5 Ingredients For Great Customer Experiences
“The best advertising you can have is a loyal customer spreading the word about how incredible your business is.”
– Shep Hyken, American customer service and customer experience (CX) expert
An analysis of customer service interactions by Freshworks revealed that:
- 80% of customers are likely to work with businesses that offer more personalized experiences
- 38% of customers expect agents to have context of their queries
So, what exactly is customer experience? It refers to the impression customers have of your business during their journey with your product/service. It can impact how they view your brand and positively impact your revenues.
Why is customer experience important?
A memorable customer experience is important to ensure the sustained growth of your business. It helps promote loyalty and ensures that you retain customers while gaining quality brand awareness. If you consistently offer good customer experiences, you can sell more products and gain repeat business, word of mouth referrals, and brand loyalty.
There will also be a reduction in negative reviews, customer complaints and product returns. All of this greatly boosts profits for your business.
Customer Experience vs. Customer Service
Many people think “customer experience” and “customer service” refer to the same thing. In reality, customer service focuses on human interactions and supporting customers – it is one part of the customer engagement puzzle. On the other hand, customer experience sums up a customer’s complete journey with your business.
- Prepare a customer experience vision
You should introduce a customer-focused vision that can be shared with every member in your organization. This vision can be a collection of principles that offer a clear representation of your business’ core values.
Ensure that leaders, managers and employees are on the same page with regards to these principles. These principles should be a key part of training and development to drive your organization to greater success.
- Understand the journey a customer undertakes with your business
Create a customer journey map if your business doesn’t have one yet. This helps you understand the touchpoints your customers go through every time they interact with your business. A map will help you discover something your business can improve upon to boost the customer’s experience of your brand.
For example, customers may find it difficult to return products or they may be facing a harrowing time placing an order on your website. Resolve these pain points and make the customer experience better and more efficient.
- Build an emotional connection with your customers
The secret to making customers loyal is having them become emotionally attached to your business so that they fondly remember how they feel when they use your product or service. Work on optimizing emotional connections with customers so that you can outperform competitors consistently.
A positive experience encourages customers to recommend your brand to family and friends.
- Capture feedback in real-time
It’s important to ask important questions and capture feedback in real-time. You could use live chat tools, follow-up emails, outbound sales calls and surveys to gain insightful feedback.
Respond quickly to feedback and ensure you are on the same page as customers. Keep them happy and you can retain them for life!
- Empower employees and value their ideas
Is there anything blocking your employees from delivering a great customer experience? Use an employee survey to uncover pain points in the employee journey, and channel these insights to review processes and make them more employee-friendly and customer-focused.
Apart from the 5 ingredients mentioned above, we recommend using technology such as AI and machine learning to build innovative customer experiences. This includes 24/7 chatbots that provide tailor-made customer experiences and digital technology that ensures time-to-insights is faster, affordable and scalable.
At KServe, we have mastered the art of delivering positive customer experiences to clients from varied industries. We can work with you to transform the way a customer feels about your brand – this will help you stand out and leap ahead of competitors!
