10 Ways to Build Great Customer Experience

Customer experience is a fundamental factor in the success of a business. Offering a great customer experience drives customer loyalty, increased profits, and reduced churn. According to research, 86% of customers will pay more for a better experience, making the customer experience something every business should invest in.

The customer experience (also referred to as CX) compels a customer-oriented approach. To achieve the best customer experience, you need to formulate strategies that your entire organization can utilize to offer your customers what they need when they need it.

For instance, by leveraging the guide from NICE to assist customers in a more customer-centric manner, you can significantly increase your customer experience.

Evidently, customer experience is something you need to invest in, and even though it might seem like a complex undertaking, the results speak for themselves: research shows that businesses that invest in great customer experience observe a 70% increase in revenue in under 3 years.

If you are prepared to uplevel your customer experience and reap its benefits, here is a guide to building a great customer experience for your customers.

What is Customer Experience (CX)

Customer experience is defined as your customers’ overall perception of their experience with your products, services, and brand.

It is informed by several touchpoints and factors, including the transaction customers’ quality, your brand, your brand identity, how you interact with and reach your brand, and its communication channels.

Together, these elements contribute to the overall perception your customers will have of their experience with your brand.

Building a great customer experience encompasses several different aspects of your customer’s interaction with your brand. These are the factors you need to focus on improving to build a better customer experience.

Why Customer Experience is Essential for Your Business

Customer experience is a vital part of customer relationship management, which is key to fostering customer loyalty.

As a business owner, you should know that it is easier to retain customers than attract or seek new ones. Research shows that 65% of a business’s revenue comes from loyal customers, as they spend 67% more than new customers.

These are only a few benefits of building a great customer experience. To acquire a long-lasting relationship with your customers and inspire them to vouch for your brand to their family and friends, you need to invest in their experience. Happy customers will remain loyal to your brand.

How to Differentiate Customer Experience From Customer Service

Most people assume customer service and customer experience are the same, which is not valid. These two are to an extent related, but they are not the same thing.

While customer service focuses on a particular touchpoint of a brand, customer experience pertains to the emotions and feelings customers experience when interacting with a brand and their entire purchase process – from pre-purchase to post-purchase interactions.

How Does Bad Customer Experience Impact Your Business?

A great customer experience ensures every interaction and touchpoint with your business is seamless, easy, and enjoyable, and the opposite is what comes with a bad customer experience.

Study shows that 91% of unhappy customers often leave a brand without an explanation, with businesses losing more than $62 billion to bad customer service. Meanwhile, only 10% of consumers say that brands have met their expectations for a great experience.

The most common causes of bad customer experience include:

• Neglect from customer support
• Complicated purchasing processes
• Lack of prompt response from call centers
• Compromised personal security
• Dismissed customer feedback

How to Build Great Customer Experience

1. Streamline Your Processes

Your business processes can either make or break your business. For instance, you are likely to lose customers when your checkout process is clunky and slow.

Businesses have numerous processes ranging from signing up to mailing lists to receiving customer services and ordering products.

All these processes affect customer experience and should be managed to ensure that they are as user-friendly and seamless as possible.

Streamlining processes such as search functionality, checkout system, and automating emails throughout your order process can help you create a customer experience that is enjoyable and easy for each one of your customers. Streamlined processes are vital to preventing alienated customers and a drop in revenue.

2. Formulate a Customer Experience Vision

To build and enforce a great customer experience, you need to have a mission and a clear vision of what you want to achieve.

Other than selling products, you need to evaluate your brand and what it represents – this determines how your customers relate to your brand. You have to find your brand persona and voice and develop it across all your touchpoints to do this.

Whether your brand is whimsical and irreverent or more traditional and rooted in heritage, formulating a vision for your customer experience will help inform you on what approach to take on customer experience and enables you to make a name for your business in the industry.

Customer experience is built on a brand: they are intertwined. Once you develop a brand persona for your business, you can use it to communicate your customer experience vision to your audience, so they know what to expect from your brand.

3. Pay Attention to What People are Saying About Your Brand Online

Whether positive or negative, customers always talk about their experiences with a brand – especially online.

This kind of online feedback from consumers can help you identify issues or problems and find out what’s working and what your consumers love about and want from your brand – you know how to enhance your consumer’s overall experience.

You can leverage social listening tools to analyze what your consumers are saying online and use the reports from those tools to get your teams informed about customer sentiment so they can act on it and adjust the services and experiences your business offers.

4. Measure Your Customer Experience

Even after implementing new procedures and processes to enhance your customer experience, you should continuously track your progress to ensure that your changes are successful.

There are several ways to measure customer experience, including customer feedback, social listening, and analytics. By measuring your customer experience, you can determine whether your improvements are working and what areas need further tweaking.

5. Solicit Customer Feedback and Act on it

Brands that offer superior customer experience do so through listening to their customers and acting on the information they take in from them.

This is why businesses should not underestimate the relevance of customer feedback. Customer feedback should never be finite: it can help you cultivate a better experience for all your customers.

Asking for feedback needs to be a continuous practice – businesses should practice asking for feedback even if things are not going wrong. The best way to top brands and stay on top is through constant improvement and innovation – there is always room for improvement.

6. Develop Customer Trust

Trust is one of the most fundamental bonds you can have with your target audience or customer base. When your customers know they can rely on your brand, creating long-lasting relationships with them becomes easier.

Customer trust takes multiple forms, and unfortunately, there is no one ‘quick fix’ to building customer trust; it involves a combination of several actions that you take as a business.

To develop trust, you need to offer safe and well-developed services and products, but it should not stop there. You also need to be honest with your customers, especially when things go wrong.

For instance, instead of trying to cover up or hide problems, you need to face up to them and work on fixing them and making things right with your customers – that is how you will win their trust moving forward.

7. Understand Your Customers

To deliver the best possible customer experience for all your customers, you should start by finding out who they are and their specific wants and needs.

The best way to achieve this is through customer segmentation. Define your customers by identifying key ‘types’ of customers and forging personas for each type.

For instance, you could have a customer persona for males aged 18-35 who love sports and use their mobile devices frequently, and another customer persona could be for females aged 45-60 who are less tech-savvy and rely on constant and prompt customer support.

By identifying and creating such customer profiles, your team understands your customers and is capable of finding better ways to support them. Doing this helps your business become more customer-centric.

8. Develop Your Team

First things first, you need to hire a crack team that aligns with your business’s goals and vision; from there, you should continuously invest in your team by helping them develop their skills and keeping them motivated.

As your business grows, your processes will change, and when that happens, you need to ensure your team understands and can adapt to the new systems and revamped customer experience strategies.

In addition to the day-to-day technical skills required for the job, your team should also know the broader strategic vision and how each of their roles fits into it.

9. Connect With Your Customers and Reward Loyalty

It is essential to make your customers feel important. Since they have chosen to spend their money on your brand, it is vital to show your appreciation for them by creating a positive customer experience. It is essential to show your customers that you care about their interests and needs.

You can show your customers that you appreciate them by rewarding their loyalty. You can reward them by offering special offers and discounts. This will make them feel valued and entice them to keep coming back and even vouch for you to their friends and family.

10. Study Your Competition

Even though it is not advisable to copy other brands, it is crucial to make yourself aware of what your competitors are up to and ensure that you are doing everything right.

There is a lot of knowledge to gain from how successful brands like Apple approach customer experience and market themselves.

By doing your research and staying on top of the actions of competitors and your industry, you can ensure that your brand not only meets but exceeds the industry standard for a top-notch customer experience.

Take the initiative to Enhance Your Customer Experience

Great customer experience can provide vast opportunities that directly impact your business’s success and profitability.

Having the right customer experience strategy in place will help enhance customer experience and make your business more customer-centric with unlimited access to long-term benefits.

Therefore, whether you have a large enterprise or small business, you need to focus on delivering quality customer experience – doing this will go a long way in securing a fruitful future for your business.