In today’s digital world, delivering an excellent customer experience (CX) is not optional, but necessary for growth and competitiveness.
Today’s customers expect fast, seamless and personalized interactions, no matter what channel they use to get to you.
By optimizing your sales and support channels, you’ll reduce response times, improve problem resolution and increase the satisfaction of those who buy from you.
Let’s take a look at some keys that will help you improve your customer experience and give them the treatment they deserve.
1. Understand your customers
As obvious as it may be, it’s very difficult to improve your customer experience if you aren’t clear about who the people are on the other side. Therefore, one of the first things you should do is to determine your customer profile.
According to data from Exploding Topics, 86% of customers would leave a brand after two bad experiences. That’s how important it is to understand what they need and how to give it to them.
Take some time to get to know their wants, needs, and expectations. You can do this through surveys, focus groups or interviews. You can also analyze customer feedback through online reviews, social media comments, and customer support interactions to identify common themes and areas for improvement.
Once you have all the data you need, you can build some customer profiles by also relying on market research and competitor analysis to understand what types of customers they attract and based on what strategies. After all, they are likely to give you insights into what to do in your situation.
By doing all this, you can match your products, services and channels to the unique traits of your customers and offer them a better overall experience.
2. Map your customer journey
It’s the path a lead follows from the moment they are aware of your brand until they become a loyal follower. Depending on the source you consult, the stages of the journey will be:
- Awareness: At this stage, your target audience is just learning about your brand.
- Consideration: People start to evaluate if your brand is a solution to their problem or need.
- Purchase: Customers are ready to buy, whether it’s your brand or another. It’s also called the decision stage.
- Retention: It’s about keeping a good relationship with your customers and giving them reasons to stay with your brand.
- Advocacy: Customers are so satisfied with your product or service that they actively recommend it to their friends and family.
Each of these stages has touchpoints between you and your customers, be it website visits, email exchanges, social media comments or others.
With a customer journey map, you can identify these touchpoints between your customer and your brand, which will give you the chance to optimize them and create a smoother experience across your different channels.
3. Offer customized experiences
No one likes to feel like just another number on someone’s list, right?
Clients like it when you take your time to offer a more tailored and unique approach to their case. This can be as simple as using the customer’s name in a greeting or product demonstration, or even recommending products or services that might catch their attention based on some piece of info they’ve offered.
If you want something more complex, you can segment your audience according to common patterns or traits to form groups. This can be very useful for emails, ads, and other types of content, as it will help you create suitable messages for specific people and generate a greater impact on them.
By personalizing the experience, you’ll make your customers feel more loved and appreciated, and that’s always a plus.
4. Develop soft skills in your team
Beyond the technical knowledge you may need to explain a product or service to your customers, the key to any good interaction between you and them will be your soft skills.
These aptitudes will help you better understand their needs and better communicate the solutions you can offer to solve them.
It’s something we might lose sight of, but we must never forget that we are dealing with people who, beyond wanting to solve a problem or seek more information about a product or service, want to be understood and treated well, and soft skills can help us accomplish that.
Therefore, developing and training your team in skills such as empathy, effective communication, problem solving and others will allow you to better understand your customer’s situation and find the best solution.
This is something that not only your customers will thank you for, but also your own employees. According to a Wiley research, 63% of employees who received soft skills training stated that it has positively impacted their performance.
5. Use technology to your advantage
We live in a technological world with tools that can make life much easier. Why not use them?
When you use the right apps and integrate them seamlessly, you can free up a lot of time in your schedule and dedicate it to what’s most important while the work practically does itself, something that once was only a dream.
There are several ways you can integrate tech into your work process to automate and streamline processes. For example, you can use chatbots to answer frequently asked questions, add self-service portals for customers to manage their accounts and information, or allow them to schedule a meeting with you or your team through online meeting scheduling software.
The latter is practically a necessity if you don’t have a team to back you up. By using scheduling software for consultants, for example, you’ll automate this process and spend your time on more critical things for your project.
6. Gather and act on feedback
Gathering feedback is a must if you want to improve your customer experience. If you don’t have data on how they respond to your actions or strategies, how will you know you’re doing it right?
Feedback is invaluable for any professional and project. It will help you identify the areas where you are doing well and those where you have room for improvement and make positive decisions for your business.
Simply find the right survey maker for you, and start creating surveys based on the kind of feedback you need to drive your business forward.
Be sure to collect feedback periodically to more easily see the origin and development of patterns over time, and try to collect and segment the feedback according to what you are interested in seeing. Once you’ve done this, look for common patterns and themes.
This feedback could be collected using any number of surveys, including (but not restricted to) customer experience surveys.
From here, it’s a straightforward matter of developing action plans, making changes, monitoring them and informing your audience of them if necessary, always letting them know that such changes are happening to give them a better experience across your various channels.
7. Make customer experience your #1 priority
Efforts to improve your customer experience should be a priority in any business. Make sure this is present in your work culture and in the way each of your employees understands the business and dealing with customers.
When everyone is committed to giving their best when answering a customer’s question or in a meeting, the results will follow.
We are not alone in saying this. According to a Super Office survey of nearly 1,600 professionals, 45.9% said their priority for the next 5 years is customer experience, which speaks to its importance.
So how do you integrate this idea into your business culture? On one hand, you can align your customer experience goals with your business objectives, giving them a place in your strategic plan so that your actions impact CX naturally.
You can also set concrete CX metrics and monitor them over time. One such metric is the customer satisfaction score, which indicates how satisfied a consumer is with a company’s services or products. This metric is expressed in percentages and ranges from 0% to 100%.
Another interesting metric is the churn customer rate, which measures the percentage of customers who stop engaging with or following a brand or project in a given period of time. With this metric, you can identify areas for improvement and possible shortcomings in customer retention.
Finally, there is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). This metric helps measure a customer’s loyalty and satisfaction with your brand by directly asking how likely they are to recommend it to others. This question has a scale of 0 to 10, and the higher the score, the more likely the person is to enthusiastically recommend your brand.
Wrapping up
Happy customers are at the heart of any good business. If they are satisfied with the way you treat them, answer their questions or simply interact with them, you already have half of your success guaranteed.
This is an era where marketing and sales are no longer focused on the product, but on the customer and their relationship with brands. It’s no longer about selling a product or service, but an experience that engages the customers, builds trust and makes them followers.
The best way to improve your customer experience is to build a smooth, personalized and fast customer journey, where they can reach you easily and follow your brand thanks to your values, personality and the way you appreciate and take them into account. If you follow these tips, no doubt you will.
Article written by guest author: Diego Almao
