Promoting positive customer experience (CX) has become a top business priority across a wide range of industries. CX encompasses customers’ perceptions and feelings about how your company treats them during interactions along the customer journey, which influences their expectations and drives purchasing behavior.
In a recent Digital Trends Report on exciting business opportunities, CX came in first over content marketing, video marketing, and social media – and with good reason. If you’ve wondered whether it’s worth investing in CX, such as to outsource quality assurance to improve the user experience with apps and websites, consider the following benefits your business can achieve.
Satisfied Customers Spend More
Loyal, happy customers who enjoy interacting with your business will spend more money on your products and services. In fact, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more when they receive great CX, with engaged customers making 90% more frequent purchases and spending 60% more on each transaction.
Investing in high-quality, personalized CX gets you satisfied customers who will increase your revenue through the following attitudes and activities:
- Making more frequent purchases, including impulse buys.
- Being receptive to cross-selling and up-selling.
- Being willing to pay higher prices.
Increasing your customer retention rates by just 5% can result in up to a 95% increase in profits. Good CX promotes customer retention which also saves you money since acquiring a new customer costs 7 times more than maintaining an existing one.
Customer Advocates Do Marketing for You
Loyal customers will promote your business through word-of-mouth marketing, serving as volunteer advocates for your brand, products, and services. Word-of-mouth, both in-person and online through reviews and social media posts, is a powerful marketing tool that fulfills the public’s desire for third-party validation before making purchases. There are ways you can identify and encourage your customer advocates:
Net Promoter Score
Use a Net Promoter Score (NPS) program to measure how likely various customers are to promote your brand to friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors based on CX. NPS looks at data across multiple departments, including customer service, sales, and marketing, to capture the impact of positive CX at various touchpoints on the customer journey.
Social Media Communities
Use social media platforms to create customer communities for your business, in which people share their own content to promote the products and services they enjoy. This approach keeps customers engaged, makes them feel heard, reinforces their loyalty to your brand, and promotes your business to new potential buyers.
Positive CX Is a Differentiator
Consumers have such a wide range of choices when it comes to the companies they can engage with that it’s harder than ever to differentiate your company and stand out. Customers no longer base their loyalty solely on prices and products. They also look closely at their experiences. In fact, CX is expected to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by the end of 2020.
You can use a variety of methods to promote good CX to give your business a competitive edge, including:
Consistency across channels
Omni-channel customer service integrates text, social media, email, instant messaging, phone, and in-person services to create a unified brand experience and consistency in CX. Customers can easily switch among these channels and still receive the same quality of service.
One channel that’s particularly important is your website. In today’s mobile-driven environment, it must be responsive to adapt to any device your customers want to view it on. That way, they can accomplish the same tasks from their laptop, tablet, or phone through easy navigation, useful search features, and fast loading times. To ensure your site is adaptive, have your in-house support team, or an outsourced company like BairesDev, run usability tests on apps before you launch your site.
Personalization
Get to know your customers well so you can personalize CX to make them feel special and promote trust and loyalty. Use surveys, web forms, live chats, and social media to collect, analyze, and extract insights from customer data. Read through comments, suggestions, and reviews to find out what your customers expect and want from your business.
Self-service help options
Make easy-to-use self-service options available to let your customers find answers to their questions and solutions to their problems on their own. One option is to use artificial intelligence to automate customer interactions and provide help 24/7.
Loyal Customers Can Help You With R&D
Reduce your R&D costs by using customer feedback to improve prices, products, service quality, and types of support. Analyze CX to uncover and respond to problem issues and identify new opportunities to pursue, such as personalized manufacturing.
To better obtain this valuable information, create a customer forum where people can request new products or features to better meet their needs. It could take the form of email surveys, social media groups, or a community page on your website. You don’t have to implement all the suggestions you receive but, if consistent trends emerge, consider pursuing them.
The following video describes how to use this information:
Dissatisfaction Leads to Customer Churn
Negative experiences can cause such significant dissatisfaction that customers may end their business relationship with your company, a phenomenon known as “churn.” Many unhappy customers won’t even tell you first there’s anything wrong but will just stop doing business with you. Analyze churn to figure out the primary causes and develop strategies to resolve them, especially if the rate is increasing.
When you do receive negative feedback, your customer service response will directly impact whether customers stay with your business. Make sure your representatives are polite, focus on finding solutions and make customers feel heard and cared for. It’s important to note that 95% of customers who had a bad experience will give the company another chance if the issue is dealt with to their satisfaction. Additional methods to decrease churn include:
Surveys
Conduct customer satisfaction surveys on a regular basis, particularly after key interactions, to identify improvements you could make and approaches you should continue. Make sure to follow up on customer feedback, both positive and negative, to connect with your customers, deepen relationships, improve retention, and upgrade future CX.
Support ticket trends
Monitor your customer support ticket trends to identify any ongoing issues with CX. Investigate the specific causes and figure out solutions, so problems don’t continue and result in increased churn.
Make Customer Experience a Top Priority
If you invest in creating positive CX for your customers, you’ll reap a wide range of benefits including increased revenue, customer loyalty, and decreased churn. Improving CX is an effective way to gain a competitive edge and set your business apart in the marketplace.
