Customer experience summarizes all the interactions between a customer and a business, which involves activities such as service provision, discovery, initiation, and final purchase.
It starts with customer journey mapping which summarizes all the interactions that the customers have with your business.
The stiff competition for a few buyers makes it imperative for companies to invest in customer relations and experience.
According to the latest data, a significant number of companies compete based on customer experience. This article highlights some of the best five tips for enhancing customer experience that will help you drive customers to your business and keep the existing ones.
1- Create A Buyer Persona
Creating a buyer persona is vital to maximizing customer lifetime value. You must understand who your customers are, where they shop, and their unique tastes and preferences.
You also want to know what customers may be looking for when they visit your store. Understanding your customer motivations and gaining useful insights on how they interact with your business can boost sales over time.
In establishing a buyer persona, you can start by profiling your most frequent customers. Find out who are the customers that your team deals with every day. This way, you can get some useful insights from your most loyal customers.
Once you’ve gathered all the useful information from your customer care desk, you can now proceed to create a buyer persona using the data.
2- Invest In A Qualified Team
Your employees contribute a lot to making customers love or hate your brand. The reason is customers will always make the first contact with your employees. For instance, if a receptionist on the customer care desk is unfriendly or courteous to customers, they will not share their thoughts.
The point of touch between customers and employees must be welcoming if you want to boost CX. That said, a business needs to invest in a qualified team.
You can train your workers on customer relations to equip them with skills to pay attention to customers and make them loyal. Your team should learn what customers like and what they don’t like and personalize your brand’s customer experience.
3- Adopt Omni Channel Communication
Effective communication is essential to understanding customer needs. By adopting omnichannel customer support, you boost customer experience. The reason for adopting omnichannel customer support is to track all the links between customers and products you are offering. You want to understand better how customers can interact with your business and the type of feedback they give.
When customers contact your business, they always look forward to a swift communication. That means the customer should switch to different communication channels and still get the intended feedback.
For example, suppose a customer inquires about a product through email and leaves the conversation hanging. In that case, a new employee should pick up from the last point and proceed with the communication. With omnichannel communication, the customer does not explain himself every time they engage with the business.
As a business, you should collect preliminary information from customers through calls, online surveys, or automated post-interaction. You can use a survey tool like Jotform to create the best online surveys. Besides, you can call or message your customers to find out about their experience with the product you are offering. You gather a lot of information when you communicate effectively with your customers.
4- Create Emotions By Connecting With Customers
Customers remember a brand that treats them like family. You can easily recall a friend that offered you a gift on your eighteenth birthday or a company that offered you a free wall clock custom made with the brand’s name. Don’t forget the branding cycle and take care of the little things that a company does to its customers that count.
When you focus on creating emotions, you can easily retain existing customers and even attract more to your business. Ideally, in a recent Harvard Business Report, it is established that emotionally connected customers are more valuable than a satisfied customer.
For example, Mercato offered free delivery to customers aged 60 and above during the pandemic. This is a great branding move to enable people to remember your brand. A brand that cares for the people stays in the business for long.
Making customers think about your brand every time they shop easily converts them into loyal buyers. Therefore, you should focus on creating a memorable brand personality and emotional connection with your customers.
When it comes to customers, emotions play a significant role. Customers are human and emotional. Once you understand consumer behavior, you can quickly improve your customer touchpoints.
5- Enhance CX With Artificial Intelligence (AI)
You can use modern technology to personalize your content strategy and improve customer experience. As a company, you should take advantage of the many customers using the internet to shop.
If you have a website where customers can reach you, you can use auto-response for the most frequent question. You can also employ live- chat agents to respond to technical customer issues the auto-response cannot handle.
According to a recent survey, at least 6 out of 10 customers in the U.S prefer brands that use digital communication tools to resolve their issues because they are fast and effective. By being online, most customers expect immediate feedback from a brand, and once you adopt AI in your customer support, you boost their online experience with your brand.
Once you adopt AI in your communication:
- You can attend or respond to all customer inquiries so that none of them feels dejected.
- You will find time to reply to the most crucial issues that customers raise.
- You can limit response to the most frequent questions creating more time for your customer care desk to respond to other vital matters.
- You can send personalized marketing content to all customers on your email list and respond to all their questions on time.
- It is easy to retrieve previous interactions or conversations so that you improve customer experience.
Final Thoughts
Improving customer experience takes a lot of effort and time. When a company invests in creating better CX with the tips shared in this article, it can retain more existing customers.
Since most companies are now competing based on CX, every business must adopt the best customer experience strategies, like reducing waiting time, responding to customer inquiries on time, and ensuring employees understand customer needs.