Businesses today depend on their customers more than before. Having a great product or service won’t generate revenue by itself because there are other competitors who might offer the same level of quality. But if you can provoke a positive feeling when customers interact with you — your brand might stand out!
Customers are the ones deciding where their money is going to be spent, so you need to increase your chances by bringing value to them.
In this article, we’ll talk about the importance of customer experience and how to understand what needs to be improved. We’ll also include tips on how to use content to your advantage, as well as how different tools and platforms can boost your customer’s experience.
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What is customer experience and why is it important?
Customer experience has a lot of different elements but simply put, it’s how customers perceive your brand and how they feel when interacting with you. Great ideas and products can be put to waste if your customers have trouble understanding how they work, or if they encounter a lot of bugs.
Impacting customer perception of your brand is one of the most important things. Everything a business does has some influence on the overall experience — the way you present your company in public, what messaging you’re using, how you approach customer support, the journey the customer takes through the sales funnel, etc.
The importance of customer experience is backed by a recent survey in which 86% of the respondents claimed they’re willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Customers know they can go to your competitors, so it’s crucial to show them how you value them and can bring something better to the table.
To help you improve the experience of your customers, we’ve listed a few things that might prove to be beneficial.
#1 Understand who your customers are
Understanding your audience and designing a user persona are important in order to create a positive experience for your customers. It allows you to figure out what type of content and messaging they care about, helping you improve their overall experience. After you decide what to say, the next thing is to determine how to say it. This means, defining your voice brand and tone of messaging.
Try to put yourself in the position of your average consumer. What are their goals, needs, problems and desires? When you know what the fears and wishes are, you’re able to bring a solution to their problem. If predicted and done the right way, it can sometimes seem as if you’re reading their minds.
When you have your customers feel like you understand them, they’ll be more likely to trust you and possibly become regular customers. If you’re able to present your brand as someone who understands them you might be able to get more leads, customers and referrals.
To better understand your customers you need to listen to their feedback, which brings us to our next tip.
#2 Listen to valuable feedback
The best way to understand how customers perceive your brand is by listening to their feedback. It also helps guide you to improving the overall customer experience. That’s why it’s imperative for you to ask, collect and analyze the feedback in order to build a successful experience.
Gathering feedback can be done through multiple channels. Social media, emails, live chat plugins, chatbots, call centers are all great for getting feedback. You can have your employees ask for it after any type of communication. This helps you understand the level of satisfaction customers have.
In the case of retail and e-commerce, feedback can be gathered by placing QR codes inside the stores and on the shipped products. QR codes are safe and can be easily generated using one of these best QR code generators.
In order to improve the experience of your customers, it’s important to implement changes according to the feedback you’ve collected. Knowing what they like, dislike, enjoy or hate will help you make changes that will result in creating the best possible product.
While you are gathering feedback, you also show them that you value them and their opinion. You also show that you want their help to bring them the best possible solution tailored for their needs.
Feedback is easily the best way to know how to create an experience in favor of your customers. If you’re just getting started, consider outsourcing customer support to help you out.
#3 Create valuable content
Content marketing has always been a great strategy for both attracting more customers and keeping the regular ones. Publishing content that provides value to your customers will make them feel closer to your brand. That’s why it is highly important to constantly improve your writing skills and keep track of the latest content marketing trends.
Using feedback, you can understand what type of content you should create. This will allow you to provide them with content that’s relatable and can show them that you understand their needs.
Knowing that you regularly come up with useful content might make your users more likely to interact with you more, becoming an engaged audience. Being consistent in content creation and experimenting with content formats might even result in creating a loyal following. For example, running visual marketing campaigns is a great way to better understand customer psychology and make your future content even more targeted. Your customers will learn you have the answer for their problems and might even start reaching out to you.
Some of the best types of content are useful tips and lists. Include images and videos in your articles, as they are more attractive for readers. Also, you give a more complete picture of a certain topic. The audience enjoys this kind of content as it is helping them solve their problems. They might value you as a great source of information that will boost their experience with your brand.
Creating industry-specific webinars to educate your customers is another smart way to get your customers engaged. It’s really taking the video content to another level, making it live, interactive and educational.
Try to think of problems your customers encounter and provide them with a list of possible solutions. Tips on how to use a certain feature of your app, or how to handle a specific task on your website. Also, include tips on problems that aren’t about your product or service, but are closely related to your business and its audience.
If you want to take things a step farther, begin building a podcast that can both show your expertise, and also help your audience better use your platform or service you offer. An extra bonus is that you may end up also getting new customers from this content channel as well.
Having a complete service, from selling a certain product that helps your customers, to offering tips and advice on how to solve their problems can create a more pleasant overall experience.
#4 Work on having an impeccable customer support
To have a great customer experience, you need to become customer-centric. Brands that are customer-centric are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t favoring their customers as much.
To improve your customer experience, your focus needs to be more on customers so take special care of every interaction with them. You probably engage with customers on different channels such as emails, social media, live chats, etc., so make sure your employees are patient and familiar with all the parts of your product, service and customer support workflows.
Maintain a high level of communication that will keep customers satisfied even when you don’t have a solution for their problems. Showing that you care adds to the improvement of customer experience. You can go for customer support tools that can help you communicate with your customers better. Using the best customer portal software can enable you to provide customers with great experiences and keep them coming back.
Even the little things are important, such as being timely. The lives of modern humans are so sped up, that most of us don’t like to waste time. Users became impatient, so if you take longer to answer the phone, or they can’t even find your number on your website with ease — they will jump into the hands of your competitor.
To create a positive customer experience you should work on even the smallest of parts. Having a real person talk to customers often beats the live chat or social media channels. You can help customers reach you quickly by adding a “call us now” button to your website that will speed up the process and improve the overall customer experience.
Also consider using a call center software to handle customer queries effectively and seamlessly.
#5 Build an effective omnichannel presence
To have a great customer experience, you need an omnichannel strategy. Especially in the banking industry, it is important to implement an omnichannel banking strategy as it enables to build a transparent and seamless experience for customers via multiple channels, which leads to customer satisfaction and an increase in revenue. You need to have a cohesive identity because customers will likely approach you using different channels. They might find about you on social media, but decided to google your website, instead. This means that any irregularities considering information, design, messaging and similar might seem suspicious. Thus, lowering the experience of your customers. Contact center trends also play a significant role in shaping the omnichannel experience. With advancements in technology, customers expect seamless transitions between channels and personalized interactions. Incorporating AI-driven chatbots, voice assistants, and efficient call routing can enhance customer engagement across multiple touchpoints. Moreover, monitoring and analyzing customer interactions across these channels can provide valuable insights for continuous improvement.
Customers agree — 90% of consumers expect an omnichannel experience without any difficulties. If your interactions with customers aren’t similar on every channel could seem weird to them.
An effective omnichannel strategy revolves around cohesiveness, so if customers connect with your brand through one medium, they must feel the same experience when reaching out to you through some other channel that they might prefer more.
Wrap up
The success of your business is intertwined with the ability to provide a positive experience for your customers. It’s not as easy as before when the market wasn’t as competitive.
Having a great idea or a product isn’t enough. A big part of your success is how you influence customers to perceive your whole brand, as a package. Analyze your customer experience and figure out what needs to be done to improve. It’s necessary to define the target groups and gather their feedback.
Research and learn their needs, behaviors and habits, and build a strategy to improve the experience for your customers. However, keep in mind that creating a great experience for your customers is not a walk in the park. It may take time to get to a higher level, but these tips will give you a great head start!
