Customer Experience
It is one thing to own a business, it is another to attract new customers to your business, and it is yet another thing to retain them. Visit https://www.apicasystems.com/blog/load-testing-vs-stress-testing-vs-capacity-testing/ to learn more about why every company should have some form of load testing. What all these metrics have in common is the Customer Experience factor. Think about it this way. You set up a business to get profit, but of course you need customers to buy your products, you set up ads in every possible awareness means to attract new customers. After doing that successful, your next big plan is retaining your existing customers while you source for more customers. Without customers, your business is as good as non-existent and that is why customer experience is very vital to any business, both budding and established.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience refers to all the interaction between a customer and a business or organization both before and after sales. The interaction cuts across having awareness, purchase, relationship, services offered, advocacy, and even discovery. The best strategy a business can ever adopt is to satisfy their customers, this is why some companies use field service software to help with their customer service.
Customer experience is not customer service
Customer service is only a portion of the customer experience. The customer experience is more holistic and cuts across different means of satisfying and retaining the customer. An example of a customer service scenario would be when a customer decides to know more about a company or organization and they get in touch with one of their staffs either by a phone call or online. This initial point of entry is what gives the company the opportunity to deliver an excellent customer service and the beginning of the customer experience. As much as customer service is a part of customer experience, it is not the whole cake.
Customer experience is not user experience
Another common misconception is that customer experience is also user experience and this not true. User experience is also just a part of customer experience that relates to the feeling of satisfaction or disappointment that users get when they visit your app, website or software. A direct relationship between user experience and customer experience is how you treat or handle your customers after they raise complains from using your app or website and trying to make the process more rewarding from the feedback you have gathered from them.
What is the essence of customer experience?
Customer experience is the mother of all business strategies. As we have stated earlier, if you do not have loyal customers for your business, then you might want to review and see what you are not doing right. Customers are humans and they also express their point of view, they want an organization that actively listens and gives them adjustments according to the feedback they provide. Some of the things you can get from customer experience include
- Having better brand advocates for your business. Always remember that no ad does it better than “the word of mouth”. Satisfying your customers opens you to a world of other ready individuals waiting to be satisfied in the same manner.
- Customers will not mind paying more for your product provided an excellent customer experience is kept constant.
- You get to be top of mind for your customers. They etch your organization or brand name on their hearts forever if you can surprise them with a great customer experience.
Some useful ways to create an excellent customer experience strategy
Understand your product and know your audience
This is the single most important thing you need to settle as a brand or organization. Let your product drive you to know your audience and to make sure that you give them what they want. Understand their motivation and concerns. Study your customers and know what parts of your business they like the most. Understanding your product is important, but to be able to increase your customer loyalty, you need to ensure that the customer experience is to the highest of standards. It is more than just knowing your product. Companies similar to Digital White Space, (digitalwhitespace.com.au) can help brands to nurture their business around customer centricity, so that clients, old and new, are more likely to remain loyal to your business in the long run.
Feedback is your gold
Make sure you try as much as possible to gather as much feedback from your customers as possible. The feedback you get will help you focus on where to direct your strength and how to go about restructuring. Make sure you also try to gather the feedback in real time before your competitors get a hold on it. Progressive profiling, whereby a business gradually captures information from customers through high converting forms, is one way of keeping people engaged without leaving them feeling overwhelmed.
See how far you go with your ROI
If you feel you deliver great service, see if your ROI measures to what you claim. If it doesn’t, change your customer experience plan, act again. You should notice an increase in ROI once your customers are satisfied.
