As information continues to become more available, thanks to the Internet and social media, product differentiation is becoming difficult as it gets harder to distinguish between products in each category.
As a result, businesses need to look at something else to set themselves apart from their competitors and develop strong customer loyalty. Creating a positive or excellent customer experience is the key to achieving this.
Customer experience is defined as the interactions between a customer and an organization throughout their business relationship. The interaction begins from the moment the customer hears about the business, all the way to them making a purchase of the product or service.
Creating a positive customer experience has now become vital to success, a Bloomberg Businessweek survey revealed that “delivering a great customer experience” has become the new imperative. 80% of the companies polled also rated customer experience as a top strategic objective.
The White House Office of Consumer Affairs found that 80% of U.S consumers would pay more for a product or service that ensured a superior customer experience.
Building a great customer experience has been shown to improve customer satisfaction, increase revenue and sales, build stronger customer relationships and generate more referrals and word of mouth marketing.
But, how can you do to use this to your advantage?
The 5 ways that can help you build excellent customer experiences
1. Look at your business through the customers eyes
First, you need to find your customer or buyer persona, who exactly is your customer?
What are their main habits and what do they want from this business? What are the pain points they might face when dealing with it and what are their main priorities?
Second, map out what type of experience you want the customer to have. Define exactly the feeling what you want the customer to feel when dealing with your organization.
Write it down clearly and use it as the strategy for making your decisions moving forward.
2. Focus on customer touch points
If you want to provide an excellent customer experience, you need a deeper understanding of how your customers interact with your business at each of your individual touch points as well as across your entire organization.
Touch points being the points that the customer directly or indirectly deals with your business. From advertising, social media, website, call center, service delivery to the follow up.
To gain this understanding, you must map your customer’s journey and the touch points they interact with along the way. This analysis provides you with a clearer understanding of your customers’ experience, and where things went wrong.
3. Restructure your customer journey
After mapping out the touch points, as well as the feelings and impressions you want them to have when dealing with your business, you can then start redesigning the customer experience and touch points to build the experience you want them to have.
Restructure the customer journey to fit your messages and how you want your brand to be represented. Ensure that each step of the journey is a positive one, that each step forward is easy for the customer.
4. Track your progress
The best way to create consistent brand experience is to turn the feeling you want your customer to have into rituals and habits that are quantifiable.
This takes a lot of testing and experimenting. You should set your strategy beforehand then pick the actions you believe will accomplish these goals, afterwards you can start tracking how your customers or followers respond.
Their feedback will tell you if you are doing the right thing or not. Always remain flexible in your approach and encourage feedback.
5. Highlight success stories
Highlighting success stories is not just an entertaining practice but, as always, it is a very important act that solidifies the actions and practices that you want your team to emulate.
People need examples and previous action to further realize and appreciate your words and messages. The more they see, the better their understanding of what you want your brand to stand for.