Introduction:

Improving Your Customer Experience is the Future of Good Business. The best way to define customer experience is as the impression you leave with your customer, resulting in how they think of your brand, across every stage of the customer journey. Multiple touch points factor into the customer experience, and these touch points occur on a cross-functional basis.

The two primary touch points that create the customer experience are people and product. The customer matters more than ever before. Customers have the power, not the sellers anymore. It’s completely in the hands of buyers whether to increase your business profits or stamp it into the ground.

But it’s definitely a change for the best. Customers are your best resource for growing your brand awareness in a positive way — because their recommendations shared with friends and family are more reliable than your marketing and advertising channels.

Regardless of the industry you’re in, improving the customer experience is the key to increasing retention, satisfaction, and sales. The benefits of good customer service take many forms but the best is its impact on your bottom line.

Connect Everything:

Customers don’t care about your technology systems or how they work. They just expect that when they call a company the information they’ve provided online, in person, via chat, or on another telephone call will be available to further refine their experience with your company. Demonstrating understanding in one area, such as marketing, without connecting that understanding to commerce or service, will only lead to customer frustration.

Set Standards:

In an age of micro-moment personalization, you should have rules in place to ensure that customers with ongoing service issues receive communications that acknowledge their current situation.

Have the Right Conversations:

There is nothing more frustrating than calling into a company for help only to have to repeat yourself over and over again, and to be on the receiving end of communications that clearly demonstrate the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

Make Customer Service Part of Everyone’s Job:

Too often, organizations get fixated on the service department as being the front line when it comes to the customer experience. But in the age of digital, each customer touch point—including marketing, loyalty, commerce, and the respective lines of business—should coordinate their piece of the customer experience to ensure maximum customer satisfaction.

Search for and Fix the Areas Where Customers Are Most Frustrated:

Early quick wins are important to keep the momentum going. If it takes time to fix the issues, inform customer about the delay and advice strict timescales to resolve and stick to them.

People talk a lot. As we’ve seen, a positive customer experience impacts your company’s bottom line. Another way the customer experience can impact your business is the help or harm it can do to your company’s reputation

These elements combined form the total customer experience and its importance can’t be overstated. Especially if your company is one that does a majority of its business online; a place where you have but an eye blink to prove to a stranger that you’re worth their time and that you can offer them a positive customer experience.

Summary:

We’ve spoken about how customer the customer experience is ultimately how the customer feels about your brand. So ask yourself, what happened the last time you had either a great or terrible customer experience? You probably went to a friend or coworker to tell them the story, or you went to your social networking channels to broadcast your feelings to the world.

As a company, you have to take this personally and obsess over the reasons why people feel the way they do about you — it’ll dramatically help you grow your business.

Additionally, loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase. Meaning, all those small, early sales new customers backed out of could have generated a significant amount, as in thousands of dollars, in long-term revenue.

After all, your customers are like you. They like it when they’re treated fairly and they want to know they’re being heard. Put customers’ needs at the center of your business and stronger sales will happen. Your reputation will flourish. Your loyal customer base will grow.

Here’s one last motivational stat: 70% of unhappy customers whose issues were resolved in their favor said they would be willing to do business with that company.