In short, customer experience unites a brand and customer around a single vision. It’s a commercially effective investment that improves their experience with your brand, resulting in loyal fans for years to come.
Here are six key ways to improve your customer experience strategy:
1. Personalise their experience
At the very basic end of the spectrum, brands can personalise their emails to show the customer’s name. This is great. What’s even better is when a business personalises content to its wants and needs.
Brands such as Amazon, AO, and Netflix understand the importance of personalisation. Netflix for example analyse your viewing history and provide you with recommended content. They do this by finding customers with similar interests, discovering the differences, and offering up those results.
2. Deliver a trusted experience
A consistent brand that delivers a great customer experience, is a brand that is trusted by customers. Your brand needs to be trusted before a customer commits to a relationship with you. The more you understand about a customer, the greater opportunity for them to understand your brand.
Some brands stand for something more than just profit. Others act in the best interest of their customers, showing empathy at a human level. They’ll do what they’ll say they’ll do by keeping customers informed. This makes brands look competent and extremely likable.
3. Exceeding customer expectations
To delight your customers and blow their expectations out of the water, you’ll need to start at the beginning and go on to the end: then repeat. Researching your customer’s expectations gives you insight into how to manage them. Reviewing those expectations provides strategies to exceed them.
To create customer loyalty you’ll need to satisfy and delight them. It’s fair to say customer expectations are a constant moving target, but if you effectively plan for this shift, you’ll be exceeding them every time.
4. Planning well for crisis
No matter how great a brand relates to their customers, if they don’t plan for failure, they’ll fail hard. From a sincere apology to exceeding their expectations, the little and big gestures go a long way. Whatever the outcome a brand decides, it needs to be executed with a sense of urgency.
A well-designed customer experience positions brands to effectively communicate with the right amount of empathy. It also makes sure each and every interaction thereafter builds trust, even if a crisis happens.
5. Time and effort
Reducing customer friction as they interact with you means they experience instant gratification with your brand. Customers that accomplish their objective show greater loyalty. Decreased time and effort means your brand has a cut-through competitive advantage, adding value to your overall brand experience.
The key to time and effort in customer experience boils down to reducing efforts that add no value. Secondly, make every interaction with your brand as minimally effective as possible. Your core aim is to ensure your customers invested time is (at the very least) pleasurable.
6. Being human and caring
Brands need to invest time in their customers to understand them. By taking ownership of their experience, you make them your priority, providing sincere emotional intelligence that responds to their situation. You should aim to see more than just their perspective.
Employees play a crucial role in facilitating exceptional customer experience for any brand: body language, tone of voice, appearance, and enthusiasm, to name only a few, are some key ingredients.