Business

How a Great Customer Experience Can Grow Your Business in 2022

When we talk about running a business successfully and taking it to the next level, we focus on increasing sales, revenue, and profits. One of the critical elements every organization must focus on is Customer Experience to achieve business goals. Customer Experience significantly impacts the customers and their future actions on which our growth depends. CX and how the customers perceive it determines whether they make repurchases or not, what they talk about you in the market, what online reviews they put, and how loyal they become.

Although customers’ choice of purchase and repurchase depends on other factors too like price and quality, however, the Customer Experience Trends have changed for some years. Now, customers value experience above attributes like price. Researches suggest that around 86% of the customers are willing to pay more for a Great Customer Experience.

In this article, we will explore what Customer Experience is, how it is important, how you can create positive experiences for your customers, and some practical tips to improve CX in your business.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience is the sum total of what customers go through while dealing with a business. It may be any event, a transaction, interaction, or anything that customers go through during the customer relationship with the organization.

Customer Experience comprises the experience with the products, services, business executives, issues, issue resolution, query resolution, billing, onboarding, complaint, exchange, return, or any other experience the customers go through during their customer journey. These experiences can be both positive and negative.

Customer Experience is crucial for the growth of any business. Let’s explore the importance of Customer Experience for your business in terms of growth and success.

The Importance of Customer Experience

To know the importance of Customer Experience better, let’s explore some good reasons why CX matters so much.

It enhances Customer Satisfaction
It increases Customer Loyalty
It increases Customer Retention
It creates a competitive advantage
It improves sales and revenue
It makes you a brand

Let’s learn more about these benefits of Customer Experience.

1. It enhances Customer Satisfaction

Customer Satisfaction is the core of any business and the reason for its existence without which no business can survive, let alone attain growth. As discussed above, Customer Experience is the key factor that influences overall Customer Satisfaction, and people are even willing to pay more for better experiences. When you provide a great experience to your customers, it makes them happy and satisfied, which is necessary for the growth of your business.

2. It increases Customer Loyalty

Providing positive and memorable experiences to the customers prompts them to give you chances to serve them again. When this process gets repeated, it creates a sense of loyalty among them, and they become your loyal customers. It is not wrong to say that every successful business has a bunch of loyal customers behind its success. Loyal customers not only make repeat purchases but also attract more customers into your business which causes your business to grow more.

3. It increases Customer Retention

Nothing is more helpful n retaining your customers than good or improved customer experiences. When you focus on providing outstanding customer experiences or improving customer experiences, it becomes the most significant factor to retain the customers and motivate them to stay for long.

When your customers stay with you for long, they spend more money on your products and services. Moreover, they are 50% more likely to try your new products than the new customers. This gives a way to sell new products and cover more market share.

4. It creates a competitive advantage

Excellent Customer Experience has the power to give you an excellent competitive advantage. Along with the price and quality of products, CX can become a crucial differentiator for your business and the reason for the high success of your business.

5. It increases sales and revenue

Excellent and memorable Customer Experiences can boost your sales and revenue. Researches suggest that there has been around an 80% increase in revenue for businesses that focus on providing a good customer experience. Positive CX satisfies the customers, and satisfied customers make repurchases from your business and attract new customers.

6. It makes you a brand

People talk about their customer experiences, whether good or bad. They share insights with their friends, family, and known ones. Loyal customers even become your brand ambassadors. Positive customer experiences create positive reviews and word of mouth in the market and vice versa.

This affects your goodwill in the market, which also determines business growth. Positive experiences increase your goodwill and help you become a brand. Studies suggest that 88% of customers trust online reviews, and 74% of customers’ purchasing decisions are influenced by word of mouth about a brand.

So you cannot afford to ignore focussing on Customer Experience as it is a crucial determinant of business growth. Let’s learn how to create positive Customer Experiences in your business that drive growth.

How to Create a Positive Customer Experience?

Make Processes Seamless
Be Highly Responsive
Provide Personalized Experiences
Reward Customer Loyalty
Listen and work on Customers’ Ideas

Let’s learn more about these strategies and how you can follow them to create fantastic customer experiences.

1. Make Processes Seamless and Convenient

Making processes seamless is a great way to provide positive experiences to your customers. Imagine you want to buy a product online, but making the payment is cumbersome and very time-consuming on that website or app. Would you like to buy again from that online platform? Most of the time, NO. Because the purpose of online shopping is to reduce time going market and making purchases.

So always make your processes seamless and straightforward, and try to provide maximum convenience to the customers you can. Ensure a smooth payment process and a convenient door-to-door delivery process in the case of an online shopping platform. Moreover, every process like an exchange, return, issue resolution, or any other method must be simple and smooth to carry on. Remember that customers pay for convenience and never want to waste their precious time.

2. Be Highly Responsive

It is a great strategy to be highly responsive to build positive Customer Experiences. Revert to every query, complaint, or request by the customers. Whether an online review or a comment on your social media official page, make sure you respond to every customer and solve their issues or queries. This gives them a feeling of getting heard and being valued, thus creating a positive Customer Experience.

3. Provide Personalized Experiences

One of the biggest trends observed is the shift of the choices of customers towards businesses that provide personalized experiences. Studies suggest that around 80% of the customers prefer to purchase from companies providing personalized experiences. Personalization creates an exclusive relationship with the customers and connects them with your business. To make positive experiences for the customers, it is always a great idea to give them what suits them the most.

4. Reward Customer Loyalty

Loyal Customers are a pillar of success for any business, and it is crucial to keep them satisfied and happy. When customers become loyal, it is essential to make them feel valued and reward their loyalty so the relationship grows. You can offer them special discounts, gift vouchers, coupons, etc., from time to time to reward their loyalty.

Make sure you give more to them than you give to other customers; otherwise, they will not feel their loyalty is rewarded. For instance, if you provide a 5% discount to new customers on a specific product, offer them 8-10%, so they get benefits of their loyalty.

5. Listen and work on Customers’ Ideas

One of the best ways to create positive experiences is to listen to the voice of the customers and work accordingly. When you follow your customers’ suggestions and implement them in your business, it gives them an incredible feeling of satisfaction, creating wonderful experiences. They will feel like owning the brand and tell others too that you listen to your customers. This will be very helpful in building your reputation as a customer-centric brand and will grow your business.

Let’s explore some useful tips to improve Customer Experience.

Essential Tips for Businesses to Improve their Customer Experience

Provide an Omni-Channel Support
Improve Customer Service
Collect Customer Feedback
Take Action on Feedback
Empower your Employees
Keep Inventory Updated and well-managed

Let’s learn how these tips can help you improve your Customer Experience.

1. Provide an Omni-Channel Support

One of the biggest things businesses can do to improve Customer Experience is to be available for the customers anytime, anywhere. Nowadays, customers use a variety of mediums to connect. You must ensure that you are present on most channels, and you can do this by providing omnichannel support. This means you should provide support for multiple channels like phone calls, emails, review websites, platforms to connect, and social media. If you ignore some channels, your competitors will leave you.

Researches suggest that 80% of the companies are now investing in omnichannel experiences. Moreover, if you ignore powerful online mediums like review platforms and social media, your customers will anyhow share their experiences through these mediums, and a negative experience if not improved at the right time and do much harm through these channels. You must be present on most channels and provide support to your customers to solve queries and complaints.

2. Improve Customer Service

Customer Service is the most significant factor that affects Customer Experience. Researches suggest that 56% of the customers have abandoned a brand because they got poor customer service experience, and Americans can pay 17% more for excellent customer service.

So if you want to improve CX, make improvements in customer service. Train your employees and customer service executives to give world-class service to the customers. Build an effective query and issue management process to work on every query and issue at the earliest to satisfy the customers and improve their experience.

3. Collect Customer Feedback

To improve Customer Experience, you have to know first how the experience was and how your customer perceived it. Collecting Customer Feedback is the way to understand how your customers feel about the experience you provide them. With Customer Feedback, you will get to know where and what improvement is required. So, it is crucial to set up an effective Customer Feedback System.

For this, you should use an effective Customer Feedback Software or app to create and send surveys to your customers and collect feedback from them. Feedback will act as a guide to take actions to improve the Customer Experience and enhance satisfaction.

4. Take Action on Feedback

Taking action on feedback is as important as gathering it in the first place. If you do not take action on the feedback received, there is no point in collecting it. Follow up on the feedback received. Thank the customers who share positive feedback, apologize to those who share negative feedback, and ask them where things went wrong.

Based on their detailed insights, take appropriate actions to satisfy them and improve their experience. When you collect feedback, work on it, and inform the customers what you have done for them as per their feedback, it gives them immense satisfaction. This can even change negative feedback into positive and boost the overall Customer Experience.

5. Empower your Employees

Improving Customer Experience also requires empowering your employees and giving them a good Employee Experience. For this, you must assign some power and authority to the employees, especially those facing and dealing with the customers.

For instance, one of your customers asks a slight discount from your customer care executive, but the executive doesn’t have the authority to give it directly and has to follow a lengthy procedure of taking his managers’ approval. Now, if the customer doesn’t want to spend so much time waiting for a petty discount, he will end up with a dissatisfying experience. To avoid such situations, it is necessary to give some power and authority to your employees so that they can provide an excellent experience to your customers.

6. Keep Inventory Updated and well-managed

While working on the above tips to improve Customer Experience, keeping your inventory well-managed and updated is also vital to avoid bad negative customer experiences. Imagine you buy a product from an e-commerce website. You make the payment, wait for the delivery for two days, but suddenly get a notification that the product you ordered is out of stock, and you will get your money back. How would you feel? Frustrated, isn’t it! Although you got the money back, you still spent your precious time researching and ordering a product and waiting for it to be delivered. And now, being it out of stock is disappointing.

These things happen on e-commerce websites and create negative experiences for the customers. So, always make sure your inventory is well-managed and updated so that it always shows accurate stock in your lists and doesn’t become a reason for disappointment for your customers.