Is there something more precious than customers for a company? If it is about deriving profit, then no, nothing is more precious than customers. So, is anything related to customers important as well? Absolutely, and that's the reason why customer experience matters so much.
Customer experience is an inseparable part of a business; to be more precise, it's an important part of customer relationship management. However, Customer experience is not the sole factor; many factors affect the overall customer experience.
Customer service, reward programs, discount coupons, environmental impact, personal values alignment, and app availability are some factors that directly affect the customers' satisfaction with the brand. Furthermore, according to different studies, it is found that 45% of customers turn loyal if they are highly satisfied with the brand.
Let’s go deeper into the concept of customer experience.
Why is Customer Experience Important for Every Business?
Based on a survey by Customer Management IQ, 75% of customer experience professionals rated customer experience five out of five when asked about its importance for businesses.
According to QDegrees' survey, the influence of customer experience on customers when buying something is 52%. So, if you provide a good customer experience, you'll benefit from it.
However, even when many businesses know the importance of customer experience for running their business, they are unaware of what they are delivering. Simply put, 80% of companies have agreed that their customer service is great, but the customers' side of the story says that only 8% of customers agree that they have received a great customer experience, according to Bain & Company.
Moreover, the effect of bad customer experience is a total of $62 billion in losses each year. Also, a problematic thing about bad customer experience is that around 91% of people move away from the brand without complaining. So, you actually never get to know what's going on.
Understand your Customer Base
Understanding customers based on who they are is essential today. Here, you should know each and every customer personally, but is that possible? No, it's not. Hence, you can create various profiles of your targeted customers and segment all your customers based on these profiles.
For instance, if you are a company catering to customers ages 25 to 65, there is a high chance that to make them understand anything about your brand, such as navigating to your app's "profile" settings, you will need various ways with decreasing difficulty. Why? A person aged 25 may not even need to read your whole navigation steps and do it just by looking at some keywords, whereas a person aged 65 may need further assistance with your navigation steps. So, creating customer personas is a great practice.
Moreover, creating an emotional connection with your customers is the best way to make them loyal to your brand. Often, when you make your customers feel how important they are to you, they turn loyal and create a word-of-mouth effect for you. Moreover, if covered by media outlets, these stories will attract more people to connect to you emotionally, even when it doesn't happen with them.
Let’s move ahead on learning the 8 effective ways to improve your customer experience with practical implications.
Effective Ways to Improve Customer Experience: Practical Tips for Elevating Customer Satisfaction
Let's understand how you can improve your customer experience with these 8 effective ways.
Crafting a Clear Customer Experience Vision: Establishing a Comprehensive and Focused Approach
Now, since it is about customers, then it must start with thinking about your customers. So, our first step is to create guidelines that clearly talk about what customers are for you and your business and how they must be treated. The guidelines should be clear so that they can easily be communicated to everyone else in your organization.
A great example of such guidelines implementation is Zappos, where they have Core Family Values, which tells everyone in the organization to treat their customers humbly and deliver Services that should be amazing.
Feedback and Development
● Real-Time Feedback Capture: Implementing Methods to Gather Customer Feedback Promptly
The way to know if you are doing great in terms of providing customer experience is to capture the feedback as soon as possible. It is important because if the time duration between the interaction of the customer with your brand and you taking his/her feedback increases, the feedback will lose its value as the customer may not be able to provide you with real suggestions and feedback. So, you should take feedback instantly, whether it's about your product, service, delivery, or customer service. You can use follow-up emails and many more.
● Employee Feedback: Incorporating Regular Employee Feedback for Continuous Improvement
Surveying team members for feedback should be more frequent. Many companies have made it a one-in-a-year process but it ultimately adds up to missing a lot of feedback that an employee may notice back in the first or third or any other month. If frequent surveys are not possible, there should be a channel where employees can give feedback regularly, and you can take action immediately.
● CES/ NPS/CSAT
With tools like NPS, CSAT, and CES, you can get real-time feedback. For example, with NPS, you can measure customer satisfaction and loyalty by asking a single question. Similarly, there are other tools like CSAT, which is more precise in measuring customer satisfaction, and CES, which measures the efforts made by the customer to avail of your services.
Measuring Success
● ROI of Exceptional Customer Experience: Understanding and Quantifying the Return on Investment
Keep track of what the changes are. Calculate what you have invested and what you are getting. According to QDegrees, you can expect up to a 2-7% boost in revenue generation and 1-2% in profits with increased customer experience.
● Personalization Strategies: Tailoring Experiences to Individual Customer Preferences
With enhanced efforts on personalization, you can make up to 60% of customers repeat purchasing with you. So, putting efforts into personalization is a must in today's world, which you can do with the help of data.
Seamless Omnichannel Experience
● Creating a Unified Omnichannel Experience: Ensuring Consistency Across Various Customer Touchpoints
A multiple-channel experience is preferred by 73% of shoppers. You must provide an experience where your customers can transition from one platform to another without losing any data. In simple terms, if your customer is using your website to put things in the cart, he/she should easily buy them through your app without repeating the process.
● Optimizing the Customer Journey: Streamlining the Path Customers Take to Interact with Your Business
Streamlining the process is important as if it is hard for a customer to shop with you, it will create an adverse image of your brand. Moreover, it's extremely important to eliminate it as otherwise you'll lose your brand's difficult processes.
Summing Up: Recapitulating the Key Elements for a Successful Customer Experience Strategy
In conclusion, customer experience is a key element when it comes to expanding your business. Taking care of customers' experiences is even more important than expanding your business physically like capacity, production, etc.
If you are not working towards delivering a great customer experience, then ultimately, you'll fall apart as the customer is the base of any business.