Did you know that customers that rate companies with a high customer experience score (i.e. 10/10) spend 140% more and remain loyal for up to 6 years. A recent PwC survey with 15,000 consumers found that 1 in 3 consumers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience. That’s mind blowing to us. This shows that customer experience hugely impacts the willingness of a customer to be a loyal advocate.
Customer service is only one aspect of customer experience. To keep customers happy, it goes beyond investing in their experience but rather how the customers perceive their interactions with your brand.
Let us share with you our 5 tips for your brand to stand out with your online customer experience, especially during the seasonal periods like Lunar New Year. Of course, there are no perfect recipes in the world, so definitely tweak the ingredients to your needs.
1. Discovering Your Differentiating Touch Points
The very first step to growing your company is to have exceptional customer experience. It begins by defining who you are as a brand and aligning it to a customer experience strategy3. Keep in mind that customer experience does not necessarily mean customer extravagance.
Next, segment your customers according to their value to your business1. Keep in mind that not all customers contribute equally, thus you’ll need to collect data with a basic survey to make sense and classify them accordingly. For instance, categorise your customers according to their lifetime value, revenue, profit, or social media influence.
Subsequently, outline your customer journey and define the main consumer touchpoints. This helps you to see your company from the consumer’s point of view, evoking specific emotions related to the interaction.
Possible touch points include:
- Searching for an item
- Adding to cart
- Checkout
- Delivery
- After-sales services or exchanges.
Every step of the way, you have a chance to provide your customer with either an acceptable or superb experience. Hence, it is important to identify patterns, emotions, ‘pain points’, and opportunities to correct mistakes or better the experience at each stage.
Moments of Truth
Finally, determine customers’ moments of truth3. These crucial interactions are likely to provoke a lasting positive or negative change in the customer’s opinion of the company – either making or breaking the relationship with your customers. Each moment of truth is unique to your company and these are the interactions customers generally care most about.
- An example of a positive moment of truth is having a pleasant and informative interaction on the website’s live chat regarding a new released pair of shorts.
“The live chat assistant was patient with my questions, offering me opinions on colours and sizing that would better suit me and my style.”
“The assistant went above and beyond by sending a link of a short clip from their Instagram live to show the cut and fitting of the shorts.”
- In contrast, a negative moment of truth would be
“The company lost my trust by delivering a purchase later than the promised date and not replying to my multiple email attempts. The company has branded itself with guaranteed on-time delivery. My package arrived 3 days late with neither an apology nor reply from the company. As a customer, I felt extremely cheated and was enraged.”
2. Keeping It Consistent across Channels
The implementation of your company’s customer strategy must be uniform across all of the different channels you operate. Be it your physical stores, website, live chat, social media, and more2. They need to be harmonized with one another and be consistent with details such as pricing and product availability. We suggest that your company should give its frontline and support staff thorough onboarding, targeted training, and support including3:
- Contact handling, this includes training and relevant product material that was freely available in your management system
- Providing clear guidelines clarifying which services and functions could and could not be delivered via the chat channel
- Provide soft skills training to optimise handling times and increase overall performance efficiency
- Produce pre-written response templates and knowledge items
- Implement a formal continuous improvement program using information from customer feedback and website analytics to forecast staff requirements, assess their training needs and improve customer experience.
This ensures that your customers will receive the same experiences and messages regardless of the different channels. Essentially, you need to understand how people interact with your organisation at multiple levels. By offering your customers a seamless, consistent experience across channels and touchpoints, they can be effortlessly guided to the desired endpoint.
3. Leveraging on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool
Customers now have significantly more information and control over what they buy and from whom. Furthermore, the Internet has undoubtedly raised customer expectations. Remember – customer loyalty is not bought overnight, it is achieved by a company’s consistency and positive experiences over a long period of time!
The main problem is that most companies do not understand how, why, and what makes a loyal customer. It is important to take notice that all your company functions have a direct impact on the customer.
With the use of a CRM software1, you can view customers’ purchase history and predict future needs even before the customer recognises they need it2. Having the ability to predict a future need will allow you to be proactive and attentive. Thus, a 360-degree view of your customer.
How to Improve your Customer Experience
- Keep in touch to continue meaningful connections.
How? A CRM system includes a vast variety of information about your consumers and how they interact with your company – this includes past activities, conversations and purchases - Listening to the customer’s needs.
This can be done through email marketing surveys to know more about their experiences and how we can do to make it better - Establishing personal relationships.
By what means? Personalizing your marketing communication1. CRM software captures all different channels of communication over time through different departments, use this information to your advantage - Offer what consumers really want not what you think they want or would want.
This is done with the help of the history of your consumer interaction recorded in a CRM system - Cater attentive customer support.
Alleviate the stress of losing your customer inquiry, because each request is logged into a central system that can be obtained online - Respond promptly to requests.
Ready-made email templates are incredible as it speeds up your response to frequently asked questions with selecting templates from the system. Thus, you can be assured that your template is consistent with the company’s tone.
4. Building a community
Adding a human touch creates a personal connection. With online community groups about brands or products on the rise, it should not be left on the sideline. By working together with or even creating these community groups or forums will strengthen a company’s consumer experience.
Watch and listen closely to these groups to better understand their intent and handle support in all channels. Furthermore, they can act as a support group to aid your business into growth.
However, if there are currently no groups or forums2 about your company, you can always start your own community. You can set the rules and guidelines for your customers in the groups to maintain a level of decency and respect among members. Additionally, members are able to share their reviews on their latest purchase and help to answer any questions by other members. The channel would preferably be managed by trained staff, to handle the necessary support and maintain rules, and regulations. This channel would be great for your company to send out any immediate updates directly to loyal customers or soon-to-be loyal customers!
5. Reinventing the wheel
Companies are constantly playing the catch-up game with their customers2. It’s exhausting! The mentality of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ should be forsaken. Develop your competitive edge – whether it is on your social, your physical store, or even on your website.
This can be as simple as creating a new annual social challenge, unique to your company and values. Making waves in your industry is not as complicated as rocket science. Be ambitious!
Here are some examples of brands that created a unique, attractive shopper experience you can read more on.
Making your Move
We understand that planning a strategy that works for you and your brand is no easy task, it really depends on your overall business goals and business type. We are firm-believers in placing customers first, across the entire business and across all of the products and services that you sell. At the end of the day, you would want the people who give you their money to be happy and willing to do so!
Sources:
1Customer Relationship Management: Getting It Right!
2The Customer Experience Edge: Technology and Techniques for Delivering an Enduring, Profitable and Positive Experience to Your Customers
3Transform Customer Experience