These days, businesses are providing exceptional customer-centric experience to improve their bottom lines. Incorporating customer experience (CX) strategies help them promote loyalty, boost buyer satisfaction, and increase customer retention.
The better experience you provide for your customers, the more likely they are to continue supporting your business and share their positive feedback online. Companies that acknowledge the importance of creating and fine-tuning a CX strategy make them stand out from their competitors.
If you're unsure where to start or how to create a customer experience strategy, we've got you covered. Check out the infographic below to better understand the approach and to help you get started on developing a customer experience strategy.
The Importance of Customer Experience in Your Business
- A Competitive Edge
These days, businesses are putting their time, effort, and resources into delivering exceptional content that customers will find valuable and useful. While producing content can help improve your brand awareness and online visibility, creating a customer experience strategy is the key to helping your business stand out among the competition.
Research shows that 81% of businesses cite CX as a competitive differentiator. Customers no longer base their decision solely on product or service offerings and prices. Now, they also weigh the relationship they have with brands. If you want to connect with your customers, you need to understand and delight them.
- Better Customer Engagement
Customers often check out and put their trust in brands they already know. This allows both parties to nurture a healthy customer-business relationship.
Companies get to reach out to their existing customers with exclusive promotions or value-added propositions via email or social media. Meanwhile, customers share their positive experiences or reviews, letting businesses improve their offerings while keeping customers involved in the process.
Another example of better customer engagement practised in a CX strategy is through user-generated content. It's a fantastic way to engage customers and fortify brand loyalty, and for customers to pose as a brand advocate to other consumers naturally. Encouraging interactions like these can boost engagement and bring businesses and customers closer.
- Increased Customer Loyalty and Retention
About 57% of customers have stopped purchasing from a brand because a competitor delivered a better experience. In this scenario, you want to be the competitor that provides an exceptional customer experience. Evidently, loyalty is hard to come by, but also easy to lose. To retain clients and build strong relationships with them, you have to provide the best experience possible.
When people compare products and prices, they tend to remember their buying experience—from canvassing to communicating with the salesperson—longer than the product or service's cost. Businesses that provide extra value and personalisation through every interaction tend to get rewarded with loyalty.
- Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Aside from personal recommendations from friends or family, social media recommendations also influence people's decision to buy from or check out a brand. Word-of-mouth marketing has risen as a powerful tool for companies, encouraging their loyal customers to provide feedback and spread the word to others.
Marketers believe that 20–40% of their referrals come from word-of-mouth marketing. For many businesses, word-of-mouth is one of the most cost-effective ways to increase customer acquisition.
- Boosts Brand Equity
Brand equity is a marketing term that refers to a brand's value and worth as determined by customer perception and experience with the business. It's the added recognition or level of impact a brand name has on consumers and develops as a result of customer experiences with the brand.
Having positive brand equity entices customers and influences them to purchase from you instead of competitors who offer similar products or services. For instance, Apple is well-known for producing high-quality products that feel exclusive and meet customer expectations. People line up to their stores whenever they release new products or open new branches.
A 6-Step Guide to Implementing a Customer Experience Strategy
1. Promote a customer-centric company culture
The road to providing excellent customer experience starts within your company. Treat your employees like how you would want your brand to treat your customers.
When you nurture a customer-focused culture, your employees perform with the customers' satisfaction in mind, whether they are aware of it or not. When the leaders of the company practice this mindset, the rest of the organisation will follow suit.
2. Layout a clear customer experience vision
Enumerate a set of core values that will serve as your and the whole organisation's guiding principles to encourage a clear customer-centric vision. Set up reminders for your team so they can embed it into their work. When you establish these values in your company, it should echo your training, development, processes, and service.
3. Understand customers and their journeys
Acknowledge that there are different kinds of customers, and you have to know each of their needs to connect with them genuinely. You can segment your customers and build personas to help your customer service teams better understand, interact, and empathise with each customer's journey. This is how you can truly be customer-focused.
4. Let customer feedback lead your business to the right path
You'll never know how your customers feel about your brand and which areas you need to improve on unless you ask them. You can use surveys, live chat tools, follow-up emails, or outbound calls to capture feedback and insights that can help you improve your CX strategies for happier customers.
5. Establish an emotional connection with your customers
Customer experience is largely based on emotion. Customers grow more trusting and become loyal when they remember how they are treated every time they interact with a brand.
When you empathise with their situation and make life easier for them, especially when they're on a rough patch (e.g., when they need to cancel an item or cut a subscription due to budget constraints), they will remember how you treated them.
6. Measure the ROI from delivering great CX
Finally, you must set metrics to monitor, analyse, and adjust your CX strategies for better results. You'd want to look into your churn rate, net promoter score (NPS), referral rate, and customer satisfaction, among others. This is how you'll know if your efforts are paying off and where you need to improve.
Every Experience Counts
You shouldn't leave your customers' experience to chance. To establish loyalty, you need to treat them well and listen to their needs and wants. Putting them at the centre of your business is the key to make your business thrive, attract more customers, and grow a loyal customer base.
One way you can ensure that you're delivering outstanding customer experience is to bolster your customer service efforts. Select VoiceCom is Australia's premier call centre in the Philippines, offering professional call centre management services that can elevate your customer support. Visit our contact page to learn how we can help your business provide a better customer experience.
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