The biggest fear amongst organizations is the loss of customers. Corporates develop competitive strategies, offer exclusive discounts and employ industry experts to ensure that they can retain their customers. However, the only way to be sure that customers will not leave you is by providing them with a consistently superior customer experience.
Companies, both large and small, are focusing their efforts on the customer experience. What is customer experience? As defined by Forrester, customer experience is nothing but how customers perceive their interactions with your company. For an interaction to be perceived as a “good experience”, it must deliver some value to the customer, be easy to find and should allow the customer to effectively engage with the interaction. Delivering a superior customer experience is the driving force towards guaranteeing customer retention.
An emerging concept in the digital world is customer experience management. Customer experience management is the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed their expectations. This helps in cementing customer loyalty and advocacy, along with boosting customer satisfaction and delight. Customer experience management involves garnering an in-depth understanding of the customer, their requirements, pain points, behavioural patterns and more, such that you can design personalized and targeted experiences for them.
Source: medium.com
Marketers are now focusing on consistently providing a superior experience to ensure customer journey transformation. Customer experience amalgamates the USP of your product or service with the customer’s requirements. Although marketers have started understanding the importance of customer experience management, there is still a huge gap. Lack of adequate understanding of the customer results in companies thinking that they are providing an exceptional experience when it is average at best.
Simply put, a seamless customer experience translates into a happy customer and customer journey transformation. While customers may be happy with great customer service, overall superior customer experience will guarantee that they keep coming back to you! An effective way to ensure a consistent customer experience management is via a holistic customer engagement platform, which will engage with customers across all touchpoints and deliver a superb experience. Here are some strategies that can help you succeed with customer experience management:
Customer-focused vision
The first step to driving customer journey transformation with a commendable customer experience is creating a customer-focused vision for the company. For a customer experience strategy to be effective, all the employees of your company must have it ingrained and follow it whenever they interact with customers. This is possible with the help of a clear vision statement that defines a customer-focused vision based on providing a superior customer experience.
Buyer Persona
Customer experience management is only effective if you have an extensive understanding of your customers. Who are your customers? What do they like? Marketers need to answer these questions before they can succeed with customer experience management. Following this, buyer personas must be created for different customer groups. What are buyer personas? Buyer personas help marketers in creating personalized customer experience strategies that will be most helpful for the particular customer segment. A 25-year old woman and a 42-year old man will have different requirements and hence will need different customer experience strategies.
Customer Feedback
The customer is king (or queen), and it pays to listen to them! Successful companies design their strategies based on customer feedback. Why is customer feedback important? Customer feedback is the easiest way of knowing what your customers need, to help them get an exceptional experience. Gathering customer feedback in real-time can help marketers understand if their activities are working and what are the improvement areas that can pave the way for customer journey transformation. Tools like virtual customer assistants can help you in garnering customer feedback and comments on a real-time basis. In addition, follow-up emails with feedback forms can also be used to take customer feedback.
Employees
Your employees are key to providing a superior customer experience. No matter how robust your strategy is, it will completely go to waste if employees lack adequate training to ensure consistent customer experience management. In addition, periodic employee feedback is also an important component in ensuring an excellent customer experience. Employees must be trained to spend extensive time in understanding the customer and their individual requirements. Based on this understanding, employees can not only provide great service but also come up with innovative ideas during periodic feedback sessions which can help in driving the customer journey transformation.
Research Competitors
When it comes to providing an impressive experience to customers, the main obstacle facing marketers is bridging the gap between customer demands and what is being provided to them by companies. Researching and analysing competitors can be very effectual in identifying this gap. Building your corporate strategy based on competition analysis and market trends can help you delight your customers by providing them with something “extra” that none of your competitors offer. As a result, prospective as well as existing customers can receive a superlative customer experience at every touchpoint of the customer journey.
Quick customer response
In general, customers are happy to provide feedback, positive or negative. The onus lies on the company to promptly reply to all such messages, especially the negative ones. Positive customer journey transformation depends upon customers receiving a quick resolution to all their queries. Live chat platforms and chatbots are the most efficacious way of ensuring that all your customers’ queries and grievances are being resolved within a short turnaround time. Since most customers air their grievances on social media, it would make sense to install a live chatbot on your social media accounts for immediate support 24/7.
Automation
Finally, incorporating automation in your customer experience management process will guarantee superior results and high growth. Automated processes can ensure that you provide an omnichannel customer experience across all touchpoints of the customer journey. Additionally, automation ensures that your employees can focus on core processes without having to spend an excessive amount of time in responding to customer queries. Finally, automation is the easiest and most effective way of personalizing all your marketing campaigns, making them more targeted and relevant, thereby offering an improved experience to your customers.
In any competitive and high-growth industry, there will be several players competing to acquire and retain a larger portion of the market. As such, to differentiate yourself, you must provide something extra. Customer experience management can not only help in differentiating yourself but also help in driving customer journey transformation. A customer engagement platform can help you in providing a consistently superior customer experience across all touchpoints of the digital customer journey. Know more about our digital customer engagement platform.
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