experience

Customer experience is the top reported brand differentiator for 2020. This comes as no surprise considering that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for great customer experience. Additionally, companies that invest in their customer experience and earn $1 billion or more per year can expect to increase profits by $700 million within three years.

Ways to improve customer experience include-

1. Create clear objectives- Of course, your customer service team must understand what your customer experience objectives are clearly. Great customer experience relies on every team member at your business being familiar with customer service and experience protocol. Make sure to include these values and objectives in your training and development programs.

2. Be customer centric- In order to be customer centric a company must proactively simulate the entire customer journey while creating their customer experience strategy. Great customer experience requires planning and effort. Using simulated buyer personas can help your support team learn how to treat every customer uniquely.

3. Foster connection- Emotion highly affects both customer satisfaction and customer engagement levels. A happy customer will be more likely to come back to your business and spread the word on social media or with their personal network about the great experience they had. Emotionally engaged customers are 300% more likely to recommend your product or service to others.

Every customer should be treated as valuable and feel cared for by your business. Emotional connectivity has high profitability, with an 85% higher sales growth for companies that optimize emotional connection.

Emotionally engaged customers are also less price sensitive and are much loyal customers. In fact, 44% of emotionally engaged customers report that they rarely or never shop around if they feel connected to a company.

4. Request feedback- Customer feedback should be consistently encouraged whether the customer had a positive experience or a negative experience at your business. Employee feedback is also important, as every employee should feel empowered to give advice on how to improve employee experiences.

Knowing how your customers feel and taking proactive steps to act on customer feedback will raise your customer satisfaction levels. More satisfied customers will lead to higher customer engagement and customer loyalty which in turn creates higher profitability and less customer churn over time.