What do my customers want?
How often do you ask this question? Gone are the days when the only thing that mattered was what you delivered. How you deliver is now equally, if not more, important. This holds true, especially for organizations that are in the customer-experience business.
All of us have had our share of Customer Experience (CX). From outstanding to frustrating. It is a sum of all the interactions and experiences one has with a brand. With more nowadays customers have more ways to interact with businesses and experience them than ever before. It could be your experience with their customer care center to how they perceived your advertisement and from how easy it was to pay the bill on your app to their experience at your traditional brick-and-mortar store.
People and products are two primary touchpoints that create the customer experience.
Thanks to technology and the world wide web, today’s customers have the power, not the sellers. This makes CX all the more important.
There are 5 basic components of customer experience:
- Culture, processes, and people
- Products and services
- Information
- Customer touchpoints and channels
- Technology
Why is CX important?
52 percent of customers report going out of their way to buy from brands they’re loyal to, according to Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends Report, 2020.
What is critical to the sustained growth of any business? It comes down to customer experience. A positive customer experience promotes loyalty, helps you retain customers, and encourages brand advocacy.
How to make a great customer experience?
The starting point of creating a great customer experience is understanding the journey a customer takes. You need to identify every touchpoint that you have with your customers and then work on making each of those touchpoints a positive experience for the customer.
So what is a good customer experience? One that makes it effortless for customers to accomplish their goals for what they want to use your product or service for.
A positive experience includes intuitive product design, easy-to-access self-help resources, proactive messaging around known issues, sales being transparent about pricing and always-available live customer support with short waits.
Ways to improve your customer experience strategy
Start by putting customers at the center of everything you do. A good customer experience can help drive the success of a business. Here are a few tips to improve your customer experience.
- Customer feedback is important. It helps you gain insights into their expectations. It also tells where they are getting stuck and what’s working well. This can help you analyze and relook at your strategy accordingly.
- Provide a consistent communications journey for your customer by building an omnichannel experience. It allows conversation history and context to travel with the customer from channel to channel.
- Data-driven content will help customers solve issues on their own and not rely on a live agent
- Gartner estimates that by 2022, 72 percent of customer interactions will involve an emerging technology such as machine-learning applications, chatbots, or mobile messaging.
- Simply reacting to customers is not enough. Proactive support means getting ahead of technical issues, breakdowns, issues. It means reaching out to the customers to update them on what’s going on and what you are doing about it.
- The role of data and analytics in understanding more about your customers and your support agents cannot be understated.
No matter how small or big your business is, investing in a good customer experience is important as your success depends on your ability to keep and attract loyal customers. Start putting your customer first and see the difference.