Today, the most successful companies are the ones that know how to develop a relationship with their customers. Of course, as many brands know, building a strong connection is about a lot more than decreasing customer service waiting times, or making your products more accessible. If you want to harness the most loyal and engaged consumers for your company, then you need to understand their customer journey, and what you can do to make their experiences with your business truly unforgettable.
Today’s consumers expect more from businesses than ever before. They want to be treated well, understood, and respected whenever they engage with a new company. Fortunately, if you’re capable of meeting your client’s expectations, the results are fantastic, with 17% revenue growth on average for leaders in customer experience.
Now that customers have the power to choose which business they want to connect with, research shows that 55% of people are willing to pay more when they know they’re going to get a good experience. If you want better product engagement, more repeat customers, and a greater revenue for your company, then you need a strategy for customer experience.
The customer journey is now the primary focus of 68% of marketers. In fact, many experts believe that it’s no longer the price or product that you sell that draws people to your company, but the experiences that you can offer. Just some of the benefits of a new CX initiative are:
The most obvious result of a customer experience campaign is better customer satisfaction. Since happy customers can deliver up to 2.6 times as much revenue as their “somewhat satisfied” counterparts, it makes sense to sweep your clients off their feet.
Fantastic customer experiences not only convince your customers to spend more on your products and services, they also transform one-time buyers into repeat consumers. Since acquiring a new customer can cost up to 7 times more than maintaining an existing one, repeat clients can be the source of a great deal of cost-effective revenue.
Even if your customers weren’t originally happy with your product or service, you can still turn their perception of your brand around with a great customer experience. For instance, 95% of customers who claim to have had a bad experience with a company say that they would be willing to purchase from them again if the issue is dealt with correctly.
In a marketplace that’s becoming increasingly saturated, it’s becoming more difficult for companies to differentiate themselves from other businesses. An incredible experience can get your customers talking so that you can tap into the benefits of word of mouth marketing, and it also means that new clients have a new way to set your company apart from the crowd.
Since 88% of customers read reviews before they buy from a brand, your satisfied clients can make it easier for new consumers to pick you over your competitors.
Finally, in an environment where your customers are being bombarded by hundreds of advertisements every day, it’s more important than ever to build a relationship with consumers. Customer experiences help you to connect with your clients on a level that goes beyond product features and price points. This paves the way for long-term loyalty, and even brand advocacy.
By now, you know that the customer journey and “CX” is an important part of what makes modern companies so successful. In fact, a Customer Management IQ survey found that around 75% of customer management executives consider customer experience to be a “5” on a 1-5 scale of the most important things a business can do.
Unfortunately, while a lot of brands recognize how crucial great customer experience can be, many are failing in their attempts to engage customers. A Bain & Company survey asked companies to rate their customer experience quality and found that 80% of brands believed that they were delivering a wonderful customer journey. On the other hand, only 8% of consumers agree that they’re getting the best experience from brands.
So, how can you boost product engagement and enhance your CX?
The first thing you need to do when you’re establishing a stronger customer journey is make sure that you have a customer-focused vision that you can share with your entire organization. A good way to do this is to create a set of statements that will guide you towards success. For instance:
Once you have those principles in place, you can use them to push the performance of your organization to the next level.
The next step in developing your customer experience principles is to make sure that you understand the different types of content who engage most often with your company. If you’re going to help your organization really understand what your clients need and want, then you should start by developing user personas for each type of consumer in your network.
Personas give your customer support team the opportunity to better recognize and understand the people they’re trying to sell to. This is an important step in helping your organization to become more customer-centric.
The best customer experiences happen when service agents or members of your team know how to develop an emotional connection with your clients. Results form the Journal of Consumer Research have found that more than 50% of any experience is based on emotion, so it’s important to think about how you’re making your users feel.
Because customers grow feelings of loyalty for a company thanks to their emotional attachment, a business that can optimize their CX strategy with an emotional connection may outperform their competitors by up to 85% in sales potential.
Modern brands are currently connecting with their customers on a range of platforms that go beyond the standard phone conversation. However, regardless of whether your client is speaking to you over the phone, through instant chat, or with an email, it’s important to make sure that you’re offering the same consistent, and familiar experience.
Creating a brand guide that includes information on how to deal with customer queries, tone of voice, and other important factors could be helpful when delivering this level of consistency.
How do you know if your efforts are leading to better product engagement? Simple, all you need to do is ask. Ideally, you should be capturing feedback from your consumers in real-time using post-interaction surveys and automated tools that allow you to gather data from calls and emails.
If you want to gather more in-depth information, you can always send follow up emails to important customers, or phone them back to ask important questions about their interactions with your business.
Today’s businesses have a range of incredible technology available to them that can help them to convert customer experience data into actionable insights that make agents better at their jobs. For instance, if you can gather statistics about how people to respond to different types of follow-up content, you can inform your employees that it’s better to communicate with clients through text, instead of call, or over email instead of instant chat.
The more information you gather about what your customers like and dislike, the more you can tailor your customer journey to their needs. Remember, though there are plenty of customer experience best practices out there, every business is different, so there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for an amazing CX.
Finally, you should always have a method in place for measuring the success of your customer experience solutions. Whether you’re looking at reviews to determine how your CX initiatives have prompted a better perception for your brand, or you’re measuring conversions from repeat customers to see how often people prefer to come back to your company instead of buying from a competitor, there are plenty of ways that you can track your results.
Since the market trends and customer expectations are always changing and evolving, measuring your success will help you to determine when you need to take additional steps to optimize your CX strategy, and which of your efforts have the best impact on your bottom line.
In today’s competitive marketplace, customer expectations are growing at a faster rate than ever before. If you don’t know how to keep your clients happy, then your business will undoubtedly begin to struggle. The guide above will help you to understand not only why CX should matter to your company, but what you can do to enhance you