“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” Michael Lebouef
In today’s competitive business scenario, the success of a business depends entirely on how you make your customers feel.
And, we have got numbers to support this claim.
According to one of the surveys “customer experience is going to be the biggest factor in deciding whether a customer would pay for the product/service or not.”
So, you can clearly see that businesses need to invest a lot more in providing a better customer service experience than they are having right now.
This is one of the reasons why we are in the midst of a service revolution, with businesses focusing on not just developing a great product/service, but also providing an amazing customer experience as well.
Furthermore, if you have been looking to achieve a great customer service experience, we have plenty of good ideas that will help you in this direction. Without wasting even a single moment, let us have a look at what those ideas are.
1. Create customer values, not vision
A business stands out in the way it values its customers.
You can create an out of the world vision for your business, but as long as your customer is not part of that vision, things are never going to fit in their right places.
Therefore, while creating the vision you need to keep your customer values at the forefront.
The biggest example here is Zappos. This online clothing giant has inculcated core family values into their business culture.
That’s the biggest reason why they are able to create a ‘WOW’ service experience every single time.
Another great example is of Amazon.
In the words of Jezz Bezos “The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It’s just words.”
2. Persona building
Though the term has become quite popular amongst marketing people these days, customer persona is nothing more than the act of understanding your customers.
This has been the oldest and the most important factor in creating a great customer service experience.
Once you understand the customer, you can put yourself in their shoes to know what they are looking for, and how they are going to react to what you are going to offer.
This makes it really easy to understand their psychology and play accordingly.
After all, the most successful strategy to build a great customer experience is to let the customer know that you feel for them, and you connect with them.
Now, there are various software tools that can help you customize the user experience across your marketing channels. Take Curately as an example; With Curately, you can create highly-targeted content to speak to specific segments of your audience in a fraction of the time.
Also, with Scriptly, another amazing tool, not only can you create personalized email marketing sequences but also you can publish different landing pages for each of your customer personas. Take a look here to see how Scriptly can help you create a personalized customer experience strategy.
3. Emotional connection
Emotions play a big role in marketing, especially in today’s world where people are always looking for a human side of the business rather than automated version.
In order to provide a better customer experience, you need to, first of all, bring out the human side of your business.
Wondering how you can do this?
Personalize the interaction with your customer.
Whether it is marketing emails, calling or any other form of interaction on social media, personalize the message.
Make the customer feel that a human is interacting with them trying to feel their emotions, rather than someone just trying to sell their products.
In this light, Nike is a great example. The company has been using the power of emotions in their marketing campaigns for all these years, and has managed to create a big impact as well!
This is what Gallup has to say about emotions in customer experience “when it comes to sales growth, businesses with emotional connect outperform the ones that don’t by 85%.”
4. Value customer feedback
”Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Bill Gates
These words paint a clear picture of how important it is to gather and study feedback.
You can’t always have happy customers and the ones that are not satisfied with what you deliver provide you with the most important nutrient you need to grow – motivation.
As a result of their feedback, you can get to know where you are lacking, and what are the areas that need improvement.
This has been the major reason why businesses have started to invest heavily in analytics and understanding customer behavior to know what they feel, and how they feel when a business offers something new.
Once you have a clear picture of their behavior, you can predict the future trends and based on their feedback you can eventually plan your future strategies as well.
5. Measure everything
The last, but certainly not the least, of the things you can do to ensure that you are delivering an out-of-the-world customer experience is to employ a measurable approach to everything.
For instance, whenever you intend to change your customer experience strategy, do take a look at the numbers that you were able to achieve.
Were you able to do better than you were doing earlier? Or, was it worse? Or, the response was just the same?
This will help you with two things.
First of all, it will help you to understand the customer better. Secondly, it will allow you to evolve constantly with time.
Consequently, you will know whether your strategies are working or not, you can easily figure out ways to always improve on what has been done in the past.
Concluding words
So, as you can see, it is quite clear that customer experience can actually play a huge role in creating a winning strategy for your business.
The steps you need to take in order to create a great customer experience are not that hard to implement. All it takes is the courage and conviction to understand the customer, and then take some small actionable steps to give them what they are looking for.
As easy as it might sound, it requires a dedicated and meticulous approach to achieve this.
If you have been looking for ways to take your business to the next level, then beginning with these small steps could be the first thing to do.
A strategy, based on these steps, once in place is going to create a customer experience that wins their heart. And, that’s untimately what it is all about.
Isn’t it?