Why You Should Care About Improving Customer Experience
Customer experience should always be an integral part of every business strategy. Especially now, in today’s climate of adjusting to COVID-19 restrictions, paired with a lack of direct contact with customers, a shift to online services has emerged and with it, the need to provide a stellar experience from beginning to end.
Businesses making the transition to digital transformation is not a new one, but a shift in customer behavior to online models won’t be a temporary change. Lockdown or not, we are living in an era of digitalization, and customer experience management must be a prime concern.
Quick Question: What is customer experience?
Customer Experience (CX) defines every interaction a customer encounters with the brand during his or her buyer journey. From initially navigating the website, inquiring, purchasing and talking with customer service if necessary.
Everything businesses do to make a customer’s journey hassle-free impacts customer’s perception about the brand. Great customer experience drives both loyalty and revenue in the long run.
Why Customer Experience is important?
Great customer experience is more important than ever before, in order to maintain a long lasting relationship with consumers, businesses must deliver the products and services they promise. Consumers own the decision to stay with a brand or to switch to any of many other options in the marketplace.
With engagement across social media becoming more prevalent, buyers are increasingly making decisions based on recommendations from those in their network and reviews they read online. Focusing on consistent, meaningful customer experience builds loyalty and will contribute to additional customers long term.
What is the ROI of focusing on CX?
The impact of customer experience varies across industries varies but prioritizing CX from a strategic, operational and technical perspective helps companies gain a competitive edge. For industries like insurance and retail, improving customer service at any level proves worthwhile. Quality customer experience in healthcare engages patients, improves care outcomes, and reduces operating costs.
ROI might manifest within weeks or might even take as long as a year to manifest. Some examples of areas for potential ROI include :
- Growth in the revenue
- Additional opportunities for cross-selling
- Expenses are kept in check
- Better optimization of the customer journey
How digital transformation is changing the customer experience:
Today, digital transformation is driving businesses to adapt to new market realities. This transformation isn’t driven by businesses but consumers themselves. Consumers look for ways to interact with the brand across more and more platforms, from social channels to voice assistants and expect fast responses and comprehensive services more than ever before. With your competition is just a click away, it’s important to understand how to provide meaningful customer service through technology in every interaction.
1. User-friendly and Device-independent Application/Website
Good UX means good CX. A website’s design is a major contributor to credibility. Therefore it’s important for a website to be user friendly, load quickly, be responsive across all screen sizes, and the transition across devices should be functional and seamlessly. All links throughout any apps and website should work and navigation across the pages should be seamless.
A poorly designed website can upset potential clients and prompt distrust. It affects the customer retention rate and can affect future business. Also if your site isn’t optimized for mobile, your SERP ranking can suffer. A good website is more than just appearance.
2. Personalized Customer Experience.
Great customer experience requires a customer-centric mindset. Today every customer wants to feel valued as a unique individual and are willing to share personal information like preferences and interests. In fact, customers are three times more likely to respond to the companies that:
- Know them by their name.
- Understand their buying history
- Suggest and recommends product based on it
Companies should these insights to specify a target audience and design marketing campaigns accordingly. With a CRM system, it becomes easy to stay connected with the customers through welcome emails, sales follow-up, or a recent campaign based on their navigation history. This data helps to create highly targeted messages to provide a personalized experience.
3. Monitor and Measure Performance
Customer experience is a complex and wide concept so it’s important to break down the specific metrics and how to leverage technology to stay on top of it.
- Conversion Rate – Measure when your prospect completes an action such as sales or transaction and becomes a customer
- Customer Churn Rate – How often you lose customers.
- Net Promoter Score – Customer willingness to share your product.
- Customer Effort Score -Effort it takes a customer to purchase your product
- Customer Satisfaction Score – Includes customer feedback
Measuring the above qualitative data will help to improve the positioning of your services and products. Doing so allows you to know what your customers want and when. Taking insights from your customer database helps you make predictive business decisions and develop a respective marketing budget. Tools like Googly Analytics and web analytic tools, customer surveys and feedback help monitor and measure performance.
4. Chatbots and Voice Assistance
Today AI-enabled voice technology has found its way into almost all aspects of our lives. Many businesses rely on these voice assistant interactions to provide better customer experience. Alexa, Siri, IBM Watson are just the tip of the iceberg.
Bots can offer customer service at any hour on their preferred platform and handle multiple messages to focus on accelerating customer engagement. This avoids customer impatience and helps address behavioral cues to interpret the urgency of a question. Bots can analyze interactions and escalate if necessary.
5. Break the Barrier Between Customer Channels
Customers today look for quick responses and technology has given them the power to demand this irrespective of time and place. Most customers expect a customer service response within an hour no matter whether on weekdays or weekends. This has put a weight on businesses to stay available.
Customers expect seamless service no matter what stage of the buying journey they are in, so leveraging technology helps increase communication and support this experience. This improves customer experience, ensures real-time responses for them, and ultimately increases revenue.
The Take-Away
Digitalization in providing the customer experience can be quite complex to understand. If you are looking to get started with digital transformation, think of cloud solutions first, instead of onsite solutions.
It helps your business to meet customer demands at times and stay updated with the latest features. Data management and analytics help you to map out the perfect customer journey and single user-friendly customer experience.
No matter the size of the organization, digitalization opens a new landscape to improve your relationship with the customers.
Thinking of digital transformation for your business. Check out our services.
