10 tips to improve the customer experience

Tips on how to improve the customer experience

As businesses have evolved, so have the customers, and in recent years, customer experience has garnered a lot of attention. In today's market, customers expect a personalised experience that almost feels effortless. The question is, how can the supplier of the service or product they require, achieve this? We will be going over what the customer experience is, followed by some useful tips that can help your brand build brand loyalty with your customer, so they are sure to stick with you.

What is the customer experience?

This experience can be defined as everything related to your business that can affect a customer's perception or feelings about your brand. There are many steps in the sales process that might influence this. Customers want the website to be intuitive, easy to navigate, and there to be as few steps as possible along the journey. If your client must click through several different menus before making their purchase, this can be quite frustrating for their experience, and if these are collecting information that the company thinks is necessary, perhaps look into shifting this process into email marketing, remarketing, in order to keep the sales process simple for your clients.

How to enhance the customer experience

Most businesses are unique, and unfortunately, this means that not all means of improving the customer experience are right for your company, but here are some general tips that apply to many organisations:

1. Understand your customers

If you want to sell your products, you need to know your customers need them, and why this is. Ask yourself how your company can fulfil the needs of your prospects and go from there.

2. Research your ideal customer experience

This is essential when creating a customer experience strategy as it informs your decisions. You are designing the experience for them, so think about how they would ideally want to interact with your brand, once you've figured this out, focus on delivering the experience you intend for.

3. Integrate self-service

Ideally, its beneficial on both sides when the customer has access to the tools, they need to help themselves. This can work in the form of online chatbots or FAQ pages on your web page.

4. Consider developing a customer experience management (CEM) program

This is designed to track customer interactions at all stages across the customer journey. It gives your more controlling and tracking capabilities at all points of contact. These programs have been shown to influence and increase brand loyalty and engagement.

5. Monitor and leverage analytics

Analytics has served as a mainstream method businesses can use to leverage the data they are able to collect. It isn't difficult to set up analytics and the data provides useful insights into the personas of your clientele.

6. Engage with your customers on social media

Social media channels aren't going anywhere, which is why most companies have adopted strong social media presences. With social media being so ingrained in many people's lives, it makes sense for that to be the first point of contact. This is where your brand will appear the most transparent too since your replies on posts or comments are available to be seen by anyone following your company.

7. Reward your most engaging customers

As loyal customers, they will always appreciate recognition for their customs and there are many ways to achieve this. First, you could consider offering loyalty programs that could result in discounts or promotions. This is one of the best ways to retain customers for the long term.

8. Improve and refine your customer experience strategy

We already mentioned some ways to create and optimise your initial strategy, however, it shouldn't stop there. On a routine basis, refine which elements are working the best in your strategy and which aren't. By doing this, you can test out similar strategies and see in real-time the effect each difference has.

9. Engage with current customers

Even after the sales process is finished, that doesn't mean you should go silent on your clients, be sure to keep their details up to date for further email marketing or take this as an opportunity to request a positive review based on their experience.

10. Create an emotional connection

The absolute best way to grow brand loyalty is to personalise the experience to a degree where the customer develops an emotional connection to your brand. They will share their opinions on your products with their friends or colleagues and your customer experience skills will be heard far and wide.

A good customer experience leads to customer satisfaction

It's important to remember that the customer experience is absolutely vital to exceed your customer's expectations and ultimately lead to customer satisfaction. To achieve this, the customer must perceive your brand or service as dependable, accurate, and provide the service they promise to the utmost degree. Satisfied customers will always be the foundation of any successful company, and it is shown that customer satisfaction can have a direct and positive effect on the organisation's profitability. If you want to see repeat purchases time and time again, this should be your focus.

At Zigaflow, we know the importance of being dependable to our customers, which is why we can schedule automatic responses using our automations module. We would like to help your business streamline its customer experience too, if you are curious as to know-how, book a demo with us today.