Businesses’ approach to tempting new customers for buying their products has evolved a lot over the last few years. In the past, it was easy to sell anything that was affordable and of high-quality. Well, in modern times, that has changed and we all know it will also continue to change in the days to come.
Today, customer experience has become an element that is more important than product or price, when it comes to the consumer’s buying decisions for satisfying their needs.
In Walker Info report it has been noted that within the next one year (by 2020) customer experience will replace product and price as a key driver behind consumers’ decisions on whether or not to purchase a product or service.
Therefore with so much competition in the marketplace, it is much more easy for customers to leave you for a competitor that prioritizes on customer experience for the buyers of their offerings.
Below we will dive and dig into the importance of providing a world-class customer experience and how it can benefit you for your business growth.
Why is customer experience so important?
As in 2019, millennial(s) are becoming the biggest consumer demography in the US; all businesses will see a drastic change in their customer-vendor relationship. For now, if consumers are unhappy, they can easily ruin your brand’s reputation by spreading venomous comments across a plethora of social media channels on the internet.
Therefore, with customers having so much of choices when making a purchase, creating a reputation as a customer-centric brand is most crucial, as if you do not, consumers will buy from your competitors that do.
Consider these statistics, to drive home the importance of providing your customers with world-class customer experience:
• With stellar customer-experience, an increase in customer retention rates by a mere 5 percent can increase profits by 25-95 percent.
• It costs five times more to get hold of a new customer than it takes to keep holding on to an existing one, and it is only a great customer experience that can generate loyal customers and reduce customer churn.
• Because of bad customer experience, 95 percent of customers say they have left or have taken action towards a brand.
• 86 percent of customers will be ready to pay 25 percent more for an offering from a brand that delivers excellent customer service to its consumers.
Hence, you see if you want to remain competitive in your industry and make the wish for your business growth come true, delivering stellar customer experience is now the baseline standard for all successful businesses.
Here are a few best practices and tricks for delivering excellent customer experience for business growth.
1. Stay in constant touch
Reach out to each of your customers individually to check how things are going on a routine basis, which you can easily do using your best small business CRM software and ask them what you could do to improve upon your services.
Make use of campaigning functionality in your easy to use CRM software to create a survey and ask your customers if they need any help from you that they presently do not have.
This outreach can be done with the help of phone calls to make the interaction more personal.
Performing this type of regular outreach makes the customers feel them as your valuable partners, that you truly consider their opinions, and you are ready to do anything you can to improve their experience with your brand.
Always remember that once you have planned changes based on their feedback, communicate to your customers that you are making the changes they asked for, since this will win big points for your organization’s reputation and also ensure that your customers are satisfied with the experience that you provide to them for their loyalty towards your brand.
2. Deliver stellar customer support
Customers form their opinions of your ability to deliver stellar customer experience based on several variables.
This includes how accessible you are to them, the contents your marketing teams provide, interactions with your sales and support reps that shows empathy, and the list goes on.
However, the most important among all these factors is the quality of customer support, which is the one that provides the greatest impact on the customer’s perception of your brand.
Hence here are some of the most helpful tips for maintaining a powerful customer support presence of your brand in the marketplace.
Provide multi-channel support
If customers are made to wait, when they need assistance it is natural that they grow increasingly impatient and frustrated.
Therefore use Chatbots for providing your customers 24 hours support and Live-agents for providing support during the working hours to field more complex questions.
Apart from this, you can also use the telephone and email for those customers who prefer these modes of communication.
Finally, if you are using your best small business CRM software for increasing customer experience with your brand, you should also integrate social listening and social media monitoring tools to receive alerts when someone mentions about your brand on social media websites.
It has been observed that people are increasingly asking support questions on social media. Therefore, it is important that you must respond to these questions quickly with the help of these tools, which results in delivering stellar customer experience to your consumers in the marketplace.
3. Increase the rate of FCR
FCR or Fast Contact Resolution rate refers to the incoming help desk support tickets that your support reps can resolve on their first try.
The easiest way to boost your FCR rate is by hiring or training top talents in your organization to manage your support efforts or create dedicated help desk groups (support groups that are specialized in a specific product, services or any other areas of your business) to ensure that your customers receive superior customer experience every time.
4. Make employee satisfaction a priority
Employees who are happy working in your organization cares more about your customers, and go that extra mile to support them to resolve their pain-points, which eventually help deliver excellent customer support.
Therefore, create employ survey programs to measure the satisfaction of your employees in their job, and identify areas where you can improve and increase their satisfaction in their workplace.
Since when employees are stressed, tired, or overloaded they are more likely to be curt or rude with your customers which can easily damage the reputation of your brand.
Conclusion
As customer experience is becoming increasing important and will be the most crucial determining factor in the consumer’s purchasing decision making process, following these tips and positioning your company as a customer-centric business along with the use of best small business CRM software to aid the process will help your company to deliver world-class customer experience that will increase your revenue and solidify your future business growth.
