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An exceptional buying experience is one that is memorable and enjoyable for customers and creates an excellent customer experience. There are a few key elements that are necessary in order to create such an experience. First, it is important to create a warm and welcoming environment. This can be done by having a friendly and helpful staff, as well as a clean and inviting store. Secondly, it is important to offer a wide selection of products and services that meet the needs of the customer.
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What Is the Buying Experience?
The buying experience is a subset of the overall customer experience. The term is used to define the buyer’s perception of the entire purchase process, starting from realizing the need all the way to finalizing a purchase. The buying experience is formed by various interactions between you and the prospects. The interactions are usually called touchpoints and they are in different forms including traditional media like Tv and radio, plus digital channels like social apps and email or even word of mouth.
The buyer experience is multi-stage, uninterrupted, and typically emotionally driven and the key to creating a great buying experience is mapping out these touchpoints.
The Importance of a Great Buying Experience
Clearly, prospects don’t have much time to do in-depth research and get to know your product features. They are not able to talk to different sales representatives or go all through time-consuming FAQs. Actually, this is all your responsibility to make the purchase as easy as possible for them and inform them.
Although most consumers agree that price and quality are the most important factors, but still near half of the respondents say that their convenience while buying also matters a lot. Now that consumers’ lives are getting busier than ever before, the overall buying experience is likely to overtake price and quality soon. Keep in mind that even a fantastic product with a reasonable price can be at risk of losing customers if other competitors can deliver a better buyer experience and a stronger online presence.
The Benefits of an Outstanding Buying Experience
- Builds trust among your audience
- Shortens the sales cycle
- Boosts conversion rates
- Gains loyal customers
- Increases repeat customer rates
Building a great customer experience can make the difference between a customer who comes back in the future and another one who never comes back. We can categorize the key elements for making a great buying experience as in the following:
- Quality: You need to make sure that you are offering the highest quality.
- Convenience: Customers need to find what they want easily and fast.
- Selection: Customers need to have lots of options to choose from in order to find what matches their needs.
- Price: Customers need to feel like they are paying a reasonable price for what they buy.
Having all these elements together, you will be able to create a seamless experience that can easily make customers come back.
How to Create a Great Buying Experience
One of the most important factors in achieving success is having satisfied customers. Happy and satisfied customers help you grow by coming back to you and buying over and over again. Still, your customers rely on you to meet their needs and get solutions to their issues. To keep your customers happy, you should provide a positive buying experience. Follow these steps:
1- Recognize Customer Pain Points
You need to start with recognizing your customers and their needs. Don’t think you know what your customers want, asking about their preferences lets them talk about their needs and challenges. You can create surveys to understand the reason behind your product’s popularity among users. Maybe there is a common use case that you are unaware of or the opposite, maybe there is a feature users are barely using while you think it is popular.
To understand customers’ pain points, you can also reach out to churn customers and ask them the reason, then, you can use the information to build a better buyer experience.
2- Make It Easy For Buyers to Ask Questions
You probably need great and qualified content to convert customers; you also need to make customers feel there are people behind your brand who can assist. Customers want to feel they can ask for help whenever they want and have their problems solved right away. Live chats, for example, are good solutions.
3- Discover Where Customers Are in the Buying Process
Once you have recognized your customers and assured them that they can easily reach you, it is time to identify where your buyers are. The buyer’s journey is a bird’s-eye view of every single step your customer takes including the moment they learn about your brand all through the way to the moment they purchase.
There are three key elements in the buyer’s journey:
1. Awareness
This is the step where your customers find out about your existence, although they are not actively looking for a particular product but they are aware of your brand and it will be an important factor in later stages.
2. Consideration
Now that your customer is aware of your brand, they are ready to buy and are of course comparing different options between you and your competitors. This is where you need to stand out among the crowd and make it easy for customers to believe you are better than other competitors.
Before buying any product, a customer tries to gather knowledge from different sources like blogs, YouTube, and Reviews. But most people prefer to get understanding & reviews from YouTube as it gives an individual access to know the product visually.
YouTube also has a unique feature that customizes a visitor’s choice & creates a feed according to their taste. According to WikiAsk, YouTube considers a variety of signals, such as watch and search history, subscribed channels, sharing, likes/dislikes, clicks, watch time, surveys, country, and time of day; YouTube’s algorithm for deep learning understands user preferences.
For this unique feature, if a person searches for a specific product or service, YouTube shows all the available resources according to the person’s needs & which helps to convince them to purchase the product.
3. Decision
At this stage, your customer has already reached a potential pick and if it’s you, you need to make sure they can purchase the product as easily as possible and the process is smooth and enjoyable for customers.
4- Accompany Customers Through the Sales Process
You have already conducted research to find your brand’s strengths and pain points, now it is time to review the research and look for the areas to improve so the buyer takes a seamless route through awareness, consideration, and decision.
In order to find what obstacles customers are facing through each stage of the journey, you can use a behavioral analytics tool that shows you every single action a customer performs on your website, including the clicks, mouse movements, pages they view, etc. and this can drastically help you find the obstacles. This way, you can understand which part of the marketing funnel needs to be improved. WatchThemLive session replay is a great tool you can use to see the steps customers take while they are on your website.
Sign up now and get instant access to session replays.
5- Offer Explicit Product and Service Comparisons
Make all the key benefits and tradeoffs accessible for customers, so that they are empowered enough to make informed decisions. Not every buyer spends time to find out about the differences between products. For that reason, you as a producer are in charge of highlighting the most relevant details and comparing and contrasting different products and services. For example, highlighting the key differences in a side-by-side manner can help customers effortlessly choose what they want and click the checkout button.
6- Implement Product or Service-based Solutions
Customers want a company that is able to help them solve their problems; show them you have been paying attention to their needs and that you care about their problems. While talking to customers, try to offer solutions to your customers’ problems and explain how they can use your product or service to solve their problems.
7- Encourage Buyers to Evaluate the Post-sale
To make an exceptional buying experience, you need to make your customers feel heard. Make them believe that you care about their opinion and you listen to them carefully. However, to encourage them to take part in the evaluation, you should have everything as simple as possible, and as fun, as you can. Typically, people do not participate in these kinds of things, especially after they have spent their hard-earned money!
Conclusion
Creating an exceptional buying experience is essential for businesses today. It might even be the most critical perspective to understand that it is not a passage to finish, actually, it is a continuous process in which the buyer has to shift between various stages. Another important thing to remember is that you should consider and treat each buying experience as a repeatable one. Having happy customers requires continuous evaluation of your target audience and making a positive experience; the result obviously is more converted customers and word of mouth. Additionally, WatchThemLive is here to help you increase customer satisfaction and improve your buying experience. Sign up and give it a try now!
