7 WAYS TO IMPROVE THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
1. Create a clear customer experience vision
A clear customer-focused vision that you can communicate with your organisation.
Create a set of statements that act as guiding principles. Once these principles are in place, they will drive your organisation's behaviour. Every member of your team should know these principles by heart. It is essential that these principles are embedded into all areas of training and development at all times.
2. Understand who your customers are
Bring to life the different types of customers who deal with your customer support teams. If your organisation is going to understand customer needs and wants, then they need to be able to connect and empathise with the situations that your customers face.
Segment your customers and create personas (or customer profiles). Try to give each persona a name and personality. If you want to build a demand generation engine built on word-of-mouth recommendations, you should pay close attention to who your customers are and the experience you provide.
Doing so turns customers into fans and brand advocates, setting your company up for success, resulting in more recommendations, less discounting, lower churn and a more profitable business. By creating personas, your customer support team can recognise who they are and understand them better. It's also an essential step in becoming truly customer-centric.
3. Create an emotional connection with your customers
The best customer experiences occur when a team member creates an emotional connection with a customer.
Research by the Journal Of Consumer Research has found that more than 50% of an experience is founded on emotion, as emotions shape the attitudes that drive decisions.
A business that optimises for an emotional connection outperforms competitors by 85% in sales growth. While buyers care about your product and unique selling points, in the end, they do what feels like the right choice
Where does that feeling originate?
It comes from the experience you give them. How you handle your customers and make them feel at every step of their journey significantly impacts if and when they buy, how long they stay and if they turn into raving fans.
A post experience for customer means a lot; studies prove time and again:
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64% of consumers are likelier to recommend a brand to others if it offers simpler experiences and communications
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71% of people recommend a product or service because they received a 'great experience'
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65% of all consumers find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising
4. Capture customer feedback in real-time
How can your deliver a WOW customer experience?
It would be best if you asked, and ideally, you do this by capturing feedback in real-time. Use live chat tools to have real-time conversations. When done, send a follow-up email to every customer using post-interaction surveys and similar customer experience tools. Making outbound sales calls to customers to gain more insightful feedback is possible
5. Use a quality framework for the development of your team
With the above, you now know what customers think about your service quality compared to the customer experience principles you have defined. The next step is to identify the training needs of each customer support team member.
A quality framework furthers this assessment by scheduling and tracking your team's development through coaching, e-learning and group training.
6. Act upon regular employee feedback
Continuous employee feedback can play a role by using tools that allow staff to share ideas on improving the customer experience and for managers to see how staff feel towards the business.
7. Measure the ROI from delivering client customer experience
The answer is in the business results. Measuring customer experience is one of the biggest challenges faced by organisation. Many companies use Net Promoter Score (NPS) which collects valuable information by asking a single straightforward question: "How likely are you to recommend us?".
NPS is a highly suitable benchmark for a customer experience metric because many companies use it as the standard customer experience measurement. Implementing and measuring is simple, making NPS a favourite with company boards and executive committees