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The business competition never gets easier, based on statistics there are about 137,000 new businesses that start daily. You need something to set you apart from your competitors or you won’t be able to stay in business for long. By focusing on differentiation through offering exceptional customer experience, your business can stand out in today’s highly competitive business landscape.
The Key Business Differentiator
Improving the customer experience (CX) can be a key to differentiating your business or brand. Customers are always willing to pay more to receive better customer experience. This is why some brands, for example, charge more for fast delivery and many customers are willing to pay the extra fees as delivery is an aspect of customer experience. Customer experience can be a major contributor to increasing customer loyalty, and lifetime value. Loyal customers help in boosting sales, as they can repeat purchases and are also more willing to spread positive word of mouth and refer more potential customers.
What is Customer Experience?
Customers don’t just evaluate your product or service by how much they pay or invest overall, but rather on their overall experience which includes their experience before making the order, after making the order, and after receiving it. Understanding how your customers think and their buying journey is essential to having a sustainable business, but it remains a challenging task that requires analyzing data and behavioral patterns.
Customer Experience versus Customer Service
The first contact point with a customer is usually face-to-face, by phone, or through a social media community manager, this is customer service. Usually, the role of customer service is reactive as it starts whenever the potential customer seeks help or after a problem occurs. Customer experience on the other hand is more proactive as it goes beyond customer service and includes more touch points throughout the entire customer journey.
How to Optimize the Customer Journey?
The points of interaction with your customers, touchpoints that occur during the buyer journey, will determine how your customers will feel and think, whether they are satisfied with the product or service, and whether they are satisfied or delighted with their experience. When customers are satisfied, they usually repeat the purchase which results in increasing revenue and cutting costs.
Some studies indicate that a 2% increase in customer retention can have the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10%.
Pre-Purchase Stage
When your potential customers are still getting to know you, they are in the awareness stage. They are still forming their initial impression, trying to know more about your brand, your product or service, or your solutions. Once they start moving to the consideration phase, they compare you to other options in the market. You need to gain their trust at this point and position yourself as a credible source and the best option. You should also work on improving the customer experience at this point, and make their work easier. You should focus on figuring out engagement opportunities, providing constant answers to their questions through your content marketing and personalized messages, and showing them what they need to see like product ratings and reviews.
Purchase Stage
During the purchase stage, you should make the buying process as simple and easy as possible. The stage of ordering should be easy and the payment methods should be clear and flexible. For example, if you have an e-commerce store, you will need to improve the online shopping experience by making it more mobile-friendly, and increasing site loading speed to make customers’ shopping experience easier.
After Purchase Stage
This is the time to satisfy, delight, or disappoint your customer. You should have communicated to your customer when he can expect to receive their product and expected delivery time. The customer experience at this stage also includes setting clear guidelines for returns and exchanges and an easy customer experience refund/ exchange process. You should not end the communication after purchase, but you should try to get customer feedback, and send your clients from time to time special offers, important updates, or even wishes on special days and events.
Case Study: Smile More Improves Customer Experience
Brands for Less LLC created the Smile More Loyalty Program where their clients get membership digital cards and start collecting points on purchases to redeem them with special offers like free delivery and cashback and special promotions where they get double the points on their birthday. Loyalty programs are not only designed to encourage repeated sales but also are a way of improving customer experience. Also being able to track clients’ purchasing history, helps determine their behavior and facilitates personalization.
Other Tips to Improve Customer Experience
Identifying customer’s needs is key to enhancing customer experience. The more you know your potential customers and your existing customer’s needs, the better you can serve them throughout the buying journey.
- Customers always expect personalization, so try to collect customer feedback regularly to improve customer experience.
- Offering continuous support is essential with a focus on helping customers rather than just selling.
- You need to be responsive by offering a multi-channel approach, more than one way to reach support. You can try to enable phone calls, social media support, and live chat for example on your website and whenever possible try to keep the chat more human and personal this will enable you to tap more into their emotions and understand their needs.
How to Delight Your Customers?
Many brands overpromise and under-deliver resulting in poor customer experience. There is always a fine line between satisfying customers and delighting them.
Satisfied Customer: When you deliver what you promise, your client will feel satisfied.
Disappointed Customer: Whenever you promise something and you fail to deliver it, your customers will be disappointed and this can trigger negative word of mouth.
Delighted Customer: If you deliver more than you promised, your customer will feel delighted.
This is why it is always important to promise but you can offer, and try to exceed expectations to delight your customer. You can offer things like unexpected offers and greetings on special days or offer loyalty programs.
Conclusion
Customers are constantly demanding better experiences from the brands they get in touch with. A perfect product or service with a bad customer experience will never guarantee success. Businesses need to be responsive and focus on improving the customer experience along the buyer’s journey to have a competitive edge. By clearly analyzing customer’s behaviors and patterns, you can easily identify customer’s needs and work on enhancing customer experience.
