If you are running a business, you must know that the kind of customer experience you offer would greatly impact your brand image and sales. Successful entrepreneurs are those who can come up with marketing strategies that are geared towards providing an awesome customer experience. They train their staff in a way that ensures nobody offends, annoys, or even bores a customer. They give more importance to customer relationship management in business than to any other kind of management.
Small and large organizations struggle to alter their advertising strategies and promotional campaigns to keep their ways updated with the changing consumer trends. They do not want to be left behind in the competition. They keep a sharp eye on the other players’ strategies and want to penetrate the minds of their prospects before anyone else.
The other business metrics are relatively easier to measure, such as return on investment, salary expenses, capital expenditure, operational costs, and even sales forecasts. But how do we measure customer experience?
To measure it, it’s first important to understand customer experience. What is it, and how does it impact your business? Understanding customer experience is the first step towards developing a great strategy to provide an awesome customer experience. That’s exactly what this article is about.
Let’s first define what CX is, and then we’ll discuss the importance of customer experience to the success of your business.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience, also sometimes referred to as CX, is the holistic perception of your customers about your brand and your business. It is based on the type of situations, feelings, expectations, and service they go through when they are in the process of making a purchase from your business.
Customer experience is built through the interaction that a customer has with your brand. It could be the interaction they have while at your retail outlet, office, website, online store, or even with a salesperson or brand representative who’s doing your brand promotion out in the streets. It can start as early as making an inquiry about your product through the contact form on your website. They continue to use your post-purchase customer service and write your product review.
An awesome customer experience would increase brand loyalty and make your customers want to keep coming back to you. It even works as free-of-cost word-of-mouth marketing for your business. When someone has a great experience with your brand or product, they would be proud to talk about it with their friends and peers. This gives you more reach than what your advertising costs cover.
Some brands go viral before they even make many sales because their advertisement triggers such a fantastic customer experience within the audience that people start sharing it on social media. When people start buying the product, they already have a preconceived set of expectations for it. If you can put up with those expectations, your business has a chance to shoot up like no other. That’s how powerful an awesome customer experience could be.
Since customer service is provided both online and offline, you can measure customer experience from sources and media. If it is online, it would depend on how responsive, appealing, easy to navigate, and thorough your website is. Ask yourself these questions to know whether or not your business can offer a good customer experience online.
- Are your site visitors able to easily search for and find what they are looking for?
- Do you have plenty of options and info for your prospects to contact you through your site?
- Are you easily approachable on one or more social media platforms?
- Do you make use of the latest technological features to let your customers get in touch with you online, such as via live chat?
Understanding customer experience and its importance could be a bit tricky. But let’s give it a try by listing down a few key benefits of offering an excellent experience to your customers of interacting with your business.
Importance of Customer Experience
Here are 4 key benefits of offering an awesome customer experience to all your prospects and existing customers.
1. Enjoy Enhanced Customer Loyalty
When your customers are satisfied with your service, they feel more and more comfortable shopping from your company. This means whenever they need the product again, or a different product that they know you offer, they would surely come to buy it from you. They would give priority to your brand over others in your competition. They would find it convenient to make repeat purchases with you. This is because they would expect to keep having an awesome customer experience every time they purchase from your store.
Since a good customer experience is not forgotten easily, it can go a long way in improving your brand image and maintaining a high level of brand loyalty, which is very good for your business.
2. Get Better Reviews and Recommendations
Satisfied customers write positive reviews and testimonials and even recommend your brand to their friends and peers. This word-of-mouth marketing has a great value in helping you stand out in the competition. The world is highly globalized and competitive, and there is only so far you can go to influence people through your advertisements. You need people to carry your brand and be your ambassadors. You need satisfied customers who would spread the word about your products and services among their personal and professional networks.
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To achieve that, you need to ensure your existing customers and clients enjoy a great customer experience before, during, and after purchasing your product or service.
3. Achieve a Higher Return on Investment
Businesses with a more extensive base of happy customers often enjoy higher returns on their investment. This specifically applies to their marketing expenses. Since their existing customers are already referring and recommending the brand in their circle, their advertisements have a significant and more positive impact on the audience. Their marketing messages can reach larger audiences than they set their budget for. All thanks are to the fantastic customer experience that they offer to anyone who approaches them.
These higher returns ultimately lead to a high profit margin, which helps the business save more for growth and expansion in the same or diversified fields.
4. Easily Grow and Expand Your Business
As mentioned in the previous point, your satisfied customers could become a pathway for your business to grow and expand. They would share positive feedback with you that you can use constructively. They would also help save on your marketing expenses by spreading the word about your brand through their word of mouth.
You’ll be able to see more opportunities for expanding your business. You might want to expand your existing product line or introduce an entirely new product line. Depending on your service line, you might want to include new services based on a more specialized skill set or penetrate new markets to offer the same service to larger groups of people.
Ways of Creating an Awesome Customer Experience
Here are several ways of creating a customer experience that keeps your customers happy with your brand.
1. Offer Multiple Means of Contact
Your customers must be able to get in touch with you online whenever they need to. They might inquire before buying your product or might want to complain about your product quality after receiving it. There are hundreds of potential issues your customers could have that need to be clarified during the decision-making process and even later.
To create an awesome customer experience, always keep doors open for your customers to contact you, primarily through the internet. Make sure your website has proper business contact information published on it. Better than that is to build a contact form on your site that your customers can simply fill up and submit within a minute. Respond to all your contact form entries regularly.
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Let your customers contact you via social media as well. You can integrate your website with your social media pages by adding Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter icons on your site’s footer.
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The best means to allow your customers to contact you is to have a live chat feature on your website. Customers are hungry for responses and answers to their queries. They often tend to buy from whoever gives them the fastest response. The fastest response can be provided only via a live chat feature, which is active 24/7. It is a way for you to get more leads through your website.
If you create a website on Strikingly, you can add this 24/7 live chat feature through a widget to your site. It will become a means for you to get the maximum number of leads through the site. It requires you to be on our Audience or VIP Plan. To enable it, simply go to ‘Settings’ in your Strikingly editor, and select ‘Live Chat’. Then click ‘Activate Live Chat’.
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At Strikingly, we also have 24/7 live chat support to assist our users with any inquiry, problem, error, or any other general questions that they may have. That’s because we care about the customer experience that our users have while using our platform.
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2. Always Deliver on Time
If there is anything that customers really dislike after bad quality is late delivery. Delivering your orders or services on time is key to creating a good customer experience. If you are selling products online, make sure you track your orders properly and deliver each on time. Suppose there is an issue with a delivery, such as out-of-stock issues. In that case, it is better to inform the customer beforehand instead of keeping them waiting until they get frustrated.
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If you build your website on Strikingly, we offer a built-in order management system that enables you to closely keep track of all your orders in chronological order by highlighting the due date, status, and customer details for each.
We have many other tools and features on Strikingly, making it easy for you to manage your overall business. You can check out these features through our free plan, which is our ideal package for those looking to build a basic website to represent their business.
The process is simple. After signing up through our landing, you can simply select one of the website templates from among all those that show up. Once done, start keying in your website content by using our drag-and-drop editor interface.
Running a website has never been easier. As we take care of any technical issues that our users face while maintaining their site on Strikingly, we give you ample time to focus on the primary operations of your business. That makes it a win-win situation for all of us. As you grow your business, we celebrate your success by mentioning your story in our blog posts. That gives an SEO boost to your website and further enhances your marketing reach.
