4 min read
When it comes to customer experience, businesses today can’t afford to take chances. In a world where people have more choices than ever before, and social media makes it easy for them to share their experiences with the world, customers can be quick to jump ship.
That’s why it’s so important for businesses to focus on delivering positive customer experiences. When customers have a good experience, they’re more likely to tell others about it – which can result in more business for you.
In this blog, we’ll talk about what makes a good customer experience, the key benefits of one, and how you can create your own.
So, what truly makes for a good experience? Speed. Convenience. Consistency. Friendliness. Human touch. Although the way each organization delivers a great customer experience differs from business to business as every company and product is unique. But, there are some common attributes of a great customer experience that work across all industries, no matter what you sell or what size your company is.
Examples of these common positive attributes include:
According to a study by Forrester Research, companies that work on customer experience management increase their advantage by 14%, in terms of the customers' initiative to buy more, compared to those who do not. This often comes with an increase in profitability, as consumers are willing to pay a higher price for the product that comes with a great customer experience since they value the overall experience more than just the price.
When your customers receive a superior experience, they will continue to stay with your business and recommend it to their friends, family, and social networks. Consumers tend to trust the experience of other consumers more than the image the brand conveys.
Standing up for your brand will enable you to gain customer recognition, word of mouth marketing, faith, and credibility. According to 89% of B2B marketers, brand awareness is the most important goal, followed by sales and lead generation.
It is 6-7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep a current customer.
The probability of a sale from a brand new customer is only 5-20% whereas the probability of a sale from an existing customer is between 60-70%. In fact, 80% of your future profits will most likely come from 20% of your existing customers. You do the math.
For this reason alone creating customer loyalty is vital to your business and the best way to achieve it is by providing a great customer experience every single time customer interacts with you.
Great employee experience and great customer experience go hand in hand and one impacts the other in the most fundamental of ways. It’s common sense if you think about it. Without your employees, you won’t be able to provide any sort of customer experience. And, if your employees aren’t engaged and happy in their work, they won’t be able to (or won’t want to) provide a fantastic experience for your customers.
So now that we understand what a good customer experience is and the many ways it affects your business, let's take a look at some of the key areas of focus for delivering a great CX.
Culture and strategy always go hand in hand. When organizations create a strong, customer-centric culture, it informs all other strategies.
Creating a culture that puts customers first drives more sales, boosts your brand’s reputation, and sets the stage for long-term relationships with loyal customers. It also enables a better, faster, and more accurate identification of customer pain points and, in turn, more efficient and personalized ways to solve them.
Building a customer-centric vision and culture is a major undertaking—arguably the most challenging and most crucial element in any CX strategy.
Understand who your customers are, what are their needs, wants, and pain points. You can use this information to position your product or service as a potential solution. Solving the challenges customers face helps you deliver a great customer experience.
Start by creating a customer journey map. Although the journey is not linear, and every customer is unique, it’s important that you identify the key touch-points customers have with your brand – and you work to improve those first. At the end of the day, the goal is to build a connected customer experience across the entire journey.
Communication is essential to building relationships with your customers and investing in this omni-channel customer experience is a must for today's organizations. Omni-channel takes all avenues of communication and interaction and links them together to get a full view of the customer experience. Rather than siloed experiences operating parallel to one another, the omni-channel approach works concurrently for a seamless and frictionless experience between each touchpoint seen through the lens of the end-to-end customer journey.
Whether you have a physical location or are reachable by telephone or SMS, your website, mobile app, social channels, or customer self-service, omni-channel keeps a branded experience with all of these avenues in mind.
How can you tell if you are delivering a WOW customer experience? You need to ask. Ideally, you ask in real-time. The Voice of the Customer program is at the heart of any customer experience program. It helps organizations capture, analyze, and report on all feedback associated with their brand.
From this feedback, you can get real-time insights into your customers' experiences, identify trends and opportunities to act on in order to deliver great customer experiences.
Delivering a great customer experience is crucial. Although it is an undertaking requiring enormous time and effort, it is way worth it in the end. And it is never too early to start creating your customer-centric vision, identifying key touch-points along your customers' journey, investing in the right technology, and collecting customer feedback to improve those experiences.
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