How do you improve Customer Experience?

Let's look at the problem

Poor customer experience is easier to spot in face to face situations, but it also exists in online interactions too.  Most of us will have experienced rude or ignorant staff at some point, or being kept waiting unnecessarily.

The digital disconnect can increase the capacity for poor customer service in an online environment.  This could relate to long delays in responding to web chats and emails, being put on hold or transferred from 'pillar to post' (in the customer's perception at least) by contact centre agents.

Providing excellent customer experience should be the goal of every business. Customer experience refers to how people feel about your brand.  And as customers are a crucial component of any business.  You need to make sure they feel good about your company. 

By providing an excellent customer experience, you retain existing customers and attract potential ones.  Therefore, it is mandatory to embed the necessary factors in your business strategy to provide a positive customer experience.  Here we'll explore ways on how you can maximize customer experience.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience refers to the interactions and experience a customer has with your business.  From initial contact to becoming a loyal customer, each aspect of the customer journey comes under customer experience. 

Customer experience plays a crucial role in ensuring a customer becomes loyal to your business.  According to a global customer experience study by Oracle, 74% of senior executives believe that customer experience is a decisive factor for a person to become a company's loyal advocate. Hence, this is why companies are investing a fortune in ensuring customers get a positive experience.

To simply put it, happy customers lead to loyal customers. Therefore, ensuring you don't ignore their feedback would enhance the customer experience. Companies that make their customer journey easier are the ones that stand out from their competitors; after all, customers are the lifeline of every business.

Customer Experience vs. Customer Service

Many people believe customer service and customer experience are the same things.  But this isn't true.  Although customer service is a part of the customer experience, it doesn't encompass all aspects of the customer journey.

As far as customer service is concerned, it refers to solving customer queries related to products or services.  In contrast, customer experience includes all of the interactions between your brand and the customer.

Importance of Customer Experience

Customers are a crucial part of any business. Without them, a company cannot exist.  Customer experience is the art of exceeding customer expectations.  When businesses understand their customer's pain points and needs, only this way can they meet customer expectations.  By providing easy, enjoyable touchpoints for customers, businesses can attract new customers and retain previous ones.  Therefore, making a smooth and easy customer buying journey enhances the overall customer experience.

On the other hand, if business owners cannot match customer expectations, they may lose customers.  Not only may they lose customers, but it would also affect the overall company's reputation.  Therefore it's crucial to ensure the customer experience is always up to the mark, per customers' requirements.

Ways to Improve Customer Experience

No matter your business type, there is always a way to improve customer experience to surpass competitors.  Here are 5 ways to improve customer experience:

1.  Understand your Customers' Pain Points

When creating content and messaging for your brand, it's easy for brands to focus on their products, but put yourself in your consumers' shoes and think about your brand from their perspectives. 

A good place to start is by identifying if your website is aligned with your customer's pain points.

Then, it's a good idea to plan how you can engage with your customers both digitally and in person to address the customer's queries.

It's also good practice to analyse your competitors to look for potential improvements for your business strategy.  The key to mapping out customer journeys that drive business results is to address your customers' needs.

2.  Identify and Map the Customer Journey

There are many reasons why customers visit your website and download your assets, and there are many ways they can reach out to you. 

Interacting with you will be motivated by various reasons: browsing products, understanding what you do, providing feedback, making purchases, redeeming offers, learning, cancelling purchases, and modifying purchases, among others.

After you've mapped out the customer journey for each type of customer, you can then conduct visitor testing on your digital channels and solicit human feedback.  Asking your customers and prospects directly makes it easier for you to find out what is working well and what isn't too.

3.  Personalise Customer Experience

"Personalise" can mean many things depending on the scale and scope of your business. Providing a personalised customer experience helps to form a bond between your brand and your customers. An example is Gift Vouchers, and Discount Vouchers which personalise the customer's experience and foster loyalty to your brand. 

Apart from vouchers, sending personalised emails, making follow-ups, and adjusting the website according to customer preferences provides a customised customer experience. The key here is to make customers feel valued, which is crucial in delivering a quality customer experience.

4.  Create a unified experience for all omnichannel

If we look at an everyday consumer example in today's world, almost everyone streams TV over the Internet (OTT).  Research shows that many streaming service users watch content across three or more devices and typically use three OTT services, such as Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime.

From a viewer's perspective, regardless of where they are or what device they are using, the experience should remain the same.  To put it another way, irrespective of the device used to stream content, they want to be able to pick up right where they left off.

Whether we are interacting in-store, online, through a mobile application, or via telephone, we have expectations that follow us wherever and however we engage with a business.  Everybody prefers a different omnichannel but expects the same experience. Therefore, it is crucial to develop effective strategies to provide a quality customer experience among all channels.

5.  Embrace Feedback

One of the most crucial ways to improve customer experience is to take feedback.  Asking customers for feedback regarding your business would help you gather valuable insights.  It's good practice to encourage your customers to leave a review on your website or social media page.  A steady flow of positive reviews boosts engagement and attracts potential new clients.  This shouldn't be considered as a quarterly or annual marketing task either; the most effective marketing programmes do this monthly.

By getting your teams involved and explaining why it is crucial to ask happy customers for customer reviews, they realize that their ongoing efforts deliver positive customer experiences.

Want Us to Design Strategy for Enhancing your Customer Experience?

To conclude, customer experience plays a vital role in a business's success, making it necessary for business owners to put great thought and time into it. At Omni Communications, we understand the importance of providing value to customers to ensure a positive customer experience.

For more information on how we can help you to develop a business strategy to maximise customer experience, contact us using the Contact Form below, call us on 0161 507 7999 or email sales@omnicom.uk