Customer experience: Definition and how can you make it better

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What is customer experience?

Customer experience can be summed up as everything that contributes to the customer’s perception of the organization. Those things can include all the business interactions they had, product purchases, product demos and walkthroughs, queries and problem reporting/solving, etc. 

A particular customer works on building his perception about your business over the period of time. This period of time is called customer journey which is defined as the whole timeline of the customer from the moment they land on your brand to the end. Customer experience is highly built on the business and customer relationship.

Customer experience is mostly influenced by every kind of interaction the customer makes no matter how brief or detailed. Customers tend to be taken off-guard even at the smallest of inconvenience. This just makes it obvious that it is a difficult job maintaining a good customer experience.

Watch the video below to learn how you can enhance customer experience with Voxco.

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Why does your business need customer experience?

Customer experience contains customer opinion, retention and their loyalty that can add value to your brand for lifetime. Well loyalty is a strong plus point when it comes to growing your brand, because as studies prove, 52% of the customers tend to go out of their way to buy from the brand they are loyal to. 

The real challenge comes when you have to choose between acquiring and retaining customers. Acquiring requires you to make efforts to catch more customers, whereas retaining them means making an effort to keep the existing ones. It is said in the good books of business that customer retention saves a lot of money and time than customer acquisition. Keeping the existing customers happy and turning their performance into loyalty to your brand can buy you a lifetime of revenue against all the odds. Whereas convincing new people into being your customer has a 50-50 chance of them being convinced, let alone them being loyal to your brand.

Studies have proven that customers tend to switch to competitors just after one bad experience. So, every time you are interacting with a customer, be it through direct conversation or through products and services, you are always playing a risky game which can result in either a lifetime of loyalty or losing one customer. 

Let us take a look at some of the good customer experience factors that can help your organization get to the top:

  • Marketing the products and services in a way which the customers find more realistic and relatable. 
  • Design your product keeping in mind what customers would like following the market trend. 
  • Make your resources and help accessible to the customers. 
  • Be open and straight regarding pricing. 
  • 24/7 customer support and helpdesk.

How to improve your customer experience?

  • Feedback loops 

The first thing a customer looks for in a brand is their ability to listen to them. Customers love when they are being heard. And you can make that happen by always being available to them and keeping in touch. 

The best way to keep in touch with your customer is to regulate feedback loops. Reach out to the customers in a way that is convenient to them so they respond in their own time and on their own. Feedback loops are nothing but small surveys or questionnaires that are distributed to the target customer base regarding certain topics. For example, feedback can be about the recent product the customer bought, website navigation experience, customer service experience, product demo history, anything which counts as customer interaction. 

This way you will always stay on top of what your customers are thinking about your brand and help with everything they need. 

  • Omnichannel experience 

Omnichannel experience refers to providing a wide range of communication options to the customer. Doing so will give them a large range of options to choose for getting in touch with the business. Omnichannel platform examples can be emails, phone calls, SMS, social media platforms, direct visits, etc. 

The benefit of using omni channel platforms turns totally towards the customers. They can switch whenever they want, even in-between problem solving.

This approach gets a bit difficult to deal with on the organization end. Firstly, you need to train your customer service reps to efficiently use the tools and channels to track customer conversations and complaints. They need to pick them off right from the place they left even if the channel is changed. Another thing that it makes difficult is to analyze customer data. 

Many platforms give many data sources and combining them and analyzing them without any professional tools can be an impossible job.

See Voxco survey software in action with a Free demo.

  • Self-service 

Customers love to find out the solutions to their problem on their own. The least you can do here is, help them help themselves. 

Meaning, provide the user manual, documentations and any essential information out there that it is easily reachable to the customer. 

As they don’t like to turn to live agents for every small problem, this approach also helps you relieve some work off the customer service agents so they can focus on real and bigger problems at hand. 

  • Personalization 

Customers LOVE customized service. Just like they love being heard, they love when the brand narrows down their service by focusing on them, what they want and what they need. 

You can basically get the customers impressed by this move. All you have to do is pay actual attention to each customer and study their profiles. This includes everything from their purchase to their feedback and complaints. As a result, you can provide them personalized coupons or discounts on their next purchase and greet them using their demographics. 

Although, these are just some examples of how you can serve your customers personally. But the pool of personalization grows as deep as you are willing to invest in it.

  • Use latest analytics technologies

It is not surprising that the world is being taken out by all sorts of data analysis tools and technologies. Given the amount of data that businesses emit every second, making use of automated tools for data management and analysis sounds like just the right thing. 

These tools will help you capture this large amount of data, organize it to make categorical sense and process it to form knowledge out of the information gathered.

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