Great customer experience can increase the value of a customer relationship. The importance of customer experience is simple: you will maintain customer loyalty if customer experience with your company is good.
Customer experience nowadays
Customer experience today is difficult to maintain. People have higher expectations for what is acceptable. We live in a “Generation Now” as i-Scoop validates, where “everything needs to be better and faster…” In addition, there are an increasing amount of channels, including social media, through which customers can express their viewpoints – whether good or bad.
Harvard Business Review describes how many believe that increasing customer satisfaction is an expensive challenge. In reality, it often reduces expenditures for businesses because there are fewer upset customers requiring support and wanting to return products. Therefore, focusing on customer experience is an essential component to any company’s success.
How to improve customer experience
1. Emphasize your business’s strengths and how they differ from aspects of another company. As Forbes.com describes, a memorable customer experience means that something about your business made it stand out from the crowd, and this change in experience helps foster a relationship with your customers.
2. Determine the most important customer outcomes for your business. An article by Terry Rybolt, CEO of Teleperformance Canada, explains how defining these outcomes can help you improve overall customer experience. By having the outcomes in mind, you can more clearly assist customers on the journey to reach those outcomes. The article also describes how looking at the customer journey from the perspective of the customer and not your company’s internal team can significantly improve customer satisfaction.
3. Focus on the areas of customer satisfaction that equate to the highest payouts. An article by McKinsey&Company describes how, for different companies, break points for customer experience will vary. An example they use compares a health insurance company and retail banking. For health insurance, improving customer experience for those who are extremely dissatisfied with their service so that they feel the service is at least average can lead to higher payout than “migrating such ‘passives’ to the category of people willing to promote the service.” In retail banking, on the other hand, “moving someone from the 80th to the 90th percentile of satisfaction has a significant economic payout.”
4. Increase your social media presence. Social media has entirely changed the way companies interact with clients. Customers can ask direct questions to a business for others to see, and often expect and may frequently receive rapid responses. In addition, companies can ask clients for feedback and often welcome opinions through polls or asking for customer posts about their products employed through searchable hashtags. These interactions can greatly increase the value of a customer relationship.
5. Implement a 24/7 answering service. An answering service can significantly improve the customer experience, especially if it is offered 24/7. Customers, if working regular daytime work hours will still have the opportunity to contact your company to have questions answered and concerns addressed. Additionally, it’s common now to find companies that are only offering an email address or other written form of communication to answer customer concerns. The truth is that some questions are more easily communicated by phone and offering an answering service ensures that customers are always being heard. It also shows customers exceptional responsiveness, which dramatically enhances the customer’s interaction with your company.
Overall, following these tips can help enhance customer experience, in turn directly improving the value of customer relationships.