3 tips to ensure a successful customer experience strategy

Customer experience is an ever-changing aspect of every business. With the rapid adoption of social websites and mobile technologies in the past decade, customer expectations and their behavior are changing at a very fast pace. They have more choices available to them than ever before.

Businesses used to rely on marketing alone to increase their reach and sales figures. This approach is a centralized one, meaning that the business responsible for the goods and services was the main source of information about the product. However, this approach had a shortcoming: it completely disregarded what the consumers actually felt about the product.

What is Customer Experience?

Understanding customers is not an easy task. It requires insights into what motivates them, what makes them happy, and what annoys them. Listening to the customers and deriving quantifiable data from them is the key to understand how your customers feel about your product.

In short, businesses need to focus on the entire customer journey – from the need for a service or a product, purchase, use, and repurchase. Understanding what customers want has never been more important than it is now because if you don’t listen to them, there will be another business that does.

1. Multichannel support is key

Offering your customers a multichannel support system goes a long way. Customers in different age groups prefer different channels, and you need to be accessible through those channels: millennials often choose to contact support through online channels, whereas older generations prefer traditional ways. It’s all about convenience.

Offering multiple channels means everything will be faster as well. It essentially means serving more customers within the same time frame and if you implement a unified dashboard to process customer tickets, you’ll eliminate siloing, which is detrimental to the speed of your responses.

Perhaps the most beneficial of all, you’ll ensure a high customer satisfaction rate and build brand loyalty. Customers usually don’t tolerate bad experiences. Adopting a multichannel support system reduces the chances of that happening: no ticket goes unanswered, faster response times across the board, and you’ll offer an overall better support experience to your customers.

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2. Focus on Building Brand Loyalty

We live in an age of instant gratification: meaning that customers demand fast results, anytime, anywhere. No matter where the engagement takes place, you have to be there. As customer expectations rise, you need to up your game to match that ever-increasing demand and create great experiences for your customers. You need to identify their needs, analyze what the most convenient communication channel is, and build a loyal customer base.

It’s pretty evident why so many companies focus their efforts on CX – the long-term payoff is worth it. In brief, reliable and consistent support builds loyalty and increases LTV.

An experience of a customer is a predictor of what is to come. According to Harvard Business Review, customers who had the best past experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest experience. By providing consistent and positive outcomes to customers, they’ll anticipate the next engagement with your company will be just as pleasant, if not more. Thanks to the advent of new technologies and platforms, these customer interactions are more frequent than ever and this allows businesses to increase their brand awareness and customer loyalty.

3. Omnichannel communication will dominate the field

We’ve touched on the importance of staying in contact with your customers in a previous blog post, but we felt the need to outline it here as well, given the importance of it.

Direct contact with customers has been in decline for some time and it will continue to decrease in 2021. We now have a multitude of other channels available instead, such as various social media platforms. The flow of information on products is no longer controlled by the product page on the company website, but rather by social media and product review videos.

That said, maintaining a good social media presence is crucial for providing a great customer experience. You need to follow your customers wherever they go and engage them on those platforms.   This is a great way to take support requests, convey company policies, advertise your new products or even advertise the improvements to your products.

Much like last year, brands will thrive on social media if they do it right. The trick is being able to monitor and manage customer comments and take every message as a support request, this means reaching out to the customers proactively before the customer reaches out to you.

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