When it comes to serving clients, the paradigm has shifted. Because of increased competition, it’s as simple as changing your mind about customer service and calling it the customer experience. When you begin to think about improving the customer experience, you’ll notice minor but significant improvements in your approach to maintaining consumers, which leads to attracting new ones.
Customer service is focused on the firm rather than the customer. To make the adjustment, you must review every interaction your consumer has with your business. You need to know what customers say about their experience at your store from the storefront to the website. This goes beyond the surface of online reviews and delves into their entire experience.
A great customer experience keeps customers coming back and spreading the word about their positive experience. Giving your personnel the resources and authority to deliver on the promise of outstanding service is one approach to ensure that your clients are entirely satisfied.
Customers prefer dealing with a single person rather than three. When a customer has an issue, this is even more critical. Negative customer encounters can be avoided by empowering your employees to do what is best for the customer. So how do you ensure this happens? Here are seven tips for you to create an excellent experience for your customers that will keep them coming back to you no matter what.
7 Tips to Enhance Customer Experience
1. Clear Customer Vision
The first stage in developing a customer experience plan is to develop a clear customer-centric vision that you can share with your team. Creating a set of statements that serve as guiding principles is the simplest way to define this vision.
Zappos, for example, uses their core family values, which are ingrained in company culture and include providing wow via service, humility, and embracing change.
Once these principles are in place, they will guide your company’s actions. These concepts should be known by heart by every member of your team, and they should be incorporated into all aspects of training and development.
2. Understanding your Customers
The next stage in implementing these customer experience standards is to illustrate the many types of clients who interact with your customer service representatives. If your company wants to truly comprehend client requirements and desires, it must be able to connect with and empathize with the conditions that they encounter.
Segmenting your clients and creating personas is one approach to do this (or customer profiles). Make an effort to give each character a name and a personality. Anne, for example, is 35 years old and enjoys new technology. She is tech knowledgeable enough to follow a video tutorial on her own, whereas John (42 years old) need the ability to follow simple instructions on a web page.
Your customer service personnel will be able to recognise and understand their customers better if they create personas. It’s also a crucial step toward becoming truly customer-focused.
3. Establish an Emotional Connect
“It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it,” as the saying goes. The best customer experiences occur when a member of your staff establishes an emotional bond with a client.
Zappos is one of the best instances of creating an emotional connection. Due to the death of her mother, a customer was late in returning a pair of shoes. When Zappos learned of the situation, they handled the return postage and had a courier pick up the shoes for free. Zappos, on the other hand, did not stop there. The client returned home the next day to find a bouquet of flowers and a note from the Zappos Customer Success team expressing their sympathy.
According to the Journal of Consumer Research, emotions determine the attitudes that drive decisions, and emotions account for more than half of an experience.
Customers become loyal because they are emotionally attached to a product or service and recall how they feel after using it. A company that optimises for emotional connection surpasses competitors in terms of sales growth by 85%.
Emotionally engaged clients, according to a recent Harvard Business Review research titled “The New Science of Customer Emotions,” are:
- At least three times more likely to refer your product or service to others
- Three times (!) the likelihood of repurchasing
- It’s less probable that you’ll shop around (44 percent said they rarely or never shop around)
- Price sensitivity is much lower (33 percent said they would need a discount of over 20 percent before they would defect).
4. Real-time Customer Feedback
How can you know whether you’re giving your customers a WOW experience? You must inquire – and ideally, you should do so by collecting feedback in real time. Use live chat tools to have real-time conversations, and then use post-interaction surveys and other customer experience tools to send a follow-up email to each consumer.
Of course, making outbound sales calls to clients to obtain more in-depth feedback is conceivable. It’s also crucial to link customer feedback to a single customer service agent, as this demonstrates to each team member how valuable they are to the company.
5. Quality Framework
You now know what customers think about the quality of your service in comparison to the customer experience standards you defined by following the stages above. The next stage is to determine the training requirements for each member of your customer service staff.
A quality framework goes beyond assessing the quality of phone and email communication by scheduling and tracking your team’s development through coaching, eLearning, and group training.
6. Regular Employee Feedback
Most firms do an annual survey to gather feedback from their employees, as well as their level of engagement and the company’s capacity to provide great service.
But what occurs during the 11 months in between these surveys?
In most cases, nothing happens. And this is where technologies that allow employees to contribute suggestions on how to improve the customer experience while also allowing management to see how employees feel about the company might help.
You can build a closed environment where your organisation can leave constant feedback using project management software or social media platforms, for example.
7. Measure ROI
Finally, how can you know whether all of your efforts to improve your teams, processes, and technology are paying off?
The solution can be found in the financial results.
Measuring customer experience is one of the most difficult tasks for businesses, which is why many employ the “Net Promoter Score,” or NPS, which captures useful data by asking a single simple question:
“Would you tell a friend or family about us?”
Because many firms use it as the standard customer experience measurement, NPS, which was devised by Rob Markey and Fred Reichheld at Bain and Company, is a very ideal baseline for a customer experience metric. The NPS is a favourite among company boards and executive committees due to its ease of implementation and measurement.
The Bottomline
It is evident that customer experience is an integral part to drive the success of your business. This is where market research will play a key role in giving your business the proper direction and boosting revenue by generating happy customers. It’s critical to consider the complete client journey while building an excellent customer experience. This necessitates a thorough grasp of customers’ end-to-end experiences and how interactions are received at each stage. This is where Maction can help you nail the target and achieve your long-term business goals through powerful market research.
