The market is filled with various brands and services. There are various factors that determine the success of a product or service. Out of them, we will be focusing on the most influential ones i.e. Customer Experience.
Customer is King
It is no secret that businesses that are customer-centric are leading the marketing game, be it traditional marketing or digital marketing. Companies are paying keen attention to various strategies that help in procuring positive customer experience.
Firstly, let’s understand What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience is the impression that a company leaves on its customer during the whole process of their funneling. It helps in determining what and how a customer thinks about the brand.
Customer experience comes into play in various stages i.e. pre-purchase, during purchase, and post-purchase. The customer experience of all these stages determines the success of a particular product or service.
Secondly, Why Customer Experience is Important?
Customer experience plays a vital role in the growth and success of a company’s product or service. Positive customer experience helps in establishing brand loyalty. Also, it brings new customers through positive word-of-mouth recommendations.
Now the most important question arises is How to Deliver an Outstanding Customer Experience?
Ways To Offer Outstanding Customer Experience
1. Understanding the Customer
Understanding the Customer is the key to offer outstanding customer experience. Companies while launching a product or service has to keep customers in their minds and consider everything that will make the customer experience better.
There are 3 most conventional ways to understand customers better:
- Putting Yourself In Customer Shoes.
It means looking from customers’ perspective in order to know what kind of product or service they prefer.
- Collect And Analyse Data.
It consists of collecting data that will help to understand customer behavior. Such as demographic, gender, age, etc.
- Ask Customers What They Think.
It consists of getting customer opinions about a product or services in the form of feedback or reviews.
2. Analyzing Business Blueprint
It is very important for a business that its workers, investors, stakeholders are acquainted with the company’s mission, vision, and processes.
The basic idea for analyzing everything prior is to deliver a satisfactory product or service to the customer. If workers of a company are not clear about the objective, it can create a lot of hurdles in the process of achieving goals.
3. Work Backward
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to sell it.” – Steve Jobs
Apple is one of the most successful companies in the world. Apple has implemented the strategy of working backward and it has helped the company to reach where it is today.
In layman language working backward, method means starting with the customer wants, needs, and problem and providing a solution in the form of product or service.
Search for the requirements and problems for the customer and work to find the solution. This is a more customer-centric approach rather than vice-versa.
4. Usage of Artificial intelligence
Implementation of Artificial Intelligence helps a company to provide convenient, intelligent, and informed customer experience throughout the customer journey. On the contrary, manual services take time to respond, understand the issues, and in resolving problems.
We all know AI has become an essential part of the marketing world.
AI is transforming the customer experience in various ways:
- Empowering self-service.
With the introduction of chatbots and virtual assistants. It is saving time on both the end customer as well as the company. Customers get a response to their queries in a matter of seconds. In today’s world time is everything customers are impatient.
- Improving Personalization.
The Customer gets personalized content and who doesn’t love the personalization, it gives a feeling of importance to customers.
For instance, e-commerce websites display recommendations based on recent purchases and YouTube, Netflix, Spotify recommends them on the basis of user history.
- 24/7 Availability.
Unlike a human, AI doesn’t get exhausted or frustrated. AI provides full customer support to customers 24/7. Customers nowadays don’t like to wait they want everything fast and feasible. AI is making ways for companies to provide good customer experience.
5. Usage of social media
Social Media usage horizon has been expanded it is no longer only used for connecting people with people just for personal purposes. Moreover, it is used for professionals as well.
A lot of companies are using social media as a powerful digital marketing strategy. It is used by a lot of companies for gaining good customer experience.
Social media has a vital role to play in customer experience. Nowadays people often share their experience on the social media platform about a product or a service. How was their experience or is it worth trying etc.
Such comments or posts should be monitored by the company in order to analyze customer experience. Social media has a huge audience, a positive review can help to gain new customers and on the other hand, a negative review can hamper the company’s image.
For instance, if someone has posted a good review of a product, the company should make the customer feel valued by reposting it in their stories. If someone has posted a bad review companies should try to resolve their problem in order to provide a good customer experience.
6. Keep checking on your competitors
The market is flooded with a substitute, customers get daily some or other exciting deals to get attracted to make a purchase for a certain product or service.
In other words, the customer will be more inclined towards where they will get exciting offers, good customer service at each stage of the customer journey. Importantly, if a company lacks these it will eventually hamper customer experience and the customer will switch to a brand that will provide such offers.
Moreover, it is very important for companies to keep track of their competitors in order to deliver the best customer service available in the market. Eventually, that helps them to offer the best customer experience.
7. Offer a feasible return and exchange policy:
Post-purchase experience of a product or service plays a vital role in determining customer experience. Companies should pay keen attention to offering good post-purchase experience by providing a feasible return and exchange policy.
A dilemma most of the customers face while making a purchase is that if after purchasing they won’t like the product what would they do. It is very important to provide feasible return and exchange policies.
Importantly, companies should emphasize a point i.e customers don’t like a loss of even a single penny. So, companies provide 100% money-back-guarantee, it helps in increasing the trust of a customer for a company.
A good exchange policy encourages the customer to make a purchase. It allows a customer to exchange the item in a specified time period and get the most suitable exchange they want.
If a company doesn’t provide such a policy there is a huge risk that customers won’t make a purchase.
Lastly, the main objective of return and exchange policy is gaining trust and providing a good post-purchase experience. It eventually helps in creating a good customer experience.
8. Offer a trial period and discounts
Trail periods and discounts often attract a lot of customers to try a product or service. These factors have helped a lot of companies to fetch customers and eventually gain good customer experience.
With a free trial option, the potential customers are less worried about the investment. They have the option to leave the service in between if they don’t find it worth it.
Additionally, it provides good customer experience, it is a universal fact that free feels good.
Good discounts also play a vital role in improving the customer experience.
For instance, purchase during the sales period is always high. And customers get to buy the product they want at comparatively less price than usual.
9. Make feedback a necessity
Customer feedback is one of the most important assets a company owns. Feedback indicates a lot about customer satisfaction because feedback is a clear indicator of how a customer feels about your product or service.
- Actively ask customers for Feedbacks
The customer usually after a good purchase often doesn’t bother to give feedback. That is why it is the company’s responsibility to actively ask customers to provide feedback. It can also help them to know how are they doing and what areas need improvement.
The steps that are important in order to gain good customer experience:
- Share Feedbacks Across All Department
Feedbacks are only beneficial when they reach each and every employee of the company. Only the involvement of frontline employees is not sufficient.
Each and every feedback should be analyzed properly in order to provide a good customer experience in the future. Ignoring feedback often hampers the company’s growth.
- Reply To All Feedbacks
After analyzing all the feedback reply it. When a company replies to various feedbacks in a personalized way it makes a customer feel valued and a feeling that the company cares about their opinion.
10. Reward loyal Customers
Rewards always attract attention and loyal customers of a company deserve a token of gratitude.
When a company provides a reward to its loyal customers they won’t be forgetting it in the near future. They will often talk about the company’s product or service to their acquaintance. That will act as an advertisement and promotion and will eventually attract more sales and customers.
For instance, e-commerce loyalty programs reward consist of discounts, rebates, rewards, free merchandise, coupons, and access to unreleased products.
Conclusion
Customer expectations are higher than ever and word of mouth travels fast. A customer has a lot of power over the company’s overall review. And that is why companies are giving emphasis on providing a good customer experience.
Firstly, there are numerous factors that determine customer behavior. That’s why analyzing each and every factor is important.
Secondly, companies should work on creating strategies that will help companies to achieve good customer experience.
