Customer Experience - The Secret Key to Building Business

Customer Experience (CX) is all about how your customers feel when interacting with your brand. Optimizing customer experience for your organization adds great value to the revenue that you bring in.

How?

Every conversation that you have with your customer is a chance to increase their trust and thereby bring in more business. Imagine you have a problem with a product and you write to their support team. What would you do if you do not receive a reply within the given turn around time? Or, worse, get a rude reply?

Would you want to continue using the product?

Unlikely.

Customers generally have low tolerance towards lackluster services. Buyers don’t have tolerance for lackluster service. According to a survey conducted by Access Development, about 43% of the customers consider or move to a competitor within a day post experiencing poor customer service.

Walker Consulting predicted that customer experience is the key differentiator for businesses in 2020. This means, as a business, you will have to put twice your efforts to make sure that your customer experience is great.

Customer Experience includes all the ways by which you interact with your end users - support, in person, self serve portal, help documentation, etc. It includes 3 main components:

Customer Service - It includes all your customer-facing teams such as support, success, sales, and pre-sales.

Technology - It includes the ease of understanding your product and how it solves their problem statement.

Design - UI plays a major role when it comes to Customer Experience. It is the brand’s touchpoint with the customer.

What is customer service?

Customer service is one jigsaw puzzle of Customer Experience. Customer Experience is about the whole journey of your customer. Customer Service is focused on the human interaction your customers have with the company. It is the assistance that you provide for them.

Customer service requires a high skill set of patience, product knowledge and persistence. They need to answer the customer’s queries within the given time interval. They are the face of the organization.

Benefits of providing exceptional Customer Experience

Having a good customer experience helps you build a huge customer base. Exceptional customer experience enhances loyalty and helps retention. Customers often look for extra-ordinary products at an optimal price. But, if they find value in your business, most of them will be willing to spend a little more. This is the trust that can be gained from Customer Experience.

Customer loyalty

Customer Loyalty is a great strength given the number of companies that are coming up each day. The same product that you sell is offered by so many companies out there. This means high competition. Given this, you need to have a strategy to hold on to your customers. Providing a good customer experience will not just help you retain your customers but also enable to cross-sell any product that you may build in the future. Once your customer believes in your product and is satisfied with your service, they may almost never want to switch.

Loyal customers are the best advocates for your product. These are the people who have used your product and are satisfied with them. They help in propagating your brand to other potential customers. Word of mouth is the strongest advocacy in the market. The market study reveals that people are willing to trust and try products that are suggested by their close ones.

These days, with social media being the major channel for communication, any good or bad experience with a product is taken to this platform. Imagine, you purchased something online and the product that you received was faulty. You call up the customer service and they make work extremely easy for you. Chances of you purchasing the product from the same site is more likely even though you received a faulty product.

Business Revenue

Customers who are happy with your product and service would not want to move to a competitor product even if they are offering a marginal low cost. This helps you retain your customers and increase your customer lifetime value. These customers will be willing to pay for additional services that you offer. This helps you upsell or cross-sell your product.

Factors for influence Customer Experience

This defines the ease in reaching out to the product. What if you have a support team, but your customers are not able to find a way to contact you or they call your team, only to find it busy all the time. In most cases, customers become irate when they are not able to reach out to the team. This adds up to their issue with the product. Provide support contact wherever necessary.

This determines if your customers want to use your product or not. There are two things that every business needs to consider while developing the product.

• Does the product solve the customer’s use case?
• How easy is it to implement and use the product.

Even if the product solves the customer’s requirements, chances are high they might leave if they find the UI not intuitive enough. The solution that you offer should be simple and easy to use.

Improvements

Assume you have built a great product, chances are high that your customers will leave if you do not make improvements. As your customer’s business grows, they will want features to solve their use-cases. Your product must be on par with your competitors in solving issues that your customers might have.

You might have a great product and a great support team. But, if your team does not know the product well, it is as good as not having one, Let’s say your customer calls to know about a feature, putting them on a long hold to find out the issue or giving them wrong information will deprecate the trust your customers have on your product. It will often give them the impression that the people working for the organization by themselves do not possess enough knowledge about the product.

Bottom line

It is not possible to anticipate every issue and have a workaround for every product. What matters is if you are able to still handle the customers to their satisfaction when they reach out to you.

Customers are consumers like you. They often want to be treated well and heard. The ability to be proactive in times when your customers have a problem will pay off. Making it easy for the customers to reach you on different channels and solving their issues on time will help you build brand value.