In order to stay competitive, you need to make sure you’re satisfying the people keeping your business afloat: your consumers. But how do you keep them happy and ensure they have the best customer experience with your company? Fortunately, there are several methods you can implement for customer experience best practices.
Creating a Great Customer Experience for Your Clients
According to Smart Insights, there are two critical factors that keep customers coming back to your brand: satisfaction and happiness. It makes sense that happiness is achieved when the product or service works in the way the customer wants and that the customer service given goes above and beyond.
How to Improve Customer Experience
We all can recall bad customer experience examples. Unsurprisingly, consumers prefer a brand that keeps them happy and satisfied. How can you ensure your brand is doing both? Try the following approaches:
1. Illustrate the customer’s journey – have a game plan in mind before you embark on a company-wide initiative. According to Hubspot, the best way to do this is to create a customer journey map, which allows you to outline every step your customers go through when interacting with your company. You should also consider the range of perspectives from your internal stakeholders, who can provide even more insights from an opposite point of view.
Further, you should account for both the pre- and post-sale aspects of the customer experience, which can further impact your customer’s view of your company. By utilizing understanding across this entire spectrum, your team can better identify gaps between desired and current performance.
2. Audit the customer experience from a variety of internal perspectives – in order to gain a complete picture of your customer experience, you should leverage the unique perspective of your internal departments. This can include Marketing, who will be focused on customer acquisition and offer the best insight into brand awareness and user expectations. This can also include Sales, who have insights into the early stages of the customer relationship and can inform you of the challenges your customers are encountering on a daily basis.
Finally, Customer Service can give you insight stemming from the feedback they hear from customers on a daily basis.
3. Leverage the power of artificial intelligence – Gartner has already cited AI as one of its top disruptive trends for 2020, with virtual agents managing about 85 percent of customer interactions.
A chatbot can transform the customer experience in a variety of ways, such as helping to minimize the effort it takes for a customer to resolve an issue, helping customers learn more about your products and services, always giving a polite and measured response as chatbots aren’t driven by human emotions, and providing quick responses in a short amount of time. They are also available 24/7 and can handle an unlimited amount of customers without getting distracted.
Finally, chatbots can be integrated seamlessly into your website or app, which allows people to start interacting with them directly.
4. Integrate predictive personalization – the ability to predict the action of the users based on their past behavior can be used to increase sales. Increase customer experience by presenting the most relevant content before your customer completes an action, improving conversions. The customer journey transforms as you can easily predict the customer’s next action at the very moment and take them to the next part of their journey.
5. Work toward satisfying your customers’ needs – feedback is one of the most crucial ways you’ll learn how to enhance customer experience. So, ask for it. Both positive and negative feedback will only further customer experience optimization. So share your values and information about your company in an honest way when addressing the needs of customers.
You should also stick to delivery schedules and deliver products/services when you say you are going to, thanking customers each time a purchase is made. Smart Insights recommends sending an email containing a thank you message, as this will go a long way in making your customer feel appreciated and valued. By satisfying your customers’ needs, you need to also consider what customers definitely don’t want. These include irrelevant, annoying ads, and a cumbersome checkout process. In order to understand the actual performance of your brand’s connectivity with your audience, focus on metrics like app downloads, search performance, and customer lifetime value.
To allow for exemplary mobile browsing, optimize your website by keeping the page loading speed as fast as possible. And always collect and asses data so you get a clearer picture of how your customers react to special offers. You’ll be able to see what language drives action as well as see what offers work. Finally, rather than bombarding customers with information the minute they click on your site, only provide information when they ask for it.
6. Streamline communication – to create a seamless customer journey, your company should streamline the entire communications process. Firstly, all businesses, especially retail stores, need to efficiently carry out communication between the in-house team and their customers. The customer should also be kept informed across all levels of the customer journey keeping communication proactive. While customers need to be kept happy, don’t forget about your employees. When employees are also happy, internal communication improves, often via live videos and chats.
Further, you need to check your messaging across channels in order to generate maximum engagement by tracking the traffic sources coming to your website. This will allow you to see which channels are more effective. Finally, email is still one of the best forms of communication. Keep customers engaged by sending them emails to move them through the customer journey.
7. Provide enhanced security to your customers with blockchain – we’re in an age where customers are getting increasingly nervous about how their personal data might be mined online. As a result, people are gravitating toward businesses that take the issue of their personal data seriously. Blockchain, which is resistant to the modification of data, is more than adequate when it comes to safeguarding your customers’ data.
How does it work? Well, for one, data is decentralized, which means that small chunks of data are stored across a variety of computers over the network. As a result, data loss is never problem. With full signatures across the node, blockchain offers stronger encryption and validation. Using blockchain, you can also manage customer retention in real time, which makes scalability easier without compromising security. Due to all the security benefits blockchain has to offer, making sure your customers know their date is safe will greatly improve their customer experience.
8. Leverage the power of social media – social media continues to be the best channel through which you can engage with your customers. By following or engaging with you, your customers are showing that they value what you offer or choose to stand for. Leverage this interest to build relationships and have interesting conversations with your users.
9. Create an immersive experience with projection mapping – this technology is used to turn common objects into interactive 3D displays. It is especially helpful during events where audiences need to feel like they are in a completely different environment. It allows for a more engaging experience with the help of visual simulation, which adds interactivity and gains a better ROI due to publicity. Both offline and online marketing are important to transform your business into a brand. To keep your audience connected with your business, offline interactive experiences remain crucial.
10. Learn from customer churn – churn, or the percentage of your customers or subscribers who cancel or don’t renew their subscriptions during a given time period, is an important metric. According to research from Bain & Company, if you can generate a 5 percent increase in customer retention, you can increase your company’s profits by 25 to 95 percent.
Hubspot recommends using these in-app analytics to analyze areas of the customer experience where there is low engagement, which might suggest a higher risk of customer churn. You can use these analytics to identify which customers are most at risk for churn while also determining what percentage of engagement will result in churn.
Then, you can set up a monitoring system to let your customer service team know ahead of time if a customer is approaching that value. It’s still important to pay attention when customers decide to move on and pinpoint what caused their departure. Provide channels for customers to leave feedback and take that feedback into account. Hubspot even recommends making it easy for customers to cancel their account, but providing a channel through which they can tell you why they are leaving.
The customer service experience continues to be something that should be at the center of your strategy. But, you don’t have to go on this journey alone. Stefanini is here to assist you every step of the way. Our AI assistant Sophie can help you leverage personalized experiences when it comes to customer service while we help you find the right solutions. Ready to get started? Contact us today for more information.
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