Customer Experience (CX) is simply the level of satisfaction and support a business gives to its customers throughout the whole buying process. It can either be a good or a bad one.
From research, one to three customers will most likely stop patronizing a brand after one bad experience. And that could cost your business a lot, especially if it’s one of your best customers.
This tells how very important it is to give buyers a positive customer experience every time they patronize you.
A good customer experience helps turn new customers into loyal and recurring customers. It also helps to keep old customers and inspire people to recommend your product or service even when you didn’t ask for it.
If you have been looking for ways to boost your customer experience to earn more loyal customers to your brand, the answer is in this guide.
How to improve customer experience
Here are must-know ways to improve customer experience:
1. Have a clear customer experience vision
The first step toward improving your customer experience is to have a clear vision of the kind of relationship you want to keep with your customers – what you have to do, the strategy to reinforce, and some things to avoid.
The perfect way to do this is to draft a statement that will serve as guiding rules and watchword for your business growth.
You have to also communicate this information with the members of your team and ensure that they all know it by heart.
If every team member follows the rules effectively, customers will have a good experience when in contact with any unit or staff member.
Also, having laid down principles will allow you to measure your business goal with its current performance.
2. Equip your employees with the necessary work tools and materials
Customer experience is often determined by how your members of staff attend to customers during the buying process.
Hence, one of the ways you will improve your customer experience is to provide your employees with the tools and materials that make it easier for them to provide the best service.
For instance, in a gym and fitness center, it’ll be impossible for employees to give clients a good customer experience by helping them achieve their fitness goals without the right equipment or facilities.
So, when employees are properly equipped, the chance of improved customer experience becomes higher.
3. Create an emotional connection with your customers
Research shows that customers buy based on emotions and justify with logic. Also, over 50% of customers’ experiences are based on emotions.
That’s why more than 85% of businesses that create a strong emotional connection with customers outperform their competitors in sales.
Hence, making customers connect with your brand emotionally is also one of the effective ways to improve customer experience.
Giving customers incentives after their first purchase, providing gifts or bonuses on first purchases for customers, etc are effective ways to get the emotions of buyers and achieve a good customer experience.
Furthermore, creating an emotional connection doesn’t always have to be giving discounts and gifts. It might be:
- “Thank you” email or call customers after purchase.
- Customer satisfaction surveys
- Special website packages.
A wonderful strategy to improve the total customer experience is to continue to make the consumer feel appreciated after each transaction.
4. Give your whole team access to customer experience data
It’s very paramount to let the whole team have access to customer experience information for proper monitoring. You have to let your team know about your new findings so that you can work together to optimize daily internal processes such as workflow automation, customer routing, and client tagging.
This helps brands to:
- Improve their product/service quality
Once the team can work together, you will be able to get an insight into how your product’s quality is affecting the overall customer experience. By having the customer experience team meet with the product team, you will be able to gather information on the usability of the product and work on the reviews.
- Address customers need faster
If your team has information on the areas where the consumers are likely to encounter problems, it will be easier for them to avoid customers’ annoyance and smooth over any issues in the customer’s buying journey.
5. Collect customers feedback
Customer feedback is very important for business growth and to measure the customer experience level. Customer feedback will let you know if your customers are really happy with the services you offer.
You can collect this information through live chat tools, follow-up emails, or direct calls. This information will let you know specific things to do to improve customer experience.
6. Implement the voice of the customer’s program
Voice of Customers (VoC) refers to customers’ feedback regarding their interactions with you and their expectations of your goods or services. It refers to the basic information collected from customers regarding the brand.
Also, it emphasizes the customers’ needs, wants, demands, and product improvements. Implementing the voice of the customers rallies around improving the quality of your products, and understanding the major requirements of the customers.
It also builds your brand’s credibility and shows customers that you have them in mind.
7. Consider customer experience with a UI/UX expert
UI/UX means User interface and User experience. UI/UX experts are in charge of providing a great interface for a website and in turn increasing customers’ experience. You can also consider hiring a UI/UX expert to make your website easy to navigate.
Research shows that 88% of customers never return to a site with a bad experience. This means that if your website lacks the user experience customers desire, you will lose sales.
To improve your site’s customer experience it’s thus very crucial to hire a UI/UX designer.
Conclusion
A good customer experience is the bedrock of every successful business. It helps a brand to keep having more loyal customers.
There are several ways to increase your customer experience, and, they all require having a good team to work with and making your customers a priority.
If your business suffers from good customer experience, I believe the tips above will go a long way for you.
