A business cannot exist without its customers, and this is why companies are focusing on how to win new customers and perhaps more importantly, retain existing ones. Providing an exceptional customer experience is important to the success of any business. Hence, inculcating such strategies that can help improve the efficacy of customer service can prove to be highly beneficial. Have a look at some of these customer experience strategies and leverage these to gain customer satisfaction and loyalty:
Set guiding principles to enhance customer experience:
You should start up with creating a clear customer-focused vision. For this purpose, you need to set guiding principles. Once the principles are set and discussed with the organization, they effectively drive an organization’s behavior. All the members of your organization should be familiar with these principles. It is preferable to embed these principles into all areas of training and development.
Understand your customers:
As mentioned earlier, in order to gain success as a business, it’s really very important to understand the customers. This strategy can help achieve the best outcomes by creating customer personas and providing each persona with a name and personality. This will help your customer support team to recognize who they are and understand them in a much better way. Moreover, this will help in becoming truly customer-centric.
Engage with your customers on an emotional level:
According to a research conducted by the Journal of Consumer Research, more than 50% of an experience is based on an emotion. The reason? Emotions play a crucial role in shaping the decision-driving attitudes. The reason behind customer loyalty is an emotional attachment. The customers remember how they feel when using a product or service which eventually leads to an emotional bond. Researchers prove that a business that optimizes an emotional connection outperforms competitors by 85% in sales growth.
Make use of post-interaction surveys:
Making use of post-interaction surveys is a highly efficacious customer experience strategy. A variety of automated tools can help deliver these surveys through email and calls. Moreover, outbound calls can be made to the customers to gain more insightful feedback. You can further tie customer feedback to a specific customer support agent in order to show every team member the difference they are making to the business.
Focus on consistent team development programmes:
Post-interaction surveys help you know what customers think about the quality of your service compared to the customer experience principles you’ve defined. Organizations can use these surveys to identify the training needs of each individual member of your customer support team. Apart from assessing the quality of phone and email communication, a quality framework can help take this assessment one step further by scheduling and tracking your team’s development through coaching, e-learning, group training and other such techniques.
Utilize continuous employee feedback:
Continuous employee feedback is yet another customer experience strategy that can help improve the efficacy of customer experience management system. It can play a vital role using tools that allow staff to share ideas on how to improve the customer experience and for managers to see how the staff is feeling towards the business. Project management software or social media tools help create a closed environment where your organization can leave continuous feedback.
Measure the ROI:
Net Promoter Score or NPS is used to measure the ROI based on customer experience. It collects valuable information. Net promoter score is a highly suitable benchmark for a customer experience metric. The reason? Well, that’s because a lot of companies utilize it as the standard customer experience measurement. Since it is simple to implement and measure, NPS is a favorite with company boards and executive committees.
Leverage these strategies and show your employees and customers that you care!