Companies are starting to realize customer experience is one of the most important, if not the most essential aspect of a business.
According to recent research, companies that are performing better with customer experience outperform those who don’t by almost 80 percent!
How are these companies perfecting the user experience and reaping the benefits?
Keep reading this comprehensive guide to discover seven essential tips you must know for creating a customer experience strategy.
- Understand Your Consumer
To effectively improve customer experiences, you must first understand your market and what they need from you.
In order to understand your customer, it is going to take some research. You can gather information on consumers a few different ways, including:
- Developing surveys
- Holding focus groups
- Demographics
- Using real-time data
- Gathering web activity
- Utilizing social media
- And checking contact info
After gathering the necessary data, its time to analyze the information to see what areas can be improved and what you are doing well.
This information is priceless and will give you insights about your consumer and their behaviors.
- Know Who You Are
As a business, it is just as vital knowing who you are as a company as it is knowing your customer.
For some, you may already know exactly who you are and what you stand for. For others, this may take some time to review the mission and vision statements to decipher what your company stands for and what you want to project it to be known as.
Think of companies like Apple, who builds technology devices. But if you ask anyone at apple what the product they sell is, the answer will be something like “with our innovative and beautifully designed devices we are changing the way people use technology.”
Year after year, people line up at the closest apple store to buy the new iPhone. This is primarily due to the fact that Apple knows who they are and what they have to offer. If Apple were like most other companies, they would just say we sell phones and computers.
If you need help understanding who you are as a business, taking a look at Simon Sinek’s TED talk on the golden circle could be an excellent place to start
- Research the Industry
Now that you understand your customer and your business, its time to study the competition.
This would be a good time to perform a SWOT Analysis to see what your competitors are doing that is working and what opportunities you have. A SWOT analysis consists of:
Strengths – Certain things your business is doing well that you consider to be a strength.
Weaknesses – Maybe what your competition is doing better, or areas that are holding you back.
Opportunities – Places of business that you could take advantage of or areas in the industry you believe you could do better than the competitors.
Threats – Potential factors that could harm or disrupt business.
Performing a swot analysis will give you a better understanding of the industry and determine where your company fits.
- Make It Unique
When considering improving upon the customer experience, there is no cookie-cutter approach that works for all businesses. It truly depends on the audience and what they need as a consumer.
By now, most of us have heard of social distancing, but companies should be doing more “social listening.” Gathering feedback through social media and utilizing it to benefit the customer, is a great way of personalizing the client experience.
A great example of this is the Canadian sports restaurant chain Wild Wings. Wild Wings regularly engages users on social media when they get a specific location tag. By tagging customers, Wild Wings is creating a bond with that consumer.
Friends and family members can see that he or she was tagged by the restaurant creating awareness around the brand while giving a personalized approach to the customer experience.
- Use Feedback
Gathering customer’s feedback will help you determine what is working and what isn’t. You may think you have an improved customer experience, but your consumers may say otherwise.
According to research from Bain & Company, 80 percent of companies believe they have “superior” customer service, while only 8 percent of customers agree.
It’s important to be on the same page as your consumer. A lot of times, what happens is these companies are generating great ideas and implementing them, but they are just not resonating with their customer base.
This is where you need to utilize customer feedback to improve upon these processes and develop a strategy that incorporates customers’ feedback.
There are so many ways to gather feedback from the consumer, including:
- Live chat
- Feedback forms
- Focus groups
- Calling customers
- Email surveys
- Monitoring social media
- Utilizing polls
- And offering incentives
Consumer feedback is critical to improving customer experience. Gathering feedback will help give your company a direction to go with and give you insights on how your strategy is working.
- Utilize Technology
Technology is taking over the customer experience industry and improving processes to make them more efficient and personalized.
Interestingly, 60 percent of consumers are more inclined to use a digital self-serve tool (such as live chat, mobile app, or website) for simple inquiries.
Utilizing digital experience apps can help your company potentially free up payroll hours and even improve the companies bottom line by harnessing the power of technology to work for them.
- Measure and Analyze
There is so much valuable data being collected each and every day. Many companies miss out on utilizing this data to help understand their customers better simply because they don’t know how to interpret the data given to them.
You should be routinely checking web analytics to see things:
- Average response time
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Resolution time
- And customer satisfaction
Along with these, there are certain metrics that many customer experience professionals will look at, including
Customer Effort Score (CES) – Used to show how much effort the customer gave to complete a transaction.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) – Used to determine how likely a customer is to recommend the product/ service to a friend.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – Used to determine the customer’s satisfaction.
Analyzing these metrics are an essential part of the strategy used to improve customer experiences. Professionals can take a look at these and determine what changes are necessary to improve the scores.
More on Customer Experience Strategy
These seven tips will give you the tools you need to develop an exceptional customer experience strategy. Keep in mind there are plenty of resources available to assist you and your goal of making your customers happy. For more quality information about web design and other helpful information, check out our blog!