Simple customer experience strategies that improve customer retention and loyalty!
- Understand how your customers define “Customer Experience”
- What is important to your customers?
- What ticks them off? For example, is it the fact that you do not have a particular item in stock or that your sales person doesn’t know about it.
- Acknowledge that customer experience is driven by every customer touch-point – all elements of your media-mix and across all departments of your organization, customer facing or not.
- It is imperative to maintain a high quality experience throughout the relationship, not just when you are selling or renewing.
- Customers are sensitive about data privacy. How you handle personal data is an integral part of customer experience now.
- Customer satisfaction is a given, focus on improving customer engagement
- Customers are no longer passive recipients of ‘push’ marketing. They prefer doing business with companies that engage, listen to, and act on inputs from them.
- Be where your customers are – the device, the medium, and the communication. Match it to your customers’ preference to increase engagement.
- To come closer to your customers, actively listen to their preferences and personalize your marketing and services accordingly.
- Deliver a multichannel experience
- Today’s customers are present across channels – social media, email, offline billboards etc. Marketers need to engage and be available across every possible channel.
- Be relevant and consistent across channels to avoid confusing your customers.
- Customers are easily annoyed or they lose interest if multichannel communication is not as per their preference. Don’t become ‘multichannel annoyance’.
- Rethink how you engage with customers
- Don’t be fixated by tried and tested strategies. Leading brands constantly try creative ways to engage with their customers and more often than not, customers love it.
- Data privacy is becoming contextual. Customers are willing to share business/personal information if they trust you to deliver a personalized experience.
- Through meaningful exchange of value and information, companies are delivering better experience to customers; and customers appreciate that.
- Show your customers you care: when you promise something, deliver
- People never forget the way someone made them feel. Similarly customers never forget if you made them feel special by caring to send a birthday note, or by apologizing for a delayed delivery by sending a souvenir.
- When you ask for feedback, show that you read it and are going to act upon it. This simple gesture reinstates your customers’ trust in you.
- Customers and prospects view personalization as the next step in a company’s commitment to service excellence.
Are there any other customer experience strategies that are working for you? We’d love to hear them!