What a customer thinks about your business and brand is no longer based on the quality of the product or service you sell. Today’s customer also considers the overall interaction with your company, including conversations with customer service, advertisements, social media posts that led them to your website, easy user interface on the website or e-store and even the communications they receive from you in the form of messages or emails.
These interactions, and many more, are a part of the customer experience you provide, which can dictate the way a customer views your brand. By providing a wonderful customer experience, you can not only gain a long-term customer but also earn great word-of-mouth publicity from them. Here are 10 ways to quickly ramp up customer experience for your brand.
- Provide Full-Time Customer Service
Customer issues don’t just happen during business hours. In fact, most customers might be using your website outside of their own business hours. Even during times, they should be able to talk to customer support if needed. If you can’t have an entire support team working throughout the day, try to implement chatbots that can help customers with some common queries.
- Offer Better Customer Service
Train your customer service team to provide impactful customer support. These interactions are a great way to connect with your customers and can be made more meaningful with a pinch of personalisation. This can be as simple as addressing your customer by their name instead of a generic sir/madam.
Have you noticed how certain restaurant managers make it a point to ask if you’re celebrating something during your visit, and then provide you with wishes and complimentary food or drinks to celebrate the same? Such attention to detail costs nothing but can gain long-term customer loyalty.
- Take Action On Employee Feedback
Customer service executives spend most of their time interacting with customers. They receive complaints, issues and other valuable feedback first-hand. While their main duty is to help the customers, they might be able to recognize patterns in these interactions.
Did several customers have trouble finding their shopping cart? Did a lot of customers not know how to make payments? Such insights can help identify aspects where you can improve your website.
- Use The Power Of Artificial Intelligence
AI tools like predictive analysis and chatbots can create personalized experiences for customers. Leverage these tools to create a more effective website experience.
For example, e-commerce stores like Amazon are using AI to predict products you might need based on your recent purchases. This not only drives more sales but also makes it easy for customers to find what they want.
- Reward Your Customers
Customer loyalty helps drive more sales. And customer loyalty can only be built by providing a good customer experience. With rewards or loyalty programs, customers feel good about getting rewarded for their purchase. Make these programs meaningful by providing lots of benefits or freebies for long-term and returning customers.
The Starbucks’ loyalty program offers their customers ‘stars’ that can be collected on each purchase. With enough stars, one can get free drinks or food. This would probably not work if the process of collecting the stars and redeeming them was a hassle. But Starbucks has made this an easy process with the Starbucks Rewards App.
- Step Into The Customer’s Shoes
Whether you’re the founder of a company, a software tester or a product developer, experience your product and website through the perspective of a customer and see the challenges one might face. Read through the website texts, go through the complete process of searching for a product and placing an order and focus on the practicalities. What might seem simple or basic to you might not be that way for the general public.
- Capture Customer Feedback Through Surveys
Conducting surveys is the easiest way to find out how your customers feel about your brand. Include leading questions with polls, ratings to find out problem areas about your website or e-store so that customers can finish the quizzes easily. While you’re at it, also include a blank text input so customers can elaborate on certain matters, if they wish to.
- Look At What Customers Are Saying Online
With social media, it is now extremely easy to gauge customer experience. Simple indications can be on the sheer number of such engagements you get. Customers talk about brands on social media if they either had a wonderful experience or a terrible one. Treat these as feedback and figure out what you might want to change or continue doing.
Also, if nobody is talking about your brand online, why is that? Have you made your social media handles public? Do you encourage your customers to post about you? Maybe it’s time to work on that!
- Have A Memorable Brand Identity
If your brand was a person, what kind of a person would it be? A fun-loving, quirky one, a no-nonsense, straightforward one, or someone who’s always got some sarcastic comments up their sleeve? This personality should reflect all over digital and offline media so that customers relate to this person.
Take Old Spice for example. Their ads, while marketing to men, have a certain sense of humour that can be seen in their tweets and Instagram posts. This persona is also significantly evident on their web pages, where they use funny, made-up words like ‘smellingness’ and ‘beardness’.
Looking for ways to enhance your customer experience strategy? Head over to https://thesoarmedia.in/ and get started.
