The customer experience has never been as fundamental to business success as it is today. As well as consumers expecting more from the companies and brands they engage with as part of a values-driven economy, innovations in the world of CX have created an increasingly competitive landscape where a poor customer experience approach could put you out of the game for good.
To address your concerns over what you should and shouldn’t be doing to offer great customer experiences that support your growth, we’ve outlined five key steps you can take. While they’re not the total answer, they can help you create a solid foundation for delivering consistent customer experiences.
- Understand who your customers are
Don’t rely on hypothetical buyer personas or old target market data. Learn who your customers are and evolve your business to match their needs. Customers (and customer expectations) are constantly changing, so you can’t rely on generic or traditional approaches.
- Find out why customers like your products and services
It’s not enough to know that your traffic or sales data is strong. You should also be learning ‘why’ this is the case so that you can benchmark this performance against competitors and other periods in the future where you may be less popular as a brand. This will let you understand how to adapt and modify your offerings based on what customers want.
- Map out the customer journey
Map out all aspects of the customer journey across all channels. After this, ensure that every customer touchpoint is consistent with your brand and offers great customer experience opportunities. If you have one weak link in your customer’s buying journey, it could let down your whole customer experience network. Great face to face customer service can be ruined by a poorly designed website and vice versa.
- Be proactive
Whether it’s engaging with customers directly; managing inquiries and complaints as part of their customer service experience, or building online communities, you need to be proactive. Today, customers want to know that you are able to adapt and react in real-time. This means making sure you keep an eye on forums in your sector, check social comments and encourage customer-facing employees to capture feedback.
- Make the customer experience part of your values
The best ideas to improve the customer experience always come from a team effort. You should never just rely on one ‘CX’ expert or member of your marketing team to drive customer experience improvements. For true results, you need to include everyone in this process placing the customer experience at the heart of your company’s values. This will help you be consistent and make the customer experience the responsibility of everyone in your organisation.
Build better experiences
Some of these principles are easier to put in place and sustain than others, but they are a good place to start for any business looking to improve their customer experience. For more advice or help in designing and implementing the right customer experience approach, get in touch with SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL.