What is customer experience? How does it matter for your brand success?

As you scale your business, you would be growing your clientele, right? So how do you plan to sustain this expanding customer base? It’s your customer experience that shapes their sentiments and keeps them hooked to your brand.

Customer experience involves a spectrum of interactions you have with them. Based on the quality of these interactions, they decide whether to continue sticking to your brand. It encompasses several parameters like resolving their problems, answering their queries, and coming up with innovative solutions to their demands. Nurturing a healthy relationship with your clients calls for a positive experience.

Simply defined, customer experience defines how you treat or value your customers. When they feel valued, they tend to gratify your brand by sticking to it. Otherwise, they would switch to your competitors. In a world of competition, every brand would strive to improve its customer experience.

What makes customer experience important for your brand?

A better customer experience works well for both your clients and the brand. According to a survey, around 56% of businesses are working to enhance their customer experience.

Here are the benefits of enhancing the customer experience for your clients.

• More chances to retain your customers
• Better customer lifetime value
• Stronger brand image and loyalty
• Improved reputation for your brand
• Competitive advantage in the industry

 The feelings and sentiments of your customers about your brand are directly connected to customer lifetime value, retention, and brand loyalty. So, if you focus on delivering a better customer experience, they are likely to come back to your business. According to 81% of customers, a positive experience motivates them to make another deal with the company.

When you compete with other brands in the digital business infrastructure, it’s not easy to acquire new customers. So why not focus on retaining your existing clients by enhancing their experience? Without a powerful customer support team, you might lose your existing clients.

Remember, 61% of your customers are likely to switch to a different brand after a single poor experience. With two such incidents, 72% of your customers would cease dealing with you. This explains why customer experience matters, and how you need to come up with a unique experience for your clients.

How can you improve your customer experience?

The secret to improving your customer experience is to strategize your policies by placing the customers in the limelight. Here are some tactics that should help you enhance your customer experience.

1. Come up with feedback loops

Feedback from customers provides valuable insights into the expectations of your buyers. Accordingly, you can tweak your tactics to fulfill their needs. Once you know where your customers are facing a problem, you can sort them out.

So, you need to strategize a feedback loop involving customers. When you work on the feedback, you would be addressing their issues. Moreover, every organization should create an internal loop for employee feedback. For agents, there should be a provision for combining and sharing this feedback. In the process, you will be able to identify the pain points. Maybe, your current system has certain policies that aren’t working well for your customers. Resolving these issues would help you foster a better customer relation.

2. Come up with an omnichannel approach

Customers hate repeating the same story while communicating with your agents time and again. Also, if you have multiple channels of interacting with customers, it becomes challenging for your teams to communicate. Therefore, brands should work on delivering a holistic omnichannel experience to their clients. This ensures a consistent journey, where the context of conversation gets transferred to the desired channel. 74% of customers expect your agents to be informed about the context of their inquiry.

So, an omnichannel approach will help your agents get an idea about the previous interactions of the company and the client. Regardless of the channel that the customer used previously, the agent would be informed about the context.

This explains why successful companies are investing in customer service tools with omnichannel routing features. This enables the system to share tickets across emails, chats, phone calls, texts, and other channels. Besides, the system can prioritize tickets based on the capacity and availability.

3. Offer personalized experience

The Trends Report states that 68% of your customers might be expecting customized experiences from your helpdesk. When you try to satisfy your clients and retain them longer, there’s no alternative to personalizing their experience. This makes them feel valued, and this is exactly what successful brands do.

•       Here are some guidelines that may help you personalize their experience.
•       Engage with your customers through the channel they prefer
•       Examine their search and purchase records to recommend suitable products
•       Publish FAQ and other personalized content to assist your clients

Customers have different personas, so you need to deploy smart analytic tools to identify these and craft your support strategies.

4. Be proactive with your approach

Do you know how successful brands remain at the top while dealing with unhappy customers? The secret lies in being proactive with your approach. This way, you would be better poised to identify potential problems that are likely to show up. So, before the issue crops up or escalates, you can have the damage-control tactic in place. This would also enhance transparency and build customer loyalty for your organization.

For instance, you need to be proactive while dealing with breakdowns, technical issues, and other problems that can show up. Once you inform your customers about these probable problems, they would be in a better position to cope up with them. For instance, you can use a chatbot on your eCommerce website that would answer the questions of shoppers before they leave items on the cart.

5. Use AI and analytics

AI can significantly leverage your customer support desk by handling tickets without human intervention. A survey reveals that the increment in ticket handling by AI increased by 53% between 2020 and 2021. These chatbots, powered by AI, serve as virtual assistants for customers. They take care of the repetitive tasks and save your time. Besides, these bots instantly respond to the queries of your customers. However, when the issue calls for human intervention, you can quickly entrust an agent to handle the issue.

Using smart technologies like AI and analytics can also help you detect trends of customer behavior and work on the interactions. Moreover, deploying analytics can also provide you with a detailed insight into the requirements of your clients and their demands. All these measures go a long way in enhancing the experience for your customers.

Conclusion

Before winding up, let’s take a look at how you can assess what your customers feel about your brand.

• Evaluate measurable data such as customer lifetime value, churn rates, time-to-resolution metrics, reopen rates, etc.
• From time to time, carry out A/B tests and dispatch emails to targeted segments of your customers. In the process, you can collect information on how your CX assets have been performing.
• Convert your community or blog into a virtual focus group. Here, encourage your customers to talk about their pain points. They can also come up with requests for new features, which you might consider obliging.

These guidelines will help you enhance your customer experience. Deploying the right set of analytical tools and empowering your customer support team hold the secret to leveraging your customer experience.