How to Better a Customer Experience

Do you want to deliver a better customer experience?

How customers feel and react to your company is vital for long-term success. Whether they’re new or old, they want to feel valued and treated as individuals, not numbers. But with so many experience-boosting strategies out there, it can be hard to know where to start.

Don’t worry! Read on for our guide to providing a better customer experience today.

Put Together Your Customer Experience Vision

The first step is to have a clear, customer-focused vision you want to tell your audience. The easiest way to achieve this is to create a set of statements that will act as your guiding rules.

With these guidelines in place, it will be the driving force for your company’s behavior. Employees know what message they should be giving off and everyone is on the same page.

Make sure every team member knows your guidelines and takes them to heart. You want to embed it in every aspect of training and development.

Understand Your Customers

The next step is to understand in detail the types of customers you have. This is what will help you nail down how you respond to customer needs and wants. It’ll also help you empathize with their situations and connect on a more human level.

To do this, segment your customer base and create customer personas. Try to give each one a personality and a name. For example:

• Jane is a 30-year-old who loves new technology and can navigate features like video tutorials alone.
• John is a 56-year-old who isn’t as tech-savvy and prefers written step by step guides.

These personas help your customer support team understand who your customers are. It makes it easier and clearer for them to know how to help. When looking to be customer-focused, this is a huge step to follow.

Boost Customer Satisfaction with Personalization

Every way your business interacts with customers matters to customer satisfaction. But only making sure your business services are customer-friendly isn’t enough anymore. You need to go above and beyond to make customers feel valued and appreciated.

Personalized communications is a great way to achieve this. You’re proving you recognize them as an individual and you appreciate their custom.

If a customer can see a business going out of their way to recognize them it makes them feel important. This is a huge boost to customer satisfaction. We all want to feel important and like we matter, don’t we?

There are many ways you can go the extra mile with personalization, but here’s an example:

Appreciation Emails

Appreciation emails are a small, automation-friendly gesture that goes far with customers. Thanking a customer, with the individual details, builds rapport, trust, and appreciation. But make sure it’s relevant to the customer and the action they took.

It shouldn’t seem like the usual mass marketing email, as people aren’t likely to open it or read it. It needs that personal touch to seem as though it’s written only for them.

Record Customer Feedback as It Comes in

To be able to boost your customer experience, you need to know what you’re currently offering. Finding out what customers currently think, shows you the areas where you’re excelling. You’ll also find areas where you need to improve.

Your customers will tell you what they want to see from your customer experience. You only need to listen to them. And to do this, you need to capture customer feedback as it’s coming in.

Use live chat tools to have a real-time conversation with the customer. Afterward, send over a follow-up email using customer service surveys.

Feedback is what will help you grow into a most customer-focused business. Show customer-facing teams this feedback so they know the difference they’re making. A motivated team will want to deliver higher customer service.

Keep Language Positive

When customers have an issue (and they will), stay positive with your language to defuse and put them at ease. Your words are powerful and can be what builds trust between you and your customers.

Use verbs in a positive way. Using future tense is also more positive, as it’s not dwelling on current or past issues. It moves customers forward. Using phrases like “Great question, let me find that out for you” keeps them in the present, not going back to the past.

When you’re speaking with customers, be authentic, positive, and memorable. Even in a heated situation, remain calm and positive. You’ll have more chance of turning the situation back around in your favor.

Make Use of Regular Employee Feedback

Most businesses will use an annual or biannual survey for staff feedback. This where you can find out how engaged your team is and what level of service they’re delivering. You can also find out where they think the business can improve to give better service to customers.

By letting them see their opinions and ideas matter, it’ll bring the team closer together. Employees will feel included, and managers can see how staff feel about the business as a whole.

Create an open, encouraging environment for staff to share ideas. Each employee is an individual who thinks differently. If you don’t make use of it, you’re wasting a pool of potentially great ideas you might never think of on your own.

Measure the ROI From Better Customer Experiences

Coming up with these ideas and putting them in place is one thing. But you want to know what’s working best, and what is giving you the best returns for the costs in time and money.

To do this, you need to measure business results. The most popular way to do this is to use your NPS (net promoter score). It works by collecting information on one question:

Would you recommend this company to your relatives or friends?

People care about their friends and relatives’ experiences as much as their own. So this metric is a good way to measure your customer experience. It’s easy to put in place and measure, which means it’ll be easy to report on at the end of each month.

It Pays Off to Have a Better Customer Experience

So there you have it! If you follow this guide, you’ll be well on the way to creating a better customer experience.

But remember, it’s easy to read a guide, the hard work will come from implementing it. The more you communicate and work to build a trusting, human relationship with your customers, the better your customer service can be. To improve relationships with customers, you can go for programs like voice of customer which helps to get their feedback regarding the particular products or services.

If you found this article useful, check out our other blog posts today.