Customer experience
What is it?
In meetings I hold, lectures, talks with friends, I hear a lot of answers:
Service, convenience, process etc.
So what is it really?
Customer experience is the sum of all the interactions a customer has with your business. Moreover, it’s the feeling customers get after all the interactions they have with your brand.
Yup, customer experience is a feeling. If you know this, you're already in a good place.
It's happening since the moment your client exposed to your service\brand until… forever. Yes, forever!
Customer experience is a never-ending story, even when the lead becomes a customer who bought something. We must keep them satisfied for them to buy again and tell friends about their amazing experience.
The better the experience, the better your business is. Let’s go through the interface points that most businesses operate on, and understand how they affect customer experience:
1. Creative. In intuitive way, your customer will judge your visuals, text, call to action etc.
2. Reputation. When it’s high, the customer experience starts in a great point. Think for a second. Before you’re contacting any business or product, what do you do? Looking for reviews? This will obviously affect your next step.
3. When you’ve already convinced your clients to look at your product\brand, they advanced and now they enter the sale stage.
It's changing from business to business, but if there is a lead nurturing process, it will improve the customer experience (and the sales process). Therefore, ask yourselves several questions that will help you move forward:
How much information does the customer receive about the product the product is selling? Sometimes there is too much information, and it confuses the customer. Sometimes there is a lot of information missing and no answer.
Availability: How available are you to the customer pre-sale?
Simplicity of use: How simple is the selling process for me?
There should be an easy and simple sales process, whether it is digital or physical. If I want to buy, don't stand in my way. We sometimes make insurance difficult, on the sales floor or with our digital assets.
4. Support and service after purchase.
Unfortunately, this is where most businesses I have worked with fail. The misconception that the customer experience ends with a purchase has penetrated too deeply into service providers and we as consumers feel it from all sides.
We need to fix it.
This point has the most effect on customer experience!
Upon first contact with customer service/support, the customer's experience is revealed in its entirety, and if it is positive, there's no better hype! We earn customer loyalty, increase 14 times the chance of repeat purchase by that customer, receive a tremendous boost to the reputation of the business (and to me, this is the most important thing) and more.
Bottom line: What do you gain from better customer experience?
Satisfaction – As researchers say, positive experience leads to satisfied customer. Satisfied customers become recommenders, and the more positive the experience, the more clients will recommend your brand. This will lead to more buyers.
Loyalty – Happy clients will return. If you enjoy the service, support (before\after), why would I go looking for other products? Customer experience creates loyalty.
ROI – If your customers are satisfied and/or return, you're able to generate more profit with less spending.
The cost of customer acquisition, the money you spend marketing your business, drops significantly because you have ambassadors. Loyal customers who return again and again to buy from me.
How do we measure customer experience?
You’ve guessed it, asking the clients. We have to give clients opportunities to give feedback as much as possible. Of course we don’t have to push it into every asset or SMS, but we need to hear them out.
It is common for customers who have a negative experience to tell friends and family rather than the business. Reputation is seriously damaged here.
When I was a child, there was a popular Shawarma restaurant whose napkins read:
Did you enjoy Tell your friends!
Did you not enjoy it? Tell us!
ABC’s of customer experience (thank you Yehuda Ouzi)
What do you do tomorrow morning?
1. Know the customer.
For you to provide a positive customer experience for customers, you need to know them. After all, everyone is special (the true paradox). Everyone has their own desires and requirements. You need segmentation, which allows you to build several customer profiles for whom you can provide a service or sell a product.
Even though it may not be possible to reach every profile, it will definitely help you learn as much as you can.
2. Full mapping of all your interface points with the customer.
The sales floor, digital assets, the call center, chat on the website or on Facebook, WhatsApp for service and sales, restaurant napkins.
Ultimately, the customer experience is where everything begins and ends. Good luck to all of us, both customers and business owners!
