In this post, we explore the most recommended ways to improve your customer experience to keep both the customers and the business happy.
Let’s face it – without customers, there would be no business. Customers are the oxygen a business breathes; for this reason, they deserve the most smooth-sailing experience when they elect your company to provide its goods and services. It’s not rocket science, yet so many businesses get it wrong when it comes to customer experience (CX). Read on to see some of the main tips for improving CX for your loyal customers.
Get Feedback Whenever Possible
Affording customers the opportunity to leave reviews and take surveys will help your business better tailor its service to customers’ needs. It gives a voice to customers to air their thoughts and opinions and is not only enlightening on what works well with your customers or what could work better but is also highly motivational to your team to know that their hard work is paying off.
To bolster customer experience, then, it is hugely important to collect, analyse and respond to customer feedback. Following this process should help you perform better in the long run as, after all, according to SurveyMonkey’s 2018 Buyer trust report, 82% of people trust the voice of customers more than that of the brand.
Enlist the Help of Modern Technology
Using AI where possible will ensure a much smoother customer experience. Case in point: an automatic collection solution for invoicing and payments. By automating your accounts receivable metrics, you avoid creating a confusing and fiddly payments process that may tarnish the customer experience and deter them from returning to your company in the future. Using credit control software will ensure your customers receive prompt and accurate invoices and boost your brand’s reputation in the long term.
There’s a lot to be said for adopting modern technology into your business: customers value companies that are easy to work with, consistent and prompt. For this reason, you may wish to consider using AI in certain areas of your business to help build your customer experience.
Ensure your Website is Fit for Purpose
The importance of a strong website is not to be understated. A website functions as the digital home of your brand and is the first impression for prospective customers, so it should aptly showcase what the business is all about.
That said, your website cannot achieve this if it has a jarring or hard-to-use interface. Ensure your website can be fluidly navigated, is clear and – if it’s within your means – stylish.
Improve Customer Service
Ultimately, everything comes down to customer service. The customer support team working for your company are the ambassadors and often the first impression a customer will receive of your company. Nobody wants to sit through an incredibly long wait time whilst trying to get through to a company’s call centre, only to be met with a sour voice on the other end.
Investing in extensive and regular training for your customer service agents will be hugely beneficial to your customers and business in the long run. To return to our earlier point, sending out surveys after a phone call or any interaction with a customer will highlight the strengths and areas for improvement within customer service.
Put an Omnichannel Strategy in Place
In line with the above point, an omnichannel strategy will allow your customers to choose how they communicate with your business on whatever online or offline platform best suits them. Simply put, omnichannel refers to using more than one channel to connect with customers. These channels could include email, telephone, in-store interactions – whatever means the company has of communicating with its customers. The omnichannel strategy allows for the seamless overlapping and integration of these various channels, meaning a client can pick up on one channel where they left off on another without having to re-explain their problem each time to different customer service agents.
Increasingly, omnichannel is becoming central to companies’ marketing, eCommerce and CX strategies, meaning it is a great measure to implement if you’re committed to improving customer experience in your business.
Implement Self-Service Options for your Company
Sometimes as a customer, you don’t want to explain something over the phone to a customer service agent and would rather try and remedy the problem yourself. A business that gives its customers the opportunity to fix issues independently benefits both its customers and themselves. A report entitled “The Self-Service Economy” found that 70% of customers expect a company’s website to have options for self-service. Such options may include tutorial videos, case studies and extensive FAQs.
Self-service options save time and help customers to find their own answers more quickly than is possible if they sought guidance from the business. Not only that, but it saves time in the future, should the same issue reoccur, as they will know how to fix it. Finally, allowing the customer a chance to solve their own problems can bolster the brand’s reputation- so everybody wins.
Bottom Line
Customer experience is a win-win for your business and customers. Putting strategies in place to strengthen the customer experience will directly impact your topline performance. Focussing on customer experience will also lay the foundations for your organisation to be fully customer-centric, and customer-centric businesses have been found to perform better than those that are business-centric.
