Never think because you promote products and services on the internet, you shouldn’t worry about giving customers an excellent experience.
Infact, as a digital marketer, customer experience should be your watchword.
Can you buy from a vendor with a shabby website or the one that replies to emails after 7 days? Of course not.
An outstanding customer experience is the bedrock of every successful business. When customers see that you value them and they have a seamless experience with you, they’ll be back for more. You can take my word for it.
However, if you get it wrong, they’ll flock to your competitors without looking back, and I’m sure you don’t want that.
So, in this article, we go over what customer experience means and why it’s crucial for your online business.
What is a customer experience?
Customer experience, called CX, is the feeling and perception a customer derives from interacting with your brand throughout the buyer’s journey.
It frames their view of your brand and consequently decides their loyalty and your revenue. Sure!
Although Customer experience and customer service might sound similar, they are different and can’t be used interchangeably.
Customer service is an aspect of the customer experience, but customer experience refers to a broader view of the customer journey.
What constitutes the customers’ experience
The primary factors that form the customer experience are people and products.
So if you’re keen on giving your customers a great experience, you must ask these questions
- Will my products blow my customers?
- How are my products’ performance and aesthetics?
- Does my customer support delight my client and solve their problems?
If yes, you’re on the right track, but if no, you’ve got work to do.
Good customer experience involves building a relationship by understanding what people want. It goes beyond the act of using the product or service itself: The entire experience includes pre-purchase connections with the brand (via marketing), the process of researching and making the purchase (either in-store or online), and post-purchase interactions (regarding service, repairs, additions and more).
The goal is to create seamless connections between the brand and the customer.
How to improve your customer experience
Create a clear customer experience vision.
The preliminary step in your customer experience strategy is to have a clear customer-centric vision that you can communicate with your team. The best way to define this vision is to create statements that act as guiding principles.
Once your principles are in place, they will drive your organization’s behavior. Your team members should be able to know these principles by heart, and they should be incorporated into all aspects of your business.
Understand your customers
To understand customer needs, you must first connect with them. You must understand the unique situations that they face.
To understand them better, you can segment them and create personas. Give each persona a name and personality.
Also, personalize the experience with your customers. It helps form a bond between the brand and the buyer. For instance, providing vouchers to customers after their purchase can help personalize their experience and make them brand loyal over competitors.
You can also use the following:
- Website offers based on user preferences
- Thank you letters or emails to customers after purchase
- Customer follow-up surveys.
Address Customer Needs Faster
Customers often forget they interacted with you if they don’t get an immediate response. Hence it’s important to fix any roadblocks as soon as possible.
Knowing where your customers are likely to face obstacles helps your team prevent user frustration and ensure a smooth ride over any confusing pain points in the customer’s journey.
Improve Product/Service Quality
Your customer support team should be able to have insight into how usability issues with your product or service are affecting the overall customer experience.
By having leaders and contributors from your support team meet with your product team, you can review top support ticket categories to identify the most common issues related to usability.
Measure the ROI from providing an excellent customer experience.
Results are the best metrics to determine if your strategies are paying off.
However, measuring customer experience is one of the major challenges faced by businesses; it is why many firms adopted the “Net Promoter Score” [ NPS], which collects valuable information by asking a straightforward question:
“How likely are you to recommend us?”
The NPS model is widely accepted because it has proven effective and easy to implement.
The best customer experience platforms
1 HubSpot
Hubspot is a cloud-based CRM ( Customer Relationship Management] platform that aims to improve sales, and marketing interactions, facilitate sales enablement, increase return on investment and maximize the effectiveness of inbound marketing to attract and close more qualified leads.
It provides everything your business will need to scale and offer top-notch customer services. Hubspot was created with customers as the focus and hence had many features that help streamline and automate the sales process; however, these features are housed in its hubs.
2 Acoustic Tealeaf
Tealeaf is a customer experience management platform powered by AI. The platform helps businesses manage visitors’ sales lifecycles and facilitate customer issue resolutions to improve customer retention. It uses AI integrations to record and deliver accurate analytics and business insights without requiring complex and time-consuming manual processes.
3 Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe is a tool suite that helps categorize and identify customers using AI. Information is sourced from several customer quantitative and qualitative data factors, including the following:
- engagement numbers and sources;
- customer identity data
- how leads behave when introduced or educated on a product or service;
- feedback and reviews
Conclusion
Customer expectations have risen dramatically over the years. And as the customer becomes empowered with more options, having a great customer experience becomes of utmost importance.
It’s an area that needs co-nurturing and care. If you can focus on customer experience strategy, you will undoubtedly have increased customer loyalty, retention, and revenue growth.