Improving Customer Experience
Submitted by: Saoirse
The term customer experience is ubiquitous in business these days. In fact, focusing on the customer experience has become the single most important way for and organisation to achieve success. Customer experience can include a lot of elements, but it really boils down to the perception the customer has of your brand. Even if you think your brand and customer experience is one ting, if the customer perceives it as something different, that is what the actual customer experience is.
CX Defined
It is how customers perceive their interactions with your company. It was defined as being made up of three things from the customer's perceptive:
- Useful - they deliver value
- Usable - the value is easy to find and engage with
- Enjoyable - they're emotionally engaging and people want to use them
Every company provides a customer experience, regardless of whether you create it consciously. That experience may be good, bad or indifferent, but the fact that you have customers, you interact with them and provide them with products or a service means that they have an experience with you and your business.
Customer experience is an integral part of customer relationship management and the reason why it's important is because a customer who has a positive experience with a business is more likely to become a repeat and loyal customer.
It seems like common sense, happy customers stay longer with a brand. And if you treat your customers poorly and ignore their needs, then they are more likely to leave. Yet some companies don't place any importance on customer experience.
CX moves us beyond the traditional definition of customer service - those individual moments when employees are providing direct service to customers. It is also about the bigger picture of what happens before and after these service interactions.
To truly understand customer experience, you must know that it encompasses every aspect of a company's offering - from the quality of its customer care to its reputation management, marketing, branding, product and service features, and reliability.
Customer experience is about much more than just customer service. It is about fostering employee engagement. It is about truly understanding your customers, creating a strategy for delivering exceptional customer service, and then empowering employees to deliver it. It is about the culture you create in the work environment that empowers and inspires your employees to reinforce the right behaviors that support exceptional customer experience.
Create a Customer Experience Strategy
Understanding Your Target Audience/Customers:
Who they are and what they need, this is crucial in building a positive customer experience. If you are really going to understand customer needs and wants, then your employees need to be able to connect and empathize with the situation that your customer faces.
One way to do this is creating a customer persona. By creating personas, your customer support team can recognize who they are and understand them better. It is also an important step in becoming truly customer-centric.
Mobile phones are the fastest adopted technology of modern times, with more than 91% of adults having access to a mobile phone, and the number of text messages sent daily ranging between 5-6 billion. That's a lot of people communicating over SMS.
SMS Marketing is a fantastic channel for your business to receive messages from your customers. By allowing your customers to text you, you can enhance your customer service. The majority of people prefer using SMS messages for customer service inquiries and comments, It's quick, hassle-free, and extremely cost effective. By offering an SMS feature you make your business accessible and allow customers to contact you with any questions or problems (this is also a great way to add to your opt-in marketing list!!). Immediately reducing the amount of time for a customer to resolve an issue they have and leads to a satisfied customer base, a win-win really!
Customer expectations are higher than ever, and as customers become more empowered, it increases the importance of the customer experience.
Saoirse
