5 Top Tips To Cultivate A Stronger Customer Experience
We don’t need to stress to you how crucial your company’s customer experience is to the success of your business. As your customers are your direct line of revenue for your company, it is important that they are satisfied and that your content and offerings address and present a solution to their pain points. It is also vital that your company is able to cultivate loyalty and trust with your customers to strengthen your brand identity and foster continued growth and elevated performance in the future.
And the numbers speak for themselves.
According to a study conducted by the Temkin Group, a stronger customer experience can drive tremendous value to a company’s bottom line, helping a company increase their revenue on average by $823 million over a period of three years for a company with $1 billion in yearly revenues.
And in addition to happier customers helping generate marked improvement in profits for a company, unsatisfied customers on the flip side, will only add to your operational expenses. Therefore, happier customers means saving money and making more of it, too. Sounds good, right?
Ok, so let’s dive into some of our top tips for enhancing your company’s customer experience.
1. Happier Customers Start with Happier Employees
After all, who is serving your customers on the frontlines? Your employees. Therefore, it is important that your employees’ needs are being met and they feel empowered to drive more effective customer experiences. This begins with cultivating a strong company culture in which employees feel valued within the company and closely connected to the company’s overall goals. It is also crucial that employees feel that their contributions to the company are being recognized and matter to the ultimate success of the company.
Employees who feel valued and appreciated will be more motivated to work harder to better serve customers, address customers’ concerns and generally, be more incentivized to create a more effective customer experience. It is vital to recognize the importance of your employees who are directly interacting with your customers, as they will be able to provide beneficial feedback from customers and help your company gain a deeper understanding of your customers’ needs, wants, preferences and behaviors. By valuing employees’ key role in driving a stronger customer experience, employees will also be able to more effectively communicate and sell customers on your company’s offerings and solutions.
2. Create a Customer-Oriented Culture
In order to generate a more effective customer experience, it is integral that your company’s values reflect a customer-centric culture. Beyond the satisfaction of your employees, it is important to evaluate your managerial system to determine if your company’s leaders and managers are helping foster a customer-oriented culture in the company. Again, it is important that employees feel deeply connected to the satisfaction of customers and the overall success of the company no matter what their role is from intern to board member. Therefore, all of your employees should be motivated to execute their roles to the highest quality, and feel ownership over their responsibilities and contributions as well as accountability over them.
A customer-centric culture should be generated through the hierarchy of your company, top-down and reflected by your leaders’ interactions with their subordinates and coworkers. The ethos that should be adopted by your company’s employees is that customer experience is everyone’s priority or responsibility no matter their position, and ultimately a stronger performance on the behalf of employees will drive a stronger customer experience.
3. Value Customer Opinions and Insights
Successful companies appreciate the value of their customers’ opinions and see them as catalysts for gaining insights and a deeper understanding of their audience, overall. Your customer feedback and opinions will help you evaluate how well your company is serving your customers, and determine potentially vital takeaways that can inform how your company can drive more effective strategy and operations that will ultimately better satisfy your customers.
One way you can proactively engage your customers to generate valuable insights is through the creation of a customer advisory board. A customer advisory board offers you a direct outlet to your company’s most valued customers helping you potentially identify opportunities for improvement such as in the positioning and branding of your company, discover new channels of business and inform how your company can become more competitive within your industry and market.
4. Drive Open and Clear Communication With Your Customers
Having clear and effective communication with your customers is key. If a customer hops onto your site, sends in a query and feels as if it is being sent down a black hole of oblivion to be forgotten about for all time — that is obviously a major problem. Customers want responses quickly. They need to feel that their needs and concerns are being valued and addressed, and that they can easily have access to someone in your company to help them with their query. If they open a ticket, they don’t want to deal with the frustration of waiting in a queue for hours.
Set up a system with your customers that is designed to foster effective and efficient communication. Provide a contact number, so they can easily reach someone in your company to help them. Integrating live-chat functionality on your site is one way to ensure that you can quickly communicate with customers to address their needs. Also, efficiently responding to customer’s comments on your social channels will help turn engagement with customers into opportunities to improve your customers’ relationship with your company, drive enhanced customer loyalty and potentially generate elevated customer conversions.
5. Integrate a Strong Customer Experience through All Channels of Your Business
While a strong customer experience on the frontlines of your company is of course essential to your company’s success, keep in mind that a strong customer experience does not end there. It is important that you are integrating an effective customer experience throughout all the channels of your business, from your products and offerings, to your website content and your customer’s user journey.
Run a content audit to evaluate its efficacy in addressing your customer’s pain points and to determine if your content is providing relevant, up-to-date and valuable information to your audience. Maybe, you need to more closely examine your email marketing to ensure that it too reflects a cohesive brand voice that is effectively communicating with your audience. Are there gaps in your email marketing that you need to fill to make sure you are serving your customers at every point of their customer journey? Take a look at how fast your webpages are loading and evaluate the overall website user journey your website is generating for your audience. Maybe, there are improvements you can make in the functionalities of your site, as well as content that will ultimately be invaluable for driving a more effective customer experience.
Yes, customer experience truly is everything to your business, but you know you don’t have to do it alone, right? If you have questions or want to address your company’s concerns for building a stronger customer experience and then put your vision into action — partner with us experts at Firon Marketing. We will help you level up your customer experience and make sure that it is effectively driven through your entire business.
