What is customer experience?
Customer experience may sound like a nebulous concept, but it can actually be defined in simple terms. Specifically, customer experience is the overall perception of someone who interacts with your business, covering the entire experience from first contact and communication, through purchasing and experiencing your products or services, to after-sales and overall customer care.
What’s important to keep in mind is that what matters is how the customer perceives your company from their perspective along every one of those touchpoints – it’s about their experience, after all.
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Why is customer experience important?
Given the meteoric rise of social media and the possibility to give a company instant feedback, reviews and ratings, it’s more critical than ever that your customers are happy. There’s nothing worse than a customer sharing a poor experience on a popular social media page and hundreds or even thousands of potential customers getting a bad impression of your organisation based on someone’s poor personal experience.
So, it’s clear that a great customer experience is absolutely essential in this day and age. It’s well worth investing in the tools and processes to ensure positive interactions with customers in all areas of your business.
Today, most businesses are aware that good customer experience means consistently delivering on your brand promise and giving your customers a streamlined, pleasant experience from start to finish. This is generally rewarded with less customer churn, more sales and a higher turnover.
To sum up, the main benefits of providing a great customer experience are:
- You boost your brand reputation.
- You stay close to your customers and know them well.
- You increase customer loyalty.
- You gain new customers through word of mouth, especially on social media.
- You drive revenue and reap financial rewards.
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How to tackle customer experience management
If you think of customer experience as your customers’ perception of your business, then customer experience management is your strategy for managing those perceptions. But before you consider putting together a customer experience strategy, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and try to see things from their perspective and truly understand their journey when interacting with your company.
Here are some steps to consider when planning your approach to customer experience management:
1) Map out the customer journey
For the best customer experience, you need to understand the entire journey your customers are on. How do they get from one touchpoint to the next? What’s working smoothly, and what could be improved? Create a visual representation of your customers’ needs and perceptions during all their interactions with your company. This will help you understand and adapt the steps your customers typically take and may reveal difficulties or shortcomings that you might not even have been aware of. The insights and opportunities emerging from this customer journey map can be extremely valuable.
2) Ensure cross-departmental collaboration
Providing a holistic customer experience can be a challenge when many departments or divisions are involved, possibly even across multiple sites or countries. This is why it’s so important that everyone in your company works together as part of one big team rather than in silos. A shared vision and mission are critical when it comes to safeguarding a positive brand image. It’s important for every department to understand that they’re part of the big picture and don’t work in isolation, even if they’re not directly customer-facing.
3) Be receptive to customer input
No one knows your customers better than – your customers! It would be a mistake to be set in your ways and not actively listen to what your customers have to say. Take a good look around social media and see what your customers are talking about. Encourage them to get in touch with your company and share any concerns or suggestions, for example through a simple feedback form on your website, or via Facebook Messenger. Any additional communication channel will only benefit you in the long term.
4) Invest in communication
It’s wonderful that you listen to your customers and take steps to meet their requirements. But are your customers actually aware that you are doing this? Don’t be shy, but tell them what you’re up to and keep them in the loop! Do you have any new products or services in the pipeline? Share an update on social media! You’ve won a customer service award? Brag about it in your next newsletter! It might be worth investing in a professional communications strategy, so you can be sure that your customers always know what you’re doing for them.
5) Measure customer experience metrics
There are a number of metrics you can monitor when it comes to accessing your organisation’s customer experience. These include customer satisfaction rates, customer churn rates, product or service quality levels or brand reputation. You can carry out regular surveys to measure these and other figures, so you know how you are tracking on an ongoing basis, and you can analyse click rates, purchasing frequency and return rates.
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How to improve customer experience
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Thankfully, there are several proven steps you can take to improve customer experience in your organisation. Let’s take a closer look:
1) Know who your customers are
To truly understand your customers, imagine who they are and give them a face, for example, by creating customer avatars (a representation of your typical or desired customer, typically including gender, age and various preferences). This approach will be a great foundation for becoming more customer-centric.
2) Give your customers what they want
Take your customer and their concerns and wishes seriously, and show them that they are important to your company. For instance, launch a customer-led initiative where you say something along the lines of ‘You asked for it, we deliver!’, and offer a new product or service that you’ve received a lot of enquiries about.
3) Build a relationship with your customers
Don’t just treat your customers like a number, but take the time to form a genuine relationship with them. When you interact on a personal level, you’ll form an emotional connection, and this will ultimately strengthen customer loyalty and advocacy. Your customers will feel part of your brand, and that’s priceless for any business.
4) Implement customer feedback
Don’t just listen to your customers and acknowledge their feedback and then don’t do anything with that information. Take action and turn what you hear into remedial measures to fix any issues raised. Your customers will feel seen and have more trust in your brand, and they’ll be more likely to give you feedback again next time.
5) Hear out your customer-facing employees
An often underutilised resource is tour customer-facing staff. These employees have direct access to your customer base and hear directly from them. That means they have valuable information and know your customers’ pain points. Take advantage of this direct communication channel with your customers and put the data gathered here to good use!
6) Hire staff like your customers
It always helps to have staff your customers can relate to. This will make your whole brand more relatable. For example, consider hiring employees from the same age group, location or cultural background as your main target groups. Customers will appreciate getting the sense that they’re speaking to their peers – and it always helps if someone speaks the same language, both literally and metaphorically!
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Refer back to this guide when you come to creating your customer experience strategy, and wow your customers with your customer-driven brand.
