Five Tips To Improve Customer Experience And Grow Your Organisation
Providing your customers with a positive customer experience is key to growing your company. However, while having the right tools to help you grow your organisation is important, staying on top of your customer’s needs is also an ongoing challenge. Take advantage of these five tips to create a unique and sustainable customer experience.
1. Create A Clear Vision For Your Customer Experience
If you don’t have a clear strategy that defines your customer experience, you will never be able to improve the relationship with your customers. But how do you define your customer experience?
Every single company that is known for providing a great customer experience is driven by a mission statement. Amazon’s clearly states: “Our vision is to be Earth’s most customer centric company”. Zappo’s first statement of their Family Core Values is to “Deliver WOW Through Service”. Apple’s customer experience is driven by a statement by former CEO Steve Jobs: “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”.
A clear vision is necessary to form the foundation of your customer experience.
2. Clearly Understand Who Your Customers Are
If you don’t understand the different types of people who make up your customer base, how can you help them? Anyone who interacts with a customer on any level needs to understand what their customers want and need. But how do you gain a deeper understanding of your clients?
One way to achieve this is through buyer personas. A buyer persona helps your customer support teams understand your customers better by creating a more relatable image of your customer. Buyer personas remind customer support that they are dealing with an individual customer with their own needs and desires, which is key to developing a great customer experience.
Another way to understand your customer is by understanding their journey with your organisation.
A customer journey map can help you identify how your customer interacts with your company before, during and after they purchase a product by mapping out all the points where a customer connects with your organisation. Analysis of your customer’s interactions with your company will help you understand them by giving your a better view of how they see your organisation, and help you identify areas where you can improve their journey.
3. Listen To Your Customers, Particularly On Social Media
While it’s vital to listen to your customers on all platforms, whether it’s email, telephone or in person, many companies don’t pay as much attention as they should to customers on social media. More customers than ever are reaching out to you via social media channels, so make sure your social media team is up to scratch or risk damaging your relationship with your existing or future customers.
4. Ensure Clear Communication Across Your Entire Customer Journey
Omnichannel customer support is vital for ensuring a positive customer experience. Omnichannel customer support tracks the numerous touch points between an existing or potential customer and a product or service, throughout the customer lifecycle. It also allows a customer to switch between different communication channels and pick up where they left off. If they contacted a customer service agent via email, and then sent a tweet, your social media team will be able to continue where the email left off, ensuring your customer never has to deal with the frustration of explaining their situation each time they engage with a different communication channel.
Feedback from your customers is also important. Whether it’s an automated post-interaction survey done via email or phone, or just a call to a customer to find out more about their experience, this information can help provide insightful feedback that helps improve your customer’s experience.
5. Connect Personally With Your Customers To Create An Emotional Connection
Without a doubt, the worst customer experiences occur when things go wrong or when a company’s customer service agents couldn’t even be bothered to try and help their customer.
On the other hand, we all remember the time when someone didn’t just solve our problems but went beyond your expectations. They gave you a clock radio that’s custom made for their hotel chain, or they helped your child feel better about their missing toy, or helped you search for a diamond that had fallen out of your wedding ring.
While these stories are undoubtedly nice to read, do they actually help your company? A study by the Harvard Business Report says yes. Harvard Business Report highlights in another article how “On a lifetime value basis, emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable as highly satisfied customers. These emotionally connected customers buy more of your products and services, visit you more often, exhibit less price sensitivity, pay more attention to your communications, follow your advice, and recommend you more – everything you hope their experience with you will cause them to do.”
It’s hard to find a customer experience specialist that not only offers and embodies these practices, but can also adjust to the needs of your organisation. Merchants is a customer experience provider that can supply the right products and combines them with a powerful customer experience strategy that scales to meet the requirements of your company. Merchants is also available to consult, assess your customer journey, and advise you along the way. For more information regarding any of our services, contact us here.