The times have changed, and they’re going to continue to change. In 1980, people would go to a local clothes shop to purchase a T-shirt. If you look online in 2022, you’ll discover millions of webshops offering the most exquisite T-shirts for a click of a button. As a result, customers have the opportunity to be selective. They now hold the upper hand in negotiations with the sellers.
Businesses have to work harder than ever to get new consumers, much alone maintain them. There are no longer any customers who will buy from a business merely because it has the best goods, the best price, or is the only one.
After completing the buyer’s journey, your customers will decide whether or not they want to return to your brand. Customer experience is the most important factor in retaining customers in today’s market.
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party. And we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” – Jeff Bezos, CEO at Amazon.
There are so many various stages, channels, tools, and stakeholders involved in the customer experience that it’s hard to figure out how to enhance it. What’s the first step?
Using this checklist, you can start the process of converting one-time clients into enthusiastic followers.
Customer service vs. customer experience
Customer experience and customer service are sometimes used interchangeably, thus it’s crucial to distinguish between the two. Even while they both have the goal of making consumers happy, they are not the same thing.
When it comes to customer service, it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing it online or at a physical location. Customer experience encompasses everything from customer service to product design to logistics to marketing to anything else that affects the buyer’s journey.
Although customer service is a critical component of customer experience (CX), it is just a small element of the overall CX.
Listen to what your customers say
There are a few things to take care of initially. Your consumers will enjoy an experience you provide if you know them well. Another common misunderstanding is that you can get to know your customers well enough without having frequent face-to-face interaction. You can’t be customer-centric if you make decisions based simply on your own preferences.
All teams that have an impact on the customer lifecycle need to integrate listening strategies. A customer satisfaction survey, monitoring the content of customer support tickets, or frequent interactions with your customers are all ways to acquire qualitative feedback.
Map your customer’s journey
Before you can help customers have positive experiences, you need to know exactly what their journey is like. Companies tend to concentrate on a few touchpoints (such as branding and customer service) while overlooking others, which may have a negative impact. When you map the customer journey, you have a bird’s eye perspective of the whole company and can never miss a beat.
Filling up a customer journey canvas might help you visualise the buyer’s journey. The five phases of the customer journey (awareness, consideration, decision, retention, and advocacy) are shown on a customer journey canvas.
The following are some implications of this:
- Customers’ needs: what are your customer’s requirements at each point of contact?
- Key moment: what does this specific moment look like for your customer? You can visualize this with pictures or screenshots.
- What actions can your team do to provide the greatest possible customer experience at every step?
Channel management
You know how to communicate with consumers now that you’ve sketched out their path. In order to provide a consistent experience across all channels, it is important to understand their distinct function in the customer’s journey. It doesn’t matter whether it’s your online shop, your live chat service, or your Facebook page; you should always strive to provide the best customer service possible. Rather of focusing on the channel, buyers just want to accomplish what they set out to do.
It might be tough to create a unified experience if your channels are dispersed over a variety of platforms. A good example of this is the multi-channel management required by customer care departments. Email and live chat have been joined by messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. Stock management software and webshop software are among the other tools they must use. When you’re constantly scrolling back and forth, you’re not spending enough time interacting with consumers.
For this reason, you must consolidate as many of your customer-facing channels as you can. A single platform should be used by all customer support departments, for example.
Collaboration across different departments
It is difficult to provide a high-quality experience across the whole journey. This is exacerbated by the fact that various teams are responsible for different sections of the process. Customer service should be as excellent as the campaign that a marketer has put up to bring in a new customer.
For this, you need cross-functional collaboration to break down team barriers and stay focused on the customer’s overall experience.
You may commit to this partnership in a variety of ways. Start by creating a customer experience team that includes representatives from every department that interacts with customers. It may guarantee that the whole company becomes and/or remains customer-centric in frequent meetings and initiatives.
Sometimes collaboration can be tough, especially when you don’t have the right tools to execute it. How many times have companies been in a situation where they are trying to improve their team collaborative efforts, but it falls apart because the right tools are not in place.
If you don’t know where to start, Rych is the platform that can help you improve cross-functional collaborations. Rych is a great platform as it also allows you to unify all customer’s favorite channels under one place. As a customer service agent, your team will be able to get on queries, assign them to other teammates and even jump on active discussions while you are talking to the customer.
This enhances your team efforts to provide a flowless customer’s journey, while making everyone more efficient in your team.
Inform others about your efforts
You should share your efforts to your customers now that you’re on the proper road to enhance the customer experience. Because just hearing isn’t enough – action is required.
Every team’s approach will be different, but it all boils down to openness in the end. Customer care, for example, will have to inform the customer in on their whole process: “You told me that your item hasn’t been delivered yet; I’m going to call my colleague for a status update and will get back to you by email before 2 PM.” It might be a regular newsletter in marketing: “Because many of you requested for product X, we decided to start manufacturing it.” “Place your order immediately.”
In the end, what matters is what your consumer experiences, not what you do to make them happy. You have the ability to shape their experience by speaking effectively.
Analyze the interaction
To know is to measure, yet the effort of measuring the complete customer experience may be overwhelming. You may measure a customer journey in three ways: the whole journey, distinct stages of that journey, and specific touchpoints.
With measurements like NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), the whole journey may be evaluated. NPS is a metric for gauging the likelihood that a client will refer your business to others. CSAT measures the level of satisfaction your consumers have with their purchase or service.
The basic purpose of each phase should be kept in mind while assessing individual stages of the trip. For each step, here are some metrics you may use:
- Awareness: number of visits, time on page
- Consideration: branded search traffic, direct traffic
- Purchase: Abandoned basket rates, sales conversion rate
- Retention: return visitors, number of conversations, customer lifetime value
- Advocacy: Net promoter score, customer satisfaction
Every employee should have access to these metrics and they should be updated on a regular basis. In the end, it’s all just a bunch of statistics. Creating a customer experience dashboard is an excellent place to start.
How to create a plan to improve your customer’s overall experience
Effective customer experience strategies begin with a thorough understanding of the customer journey, the development of customer-centric thinking and the use of the appropriate metrics to gauge the effectiveness of the plan.
