Good customer experience is key to a successful business.
Over the years, companies have pointed at customer experience as a top strategic objective. Sadly, many companies fail to deliver a satisfactory customer experience, which resulted in poor customer retention.
Here are some ways your company can cultivate a great customer experience.
Understand your customers and their journeys
Your business must make a conscious effort to understand customer needs by connecting and empathizing with the situations they face.
A good way to do this is to map out your buyer’s journey. Who is your ideal customer? What are their needs and motivations? How can your company answer to his needs? What obstacles may he face along the way?
Once you understand the customer’ s journey end to end, you can truly see where potential problems may occur. Focus on these problems and resolve them.
Also, by properly mapping out your buyer’s journey, you can understand them better, which is an important step to being truly customer-centric.
Capture customer feedback in real-time; be responsive
Companies can better implement customer experience projects after carefully analyzing customer feedback.
So how can you tell if you’re delivering a top-notch experience to your customers? Simple – you need to ask them.
IOn your website, provide post-interaction surveys and other similar customer experience tools. You can also do this using follow-up emails.
A feedback management system will automatically clean and structure the feedback you’ll receive from your customers. This way, you can easily take action to improve your services.
Also, it’s important to reach out to customers having negative feelings about your company. Address the inconveniences they might have gone through and find ways to prevent such problems from happening in the future.
Create an emotional connection with your buyers
Sixty-three percent of customers with positive feelings about a company will remain loyal to that company.
Again, going back to the buyer’s journey, you may assign potential emotional reactions to different touchpoints of their journey. As you strategize the best ways to lead a customer from point A to B, you should anticipate how a customer may feel if any step is successful or not.
Also, you should create a positive emotional impact. Take time to listen to your buyers, validate their feelings and create a positive connection that can lead to loyalty.
Explore self-service options
Thanks to today’s technology, more and more services have become automated. For example, many McDonald’s chains have begun rolling out self-service kiosks.
What’s the connection between self-service and better customer experience, you might ask?
More customers are preferring self-service alternatives, particularly millennials. A survey found that the majority of consumers preferred self-service rather than speaking to a support agent.
Self-service kiosks lower the chance of human error. Like supermarket cashiers failing to scan (or double-scanning) items. The less friction in the checkout process, the more sales you’ll make.
Always remember that customer experience is a process of continuous improvement and keeping in touch with evolving customer demands. As long as you have a solid idea of the type of customer experience you’re trying to build, the process will become much easier.
