Customer Experience Improvement: 4 Ways to Make Your Company Stand Out

Establishing customer loyalty begins with providing an impressive customer experience. A positive customer experience involves making your customers feel happy, satisfied, respected, well-served and cared for, from the first contact through the entire lifecycle. By improving your customer experience, you can help ease customer acquisition, drive customer loyalty, and boost customer retention. Here are 4 ways to make your company stand out by understanding your organization’s relationship with your customers:

Treat Your Customers Like Humans

Always keep in mind that, behind each transaction, there is a customer who made the purchase. Addressing a customer inquiry goes far beyond looking up a confirmation number and reviewing a customer’s purchase history. Don’t be afraid to ask your customers for their input about your products or services and how they feel about doing business with you; in fact, emotions account for 50 percent of the overall experience, according to Colin Shaw in The DNA of Customer Experience. By using such tactics as Voice of the Customer (VoC) and Net Promoter Score (NPS), you can encourage and measure feedback from customers and then utilize the information to improve your customer experience.

Treat Your Staff Like Humans

A positive customer experience is often defined by a company’s employees. The philosophy goes something like this: happy, healthy employees, engaged employees, positive customer experience, customer satisfaction and loyalty. As I noted in a recent 1:1 Media interview, “One of the best practices we see in improving the customer experience is managing, monitoring, and measuring the customer experience in combination with employee engagement.” So start the work in-house, with your employees, and see its effects pay off down the road with your customers.

Make New Friends but Keep the Old

A recent Forrester Research blog put it best: “With customers able to interact through multiple channels at any given moment—and often using multiple touch points in pursuit of a single goal—companies need to ensure that they present a coherent face across all interactions.” In other words, use digital marketing’s emergence to your advantage, incorporating traditional methods for soliciting customer feedback with newer platforms (Web, mobile, tablet, etc.). Since employee engagement has a positive impact on customer engagement, encourage your employees to connect with the company strategy and culture via blogs, social networking tools, and RSS feeds; doing so could make all the difference in your customers’ eyes.

Think Big Picture (i.e., Big Data)

Being able to collect and analyze data on your customers is one of the great tools currently available to companies. “Big Data can tell salespeople where the best place is to invest their time. Big Data can shorten sales cycles. Big Data can create opportunities out of thin air. Big Data can enhance sales productivity,” according to Jill Konrath of B2C Magazine. So use what’s out there to not only improve the customer experience but to also improve your bottom line.

One could argue that the customer experience is the most important part of business today. To foster repeat business from your customers and to encourage them to spread the word about your company, be sure to focus on creating and delivering superior customer interactions. After all, improving the customer experience is the first step toward improving your overall business.

For more information, take a look at our strategies, process, and resources associated with Customer Engagement Programs.