BACK7 Ways To Create A Great Customer Experience Strategy
Return customers are the lifeblood of businesses. Whether you are a mum-and-dad business, or big business boasting thousands of clients, the sight of a return customer is an indication that surely you must be doing something right.
It also serves as a reminder that customer experience is crucial for any business.
Knowing that, it becomes extremely crucial that your business has a strategy in place that ensures that every step you take before and after the customer transacts with you leaves a lasting positive impression.
But, what exactly makes an effective customer experience strategy?
Here are 7 things to know…
1. Know your customers
By knowing the needs, wants, and behaviours of your customer better than they do, you can deliver a great customer experience. This is where data comes into play.
Using marketing platforms like AdWords, Facebook, and Google Analytics allows you to compile and understand your audiences’ data, helping you identify where you are driving website traffic from, who is engaging and for how long. It may even tell you how many leads have been generated from the website.
2. Invest In Ways To Streamline Customer Experience
Website lag, sketchy promotions, delayed responses, invalid discount codes, and poor customer service can all lead to a loss of trust in your business which affects customer retention and conversion.
This truth is highlighted by a survey conducted by Helpscout in 2013 where only 8% of the companies received the top grade from customers for their customer experience.
The remaining 92%? Well, their bottom line just took a huge hit because according to a survey by Ernst and Young, Aussie businesses lose $720 for every instance of bad customer service experience.
And then there’s the fact that 91% of customers who has had a bad customer service experience won’t be willing to do business with their company ever again.
3. Reply Promptly
Patience may be a virtue, but in the real world, nobody likes to wait. Even more so for customers who are stressed or upset. Having them wait 30 minutes as you transfer them from one representative to another is just a recipe for disaster because 75% of your online customers expect you to assist them within 5 minutes.
In fact, according to a report by Frost, 41% of consumers said that being put on hold when calling customer service is the biggest source of frustration. Surely all of us can relate to that.
Promptness on the other hand can do much for your business as 33% of consumers would recommend a brand that is fast to respond even if the response is not that effective.
This is why new technologies like Messenger chatbot, website live chat, and social media administration boost customer experience compared to traditional hotlines and emails.
4. Listen to your customers and understand them
A research conducted by Bain & Company where 80% of companies that are confident that they are providing outstanding customer service in fact only have 8% of customers agreeing with them.
Clearly there is a gap between the way companies perceive the quality of their customer service to what their customers are actually experiencing.
This serves as a reminder to not over-flatter yourself. Instead, create a feedback loop that allows you to hear your customers out in real-time and on an ongoing basis. This loop can include polls on social media platforms and responding to customer comments and enquiries.
5. Take action
A feedback loop is meaningless if all you are going to do is ignore the feedback you have received.
You definitely have to take the good with the bad, acknowledging and putting into action both positive and negative feedback. Failure to do so – especially when it comes to negative feedback – can lead to customer churn and hurt your business in the long run.
In fact, American Express discovered that 95% of consumers talk about poor customer experiences with other people, and 67% of customers identify bad customer service experience as the reason for churn.
While you can’t please everybody, it is still worth the try.
6. Optimise your website
Your website is just like our digital office or store. And like your traditional brick and mortar premise, customers cannot learn, enquire, or purchase your product or service if the doors are always shut.
In the digital space, a shut door can mean an unresponsive and unintuitive website that results in customer frustration.
Then there’s the growing preference for mobile browsing and the fact that 90% of customers say that they’ve had bad experiences in seeking customer support through the use of mobile to consider.
The average visitor will only wait 2 to 3 seconds for your website to load before moving on to another website, and Google’s algorithm now ranks websites with fast load times higher on its Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
7. Get professional help
Great customer service is not a job for one person and it’s definitely not something that can be achieved unless everyone is onboard, making it extremely crucial that you work with partners that understand your commitment towards this goal.
