Create Great Customer Experience for Your Business

When you are just launching your business, it can be difficult to know how you can cultivate a great consumer experience. However, in order to truly achieve success, providing your customers with a positive and memorable experience both online and off is a must. Ensuring a customer has great experience is possible even if you are just starting out as a new business, as long as you prepare.

A great shopping/purchasing experience as well as clear and effective customer service can even help mitigate negative experiences. If your customer must troubleshoot your product or has some issue with the way your product works, a helpful experience with customer service can change everything. Transparency and a rigorous approach to company policy are essential here. Below are a handful of tips to make your customer’s experience the best it can be.

Define Your Customer

Before you can deliver the best customer experience, you must first define who you are targeting. Define your target customer by considering the gender, location, and age range of your perfect consumer. Consider why you are targeting your audience and what your business has to offer them that others do not.

Emphasize your business’s unique products and/or strategy in your marketing and promotional materials. Be sure the needs of your customer base are represented in your company both inside and out. You cannot appeal to any given demographic seriously unless you employ members of that demographic and listen to them. However, it’s also important to keep your mind open. Listening to people outside of your key demographic might open up new strategies and markets to you.

Create a Customer Service Marketing Strategy

Once you are familiar with your target customer base, you can begin developing your customer service marketing strategy. Create a customer success journey map when devising your customer service marketing strategy. Determine how you intend to reach your customers and why you are choosing those platforms.

Are your customers most likely to visit your website or store by viewing an email, a social media post, a video, or an online ad? Knowing how your customer thinks and how they navigate the internet will come in handy when devising a customer service marketing strategy that delivers results.

However, designing a customer experience goes beyond marketing and customer service. It touches every part of the customer’s use of the product, from research to purchase to actual usage to troubleshooting. Therefore, you will want to design a strategy that encompasses how the customer moves from each part of their journey to the next.

Obviously there are key moments that should be emphasized, such as when the customer decides to order a product and their first experiences with it. In your surveys, you should include questions that emphasize those parts of the customer experience. Additionally, it can be important to emphasize how even small moments can lead to sales and positive feedback.

Elements that you take for granted in your process might be pushing customers away. It can be useful to have an external consulting firm look over your process to see what you can change.

Deliver Prompt and Courteous Service

When surveyed, customers say that the biggest problem that causes dissatisfaction is long wait times. Always provide prompt and courteous customer service, whether you are responding to an email, chatting with a customer in a live chat, or listening to a customer discuss your products in person. Train your employees to make customer service a top priority while they are on the job, ensuring they provide customers with a warm, welcome, and friendly environment at all times.

Helping to ensure the best environment for your customers means making sure your customer service employees and sales representatives feel cared for. The happier your employees are, the more likely they are to be helpful and friendly. Cultivate a culture of help within your company and your employees are sure to pay it forward to your customers.

Take Feedback You Receive Seriously

Always take the feedback you receive from your current and prospective customers seriously. Ask for feedback by sharing email surveys or by sharing surveys using your official website or social media platforms. Feedback from both new and loyal customers provides valuable insight into the overall satisfaction your customers feel with your business and brand.

Use the feedback you receive from your customers to better improve your company’s customer service along with the quality of the products you offer. Even positive feedback can also be tremendously helpful. For example, knowing how your customers found out about your company can help you know what avenues of marketing you should invest in, and even what marketplaces your product can reach out to.

Additionally, you can utilize the data you receive to see how your business is doing overall. The most common ways to measure customer satisfaction are through the CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) or the Net Promotor Score. Both take slightly different approaches: the CSAT has a scale that ranges from very unsatisfactory to very satisfactory, with net promotor score relies on a numeral scale, both provide systemic ways of measuring your customers experience.

You want to make sure that your questions are clearly worded and that the survey works in a consistent manner (i.e. keep your ratings consistently a part of the same numerical or symbolic system). Remember though that data, especially when it comes to subjective customer experiences, can only go so far. You should leave space for the customer to share their experiences through text and spend company time in both your QA and Customer Service departments looking them over.

By taking the time to get to know more about your target customers along with their wants and needs, you can deliver a top-notch customer experience with ease. Though this requires a thorough approach, if you are self-reflective each step of the way, and ground your design in listening to your customers, you are more likely to succeed. With enough preparation and a complete understanding of your audience, maximize your ability to deliver satisfaction to your customers at all times.

BizEducator