Customer experience focuses on all of the interactions a customer has throughout their journey with you, and directly influences your brands perception and reputation. As a result, this highlights the importance of customer experience as positive experiences create trust and loyalty, whereas negative ones will do the exact opposite.
Here, we’ll explore how you can deliver great customer experiences, every time:
- Ensure your customers are in control
- Prioritise building your customer relationships
- Create an omnichannel experience
- Map out your customer journey, and regularly update it
- Be effective at responding to customer feedback
1. Ensure customers are in control
Once, salespeople were in control. Now, it’s customers who have all the power. Thanks to the world wide web, customers can educate themselves on products/services and companies before buying.
To improve your customers control, look at introducing a chatbot on your site. A study found that 52% of consumers are more likely to pay attention to a brand if they can control the content presented to them. Therefore, as chatbots can answer specific queries and direct users to pages based on this, it offers convenience for your customers and places the relevant information they’re after in their hands.
2. Prioritise building the relationships you have with your customers
The world is only becoming more competitive and saturated. We’re surrounded by loud adverts, bold messaging, and eye-catching imagery. And we as consumers see through it all. You can cut through the noise by building trust with your customers, and a way you can do this is by using personalisation. Here are some examples:
- Greet customers by their name – whether this is through chatbots or email campaigns, it allows you to get closer to your customers by personally addressing them
- Tailored offers and promotions – whether this is based on their prior or similar purchases, it’s a great way to re-engage your audience
- Set up a loyalty scheme – this encourages repeat purchasing, with 72% of consumers saying they’d choose one brand over another if they received special treatment
3. Create an omnichannel experience
It’s not enough to be present on one platform such as email or social media. It’s found that 90% of customers expect an omnichannel experience, and if you can’t connect to your audience on multiple channels, this’ll directly impact your customer experience.
To improve your omnichannel experiences, you should:
- Provide a seamless transition between platforms and devices – when customers switch between website and mobile for example, they’ll want the convenience of picking up where they left off
- Use always-on services – this allows you to provide a connected, empathetic customer experience as your teams can look up names, addresses, and history of how customers have interacted previously with ease
- Take advantage of AI – AI such as chatbots can increase response times to your customers, meaning they won’t have to wait to connect with a representative especially during peak times
4. Map out your customer journey, and regularly update it
Creating great experiences for your customers involves understanding the route they take to purchase your products/services. Do they use your social media channels to access your website? Are they spending more time on a particular webpage before taking the next action?
Once you’ve identified the most appropriate metrics to measure based on your goals, this’ll provide a better idea of ways to enhance your customer experience to create further engagement. Find out more about the metrics you should be paying attention to here.
Customer journeys are also forever changing, from channels emerging that create new digital customer experiences to shifting consumer trends. This means you’ll have to review your touchpoints regularly, allowing you to get an accurate representation of how they’re currently interacting with your business.
5. Be effective at responding to customer feedback
Few things impact brand reputation more than the way you handle negative feedback. Even if your product or service didn’t live up to their expectations, customers can still have a positive experience if you’re able to handle their issue effectively.
There’s a catch, however. It’s found that 96% of unhappy customers don’t end up complaining, they just leave, and it takes 12 positive experiences to compensate for one negative experience. So, by communicating with your customers at the post-purchase stage in their journey via feedback notifications for instance, you’ll always have opportunities to make your customers feel heard, valued, and looked after.
That way, you can increase the chances of earning their trust and loyalty back to rectify their negative experience.
Understanding your customers is just the first step to delivering great experiences
To provide a great customer experience, you need to know what your customers actually want. However, where do you start with your customer journey mapping to uncover this information? In our infographic, we help you:
- Map out the customer effectively with the right data and analytics
- Provide and connect digital sales channels that engage your customers
- Enable an always-on service to support customers around the clock
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