Today is the day you start caring about your Customer Experience Strategy.
Customers can be pretty scary and powerful nowadays. They are at the very core of your business and they expect to be treated as such. That’s precisely why, according to Gartner, more than 50% of organizations are investing in customer experience this year. Have you?
Just think about it: emotions play an important role in our choices. When you’re looking for a new phone, it’s most likely that you purchase from a brand you had positive experiences in the past. And definitely not the other way around.
If your customers have a positive perception of your services, they will keep using them and eventually talk about them. So be the company they choose. And start investing in your customer experience strategy.
What is Customer Experience in the first place?
Customer experience might sound like another fancy word regarding customer service. But it’s a whole different issue. In fact, customer service is just a tiny piece of the puzzle.
To give you an idea: customer service is often related to the support provided to customers with issues. On the other hand, customer experience is a sum of all interactions, ranging from discovery, to purchase and advocacy. It also includes user experience, which refers to the way visitors interact with your app, website or software.
Customer experience is about perceptions. These perceptions will build memories and feelings which may trigger behaviors and drive customer loyalty.
Why does it matter?
You simply won’t make business with a brand that treats you poorly. According to statistics, 55% of consumers are willing to pay more for a guaranteed good experience. And 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for an upgraded experience.
Wheather you want to retain existing customers or convince new ones, delivering a great customer experience is crucial if you want to stand out from the competition.
So how to create a powerful CX strategy?
1 – Know your audience better than your competitors
Good communication is only possible if the speaker and the audience “speak the same language”. So when planning a CX strategy, you need to know who your audience is in order to provide a suitable and personalized approach.
Start by analyzing your competitors to the bone. Which strategies are they using? How do they communicate with customers? This way you will be able to fill the gap and make improvements where it does matter. And even stand out.
Take advantage of report tools such as Facebook, Google Analytics, and Mix Panels to know the age, gender, interests, and behaviors of your target groups. You can also sit down with your sales and support teams to define a profile that is an accurate representation of the customers they deal with every day.
After this step, you should define a customer-centric approach that is able to capture clients emotionally and psychologically. As they will identify with your brand.
2 – Build a goal-driven and consistent experience
First things first: eliminate bad UX from your website. Make sure visitors can achieve their goals quickly with powerful CTA’s, contextual guides and an intuitive interface. You don’t want to frustrate clients right away. Your website should bring positive first impressions and help get things done. Be goal-driven, highlight the areas that matter and build a flow that leads to your business goals.
Besides, if you use multiple online and offline channels, make sure your brand is consistent in every single one of them! According to Kampyle, 87% of customers believe brands need to put more effort into providing a consistent experience. Just think about it: we all hate to repeat ourselves. We expect brands to remember our issues, no matter which channel used. And we also expect to recognize a brand in every email, social media, app, or marketing campaign. Take that into consideration.
3 – Provide exceptional employee training
Your employees are the face of your company. Especially your customer care team. Therefore, investing in employee training will be extremely important to create better experiences and relationships.
Hiring professionals with strong interpersonal skills and excellent presentation is a good way to start. But you shouldn’t stop there. Go for interactive digital lessons, on which employees can learn guiding principles. Opt for microlearning, so they can filter information easily. In the end, track their results so you can provide personalized guidance for each member.
Furthermore, train your employees to create emotional connections and remember personal details like a client’s birthday or favorite color. Details are important.
Improving your employee training approach will give you a more productive and motivated team. Do ask for feedback often and reward your employees. Remember, no one enjoys talking with fed-up robots.
4 – Create helpful and unique content
Nowadays content is king. Did you know 70% of customers feel closer to a business after engaging with their content? And that 47% of buyers view at least 3–5 pieces of content before they contact a sales representative? That’s why you shouldn’t forget about it.
This might look something outside CX but informative content such as videos, tutorials and blog posts will help you address customer pain points more easily. Customers can learn more about your business or even find answers to their issues, at any time, without having to contact your team. That’s basically a synonym of positive experience!
Another tip would be to create high-quality and unique content that relates to your customer’s needs. In a world where everyone has a blog (literally everyone), you will want to stand out and be memorable in the eyes of your customers. And make them feel related to your brand on an emotional level.
5 – Take advantage of effective CX platforms
I have bad news for you. Having multiple social channels where customers can engage with your brand can lead to frustration, confusion and even forgot “follow-ups”. Therefore, providing a place where customers have more control is very important. According to researches, 50% of customers believe it’s important to solve issues by themselves and 70% expect a company’s website to include a self-service application!
So, if you have the resources, create a CX platform on your website where users can engage with your company, while your team can manage and implement strategies. If you don’t, there are some tools that you can use that, together, will give full control over your customer experience approach.
- Take a look at Acquire for example. This live chat tool will sit on top of your website and allow instant communication with customers. But that’s not it, you will be able to set up and train your own bot to generate automated answers and even interact with the customer’s screen.
- If you already use SalesForce, tools like GetFeedback might be useful as it facilitates the creation of engaging customer surveys. Besides, you will have access to an analytics dashboard where you can build reports and keep track of customer satisfaction easily.
- Support tools like Helppier will give you a full scope of your website’s user experience. You will be able to create step-by-step guides to ensure users are on the right path and can follow complex processes. You can set up contextual tooltips to explain certain features, and even integrate knowledge base articles on top of your website! This way it’s less likely that users will engage with your team as they can easily access information.
In short
To develop a great CX strategy, you need to keep in mind that customers are more demanding of a seamless and consistent experience across channels. They also expect to be treated as individuals and become more autonomous when facing problems.
Therefore, getting to know your audience and training your employees to remember details, will be relevant to provide personalized experiences. Creating informative and unique content will not only help customers engage with your brand and find answers quickly but also make you stand out from the competition. Last but not least, having a self-service platform on your website will fasten response time and reduce incoming calls.
If you enjoyed this article make sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for similar content 😉
