7 tips for improving customer experience
Businesses that focus on providing excellent customer experiences are proven to have less customer churn, higher customer satisfaction and loyalty, and increased revenue and profit over companies that do not.
This is the era of relationship-based, customer-centric sales. To succeed in today’s competitive market, you must understand your customers’ needs and then connect, engage, and offer a seamless, personalized, positive customer experience across all channels.
Customer experience (CX) is defined by the interactions and touchpoints the customer has with your business throughout the entire customer journey – from awareness through consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. To ensure that your business is continually improving the customer experience, follow these 7 best practices:
1. Implement a customer-centric vision
Create an environment where all your business decisions and actions are done with the customer in mind. To ensure that everyone who works within your organization embraces this mindset, craft a vision for your business that is defined by guiding principals that are customer-focused. Provide training on these principles so everyone knows them and takes them to heart.
2 . Know your customers
Be sure that everyone understands who your customers are by creating buyer personas/customer profiles that highlight the different types of customers you have – along with their different needs and preferences. Don’t just assume you know who your customers are; leverage your data and analytics to help define them.
3. Build an emotional connection
One of the most important ways to connect with your customers is through empathy. Empathy is basically the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and feel what they feel. For example, Chewy.com had a customer call in to say that her dog had passed away and asked about returning dog food. Chewy not only refunded her money without the return (and suggested she donate the dog food to a shelter), they also sent her a sympathy card and flowers. Being thoughtful and creating these emotional connections will ensure you have a loyal customer for life.
4. Gather real-time customer feedback
Whether you use chat tools, follow-up emails or surveys, or other customer experience tools, try to gather immediate feedback by asking your customer how you are performing at different stages of the buying process. This feedback will quickly let you know where you are excelling and where you might need to put in additional effort.
5. Gather ongoing employee feedback
Most businesses will survey their employees once or twice a year to see how engaged they are in providing excellent customer service, but that’s not enough. Create a safe space where employees can continually provide feedback so you can identify issues and gather suggestions for improvements.
6. Train for excellence
Be sure your entire customer service team knows your customer-centric vision, guiding principles, and understands the different customers they may be interacting with. Schedule and track your team’s development by providing ongoing coaching, e-learning, group training and practicing various scenarios to ensure that everyone is providing consistent, excellent service.
7. Measure and adapt
Establish key performance indicators that can measure customer experience and satisfaction (such as the Net Promoter Score). If customer satisfaction is low, work to find out what touchpoints are causing friction and implement changes. You may need to go through the entire customer journey yourself to uncover and address weaknesses.
At Valley, we’re dedicated to helping your business succeed by doing things like offering the best customer experience possible. Visit our Business Insight Center for more helpful resources and check out our range of financial products and services designed to meet your needs. Visit our website or contact us to learn more.
Checking
Business Checking Account
Whether you are a small business or a large corporation, we can help you streamline your banking experience, avoid unnecessary fees and grow your business with a Valley Business Checking Account.