Your buyer’s journey from awareness to post-purchase impression sums up their total customer experience (CX). Putting this on top of the things to consider when planning your next marketing campaign will give your brand identity and reputation firmer foundations.
The best way to prove the quality of your products and services is to motivate your target audience to speak positively about your offer.
Customer experience is not just about customer service
Customer service is a process a business maintains to address questions and concerns from customers. It happens when the customer reaches out to seek support for their concerns about the purchase.
A customer service representative must be attentive and empathetic, providing real-time solutions and recommendations to address issues during the client’s journey.
Customer experience (CX), on the other hand, is the entirety of all the feelings, emotions, and impressions a brand has given its buyers. To create a positive customer experience, you must look at your business processes holistically.
You might use these terms interchangeably, but customer experience is the umbrella term for all the impact and values the company has added to the buyer’s life. One of the building blocks of CX is the customer service quality provided by the client-facing departments.
What makes a good customer experience
How do you ensure that you’re shaping a positive customer experience? Here are the best practices for your business.
Identifying the customer’s wants and needs
It’s essential to map your customer’s current situation to know their wants and needs in a product or a service. By doing so, you are building an understanding of and connection with your buyers.
You can start by creating a buyer’s persona. Imagine your customers have different personalities and demographics but want something similar from your company.
A college student, for example, needs an internet connection that can run their online lectures and modules simultaneously on a tight budget. At the same time, a business owner must stay connected through online conferencing platforms without interruptions.
A feature an internet provider can offer the college student is additional data allotment for academic sites that is right on budget. The other is offered a fiber connection package that caters to their online conferences all day long.
You can create various options that serve customers well by addressing their needs and wants. Paying attention to who your customers are will help your team provide an excellent customer experience.
Product and service development based on customer experience
Customer demands change over time, and for a business, this creates opportunities to grow and widen its scope. By listening empathetically, you can plan your business expansion centered around what the customer truly wants.
The product research and development team can use the data gathered from market research and buyer analysis, as well as customer experience metrics, to their advantage.
What the customer wants, their subjective perception of the brand, and what more they expect from the organization will create streams of ideas and solutions for the problem that the brand must solve.
Providing satisfactory customer experience every step of the way
Your customer’s journey does not end when they purchase your product. Customer service is holistic; it includes all stages of the customer’s buying process.
Start by presenting what your company is about clearly and concisely. Letting your customer know what you offer will help them set their expectations, which of course, you will meet through the quality of your products and services.
A high-quality customer experience also includes your brand’s reputation, and whatever your customer’s feedback may be, it becomes the public perception of your organization.
You must stick to the values the business is established from and deliver a customer experience that aligns with it. By being true to your business’s advocacies, you will gain loyal customers and attract more through recommendations.
Get your customer experience measurement tools at hand
When a customer writes a positive review for a brand, that is a sign of a great customer experience. However, if you are a business that operates on a larger scale, going through each feedback becomes a tremendous task. There are measurement tools available to analyze your customer experience ratings.
One of the most common tools companies use is the CSAT or customer satisfaction. It is measured through a survey of the customers after transacting with the brand. It rates the fulfillment a buyer receives in each transaction stage and sums up to an average CSAT score.
You can also use the customer effort score (CES) to help differentiate which customer interacts more. Net promoter score (NPS) hints at how likely the buyer will recommend your offerings, and time to resolution (TTR) measures how quickly a sales agent resolves a customer’s concern.
You can also use other platforms like social media to perform customer data analytics that tracks their preferences when visiting your brand’s page, making their first purchase, and returning for another order. By measuring customer experience, you gain valuable insights into the business.
What do you get when you provide a fantastic customer experience?
When summed up, exceptional customer service, impressive marketing, an efficient platform, and valuable products and services make up outstanding customer experiences.
Customers may forget about the specifications of the product, the key features, or anything alike, but they will not forget the emotions they felt during the entire experience.
You would know when you provide a fantastic customer experience when your product referral rate increases significantly. Word-of-mouth might be a traditional way of effective marketing, but it brings a great deal of revenue for the company.
The customer and their buying power are the lifelines of any company, and that’s why they should be at the top of a business’s marketing efforts. Knowing what the customer wants, using the right measurement tools, and continuous development collectively create a good customer experience.
