Customers are the center of nearly every business, no matter what type of product or service they sell. Creating a memorable customer experience is crucial to increasing revenue, meeting business goals, and producing champions for your brand. The following are several steps for creating a unique customer experience strategy:
What is customer experience?
Customer experience is the total experience a customer has from start to finish when engaging with a business. Each customer’s unique experience involves their total perception of a particular business. There are several tools your company can use to improve each individual’s customer experience.
The customers’ experience starts the moment they encounter a company’s advertising. It continues when they visit an online or brick-and-mortar store. It includes all interactions with the website, products, and the company’s employees. The experience continues even after they purchase a product or service. Think of the customer experience as a continuous cycle.
How is customer experience different from customer service?
Customer service generally refers to the support a company provides for customers before and after they buy services and products. It typically includes the interaction, either digitally or in person, a company has with their customers.
Customer experience includes everything involved in customer service, then expands beyond that. A customer’s overall experience will include all the touchpoints a customer will encounter when doing business with a particular company. Examples of a positive customer experience include a customer receiving quick response time to an inquiry, engaging with courteous and professional employees, and getting excellent service or a high-quality product.
What is a customer experience strategy and why do you need one?
A customer experience strategy is a detailed plan or map that enables a customer to enjoy the best experience possible with a particular business or organization. A good strategy will flow from your company’s overarching business goals. An excellent strategy will ultimately bridge the gap between what the company is currently delivering and what the customers want.
Every organization needs to know these three phases when it comes to a customer experience strategy: How to create a customer experience strategy, How to Implement the strategy, and How to monitor the strategy with effective feedback. A coherent strategy built on research and data is vital to a successful customer experience. You can pull information from marketing plans to overall business goals achieve this.. There are specific reasons why your business needs a well thought out customer experience strategy:
- Increase customer satisfaction: A better experience improves satisfaction. Satisfied customers will complain less and recommend the business to family and friends. Creating an automated support system is a great way to provide better support for customers.
- Grow customer loyalty: Happy customers will provide repeat business, sometimes for many years.
- Increase overall revenue: Long-term customers will save a company money in a variety of ways. This includes fewer returns and fewer expenditures on marketing.
What steps should you take to create a customer experience strategy?
There are several steps to take when creating the best customer experience strategy possible:
- Understand who your customer is: When trying to understand who your customer is, it’s important to develop personas. A persona is a fictional person that a company creates through extensive research that represents its typical customer.
- Understand their conversion path: It’s necessary to map out the customer’s buying journey from start to finish. A customer journey map consists of a visual representation of the steps a customer goes through when purchasing a product or service from a company. The journey map will focus on specifics such as the buying process, pain points, and solutions.
- Create an emotional connection with customers: Emotions play a large role in a customer’s purchasing decision. Testimonials and real stories are excellent ways to connect with customers. Companies are increasingly using real people in advertising to help build rapport. An example of this is fitness companies using people of all sizes and fitness levels instead of impossibly beautiful and trim individuals the average customer doesn’t relate to. Telling their stories can create brand intimacy with customers.
- Implement tools for capturing feedback: Feedback is critical when understanding how well a customer experience strategy is working. Capturing feedback in real-time is crucial to fixing any problems and improving each customer’s experience efficiently. Customer surveys are one important way a company can monitor feedback. Chatbots are an excellent way to provide real-time feedback.
The customers’ perception of a company is only as good as their last experience. Customer experience is fluid and is something businesses must continually monitor. A Support automation platform like Capacity can help build solutions to create a memorable customer experience for your business.