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In our age of constant technological innovation, it’s easy to forget the importance of good old-fashioned customer service. But in reality, providing a positive customer experience is more important than ever for businesses. There are a few key reasons why customer experience is important.
First, happy customers are loyal customers. If they have a good experience with your company, they’re more likely to come back and do business with you again in the future.
Note: An easy way to understand your customers’ behavior and their preferences is using a behavior analytics tool. WatchThemLive is here to help you. Keep reading to see how!
What Is Customer Experience
Customer experience is the totality of a customer’s perceptions and feelings about a brand or company. It includes everything from the first contact with a company, through the purchase process, to post-purchase follow-up. A positive customer experience leads to customer loyalty and repeats business, while a negative one can result in customers taking their business elsewhere. In today’s competitive marketplace, creating a positive customer experience should be a top priority for any business that wants to be successful.
The History of Customer Experience
The origin of customer experience goes back in the 1960s when the first marketing and consumer theories were happening. That was the time when long-lasting customer organization relationships were the priority, and customers were placed at the center of the business.
Over the past few years, the business world has faced huge changes, and the importance of products or services has shifted toward the customer experience. The experience your customers have with your company has become increasingly important. On the other hand, the Internet has made it easier for customers to find reviews and rates for products. As a result, companies need to work hard and find a way to make all the interactions positive and have more satisfied customers.
The Benefits of a Good Customer Experience
The first thing to mention is that in order to improve customer experience effectively and successfully, all the team members need to understand and believe in the great impact of a positive CX. Customer experience can impact customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, repeat purchases, and having customers refer your business to their family and friends. So, a good customer experience can buy you loyal customers who are willing to stay your customers. CX can benefit you in other ways, too; it can help you to reduce the Cost of acquiring and the cost to Serve a Customer by knowing your customers and their needs and meanwhile, knowing how to serve their needs and wishes. This can simply lead to an increase in revenues.
Reasons Why Customer Experience is Important
You are already aware of how important customer experience is to all businesses. Customer experience is the pulse of your business as it can significantly:
1. Improve Customer Satisfaction
The average customer satisfaction rate all over the world is 86%. For a better rate, you can consider your customers’ expectations, be accurate, and provide what you have promised. Make sure you deliver what you have promised and surprise your customers with extra care and support. Remember, having a satisfied customer increases the revenue 2.6 times more than a dissatisfied customer.
2. Bring about Loyal Customers
Creating a great experience for your customers is a valued and unique asset that can impress them and they will be more likely to become loyal customers. Additionally, finding a way to maintain your existing customers costs 7 times less than getting new customers. Invest in your existing customers and you will see positive results soon.
On the contrary, there are a number of things that can affect your brand’s reputation negatively; weak customer service for instance. The way you respond to customers will determine what they say about you in the future. Although you want to provide all customers with positive feedback, it can be quite unrealistic. Still, you can try your best to respond to negative feedback politely and assure unhappy customers that you will find the best solution for their problem; otherwise, you will lose your customers to competitors.
3. Increase Customer Advocacy
Not many customers believe in advertisements anymore, instead, they are seeking third-party validation and they actually care about what other people say about a brand and its products.
Considering the impact of word of mouth on customers, you’d better focus on creating a great customer experience and an advocate out of every customer. You also need to use advocates and user-generated content to engage customers and improve brand loyalty. For example, you can ask your customers to share pictures of themselves using your product; this can simply encourage visitors to convert.
4. Help You Outshine Your Competitors
Everyone is now aware of the impact of great content on customers, so you need something more to stand out from your competitors. How? Customer experience is the perfect tool! This way, customers will take service and user experience into consideration, along with the product and the price. Apply a customer-centric strategy to make sure your today’s customers will be your tomorrow’s brand advocates.
5. Build Trust and a Strong Relationship
To build a strong relationship with your customers, you need personalized content and experiences. You want to make your customers feel special and unique. By doing so, you can build trust with them and it ends in a strong long-lasting relationship.
The Cost of a Bad Customer Experience
According to NewVoiceMedia, bad customer service can cost $75 million annually, and it’s increasing rapidly. Accenture, the prominent consulting firm, estimated that the cost of a poor customer experience, which will result in a customer switch to other providers, could be as high as $1.6 trillion. Moreover, the cost of acquiring a new customer is at least five times as much as retaining a current customer. Having this information, isn’t it easier to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty?
Let’s take a look at the elements that are causing the cost to increase more rapidly than the rate of economic growth.
- Customers usually remember bad experiences more than good experiences, and nearly half of them stop doing business after a bad experience. Another thing is that unhappy customers will tell at least one person about their bad experience.
- Social media has caused lots of changes. Before social media, it was said that a bad experience was told seven times more than a good one, but with the growth of social media, even a single bad review can reach thousands (or even more) potential customers. The point is, what does a bad review do? Well, researchers found that a single bad review is enough to prevent over 30% of potential customers from doing business with a company.
- With the increase in globalization and technology, retaining customers has become increasingly difficult for all kinds of businesses, especially for brick-and-mortar retailers. Even a small slip in customer service can result in losing customers overnight.
How to Improve Customer Experience
There are different ways to improve customer experience. We will go through some common ways. For example, using features like session replays will let you access every single move your visitors make including the clicks and mouse movements. Wondering how it benefits you? Well, session recording is the best way to study user behavior as there is no need to worry about understanding the numerical data. You can see what on your website seems attractive to users and what makes them drop off. Sign up and give WatchThemLive’s session replays a try now and get real results.
- Don’t think instead of the customers; ask them what they want and be creative in the questions you ask. You can interview them, give them questionnaires, run surveys, etc., and it is crucial to remember that customers’ needs change rapidly due to social media and the massive options it provides them.
- Remember the customers and their needs when you are designing new products and services. Think of cost reduction, capacity increases, and other related things. Keep in mind that capturing the voice of your customers and reacting to them can make dramatic improvements.
- Provide the most profitable customers with exceptional services. It can benefit you in two ways; first, it is desired to retain these customers as they are the core of your business. Secondly, you want them to become advocates for your business to those they come into contact with.
- Never underestimate the impact of human interactions while serving a customer or dealing with their issues. Nearly all the customers would not switch providers if the company could have provided them with a good customer experience. What companies need to do is balancing customer satisfaction through the use of automation and technology.
- Make sure that key metrics do not encourage behavior that negatively impacts customer satisfaction. Occasionally, key metrics are focused on things like financial results and operational results. It is true that no one would say that these metrics should be ignored, still, they usually work in opposition to customer experience.
The Future of Customer Experience
With this unstoppable increase in data and feedback from customers running across different channels, the necessity for innovative methods of measuring customer experience has become more and more important. In the future, customer experience management will be driven by AI (artificial intelligence) and facilitated through machine learning on a large scale. AI will collect the needed information on customer actions, and within a short time, it processes the data and will learn how to improve CX in real time by personalization. These innovations can be strongly helpful in identifying unhappy and dissatisfied customers or the ones who are at risk of switching their providers.
Conclusion
Customer experience and customer satisfaction have become part of our culture, so we need to start with innovative ideas and products to elevate the customer experience. We should outperform the competitors and set new industry benchmarks. There are some platforms that help you to track, measure, and manage your business’s customer experience. WatchThemLive, for instance, is an excellent platform with features such as session replays which can help you to deliver an exceptional customer experience. Sign up here and see yourself!
