Winning over new clients costs a great deal more than maintaining an existing consumer base. Betting on a sure thing, spending time improving and maintaining the relationships forged with loyal clients will usually enhance the customer experience leading to improved customer retention and to recommend you.
Focussing on creating quality interactions with customers, will lead to a journey a client will go on with a brand over the lifecycle of that purchasing relationship. Enhancing that lifecycle will impress future investors and potential customers. Established and successful customer experiences attribute value to the brand, which can essentially be recognised as both a unique selling point and an asset.
Customer experience is equally important in building trust, enhancing reputation and improving customer satisfaction. Increasing the likelihood of repeat purchases, enhancing customer experience will correlate directly with improved revenue and profit. With the evolution of social media and technology, delivering high-quality service is more important than ever. Failure to recognise the increasingly important role customer experience plays in attracting and retaining consumers is a sure-fire strategy for undermining a business that would otherwise have great potential. Going above and beyond customers expectations allows the customer to feel valued.
It's not simply about a company building profit, but without the emphasis on value and vision going into a product, the client experience will feel empty and unrewarding. It is a good discipline for a brand to place itself into its audience's shoes, to imagine and anticipate the pain points and drivers a consumer will go through when making a purchasing decision. Every stage of supporting this purchasing process requires consistency and transparency. Switching the emphasis from selling to connecting, the transactional becomes relatable. Customers tend to remember negative experiences more clearly than positive ones. Therefore no stage of the customer lifecycle management can be neglected. To share the responsibility of enhancing the customer experience, the purchase funnel needs to be streamlined, with a strategy constructed that includes every company department from marketing to design.
As mentioned previously, brands are so much more transparent with the unrelenting rise of social media. Clients value insight into the inner workings of the team which sits behind a product or the service image. Originality and authenticity are valuable qualities for strategies looking to enhancing customer experience. A considerable shift towards promoting diversity and normality in advertising has transformed the demand for honesty within branding. The use of photoshopping, unethical trade and size zero models has never been more detrimental to the customer experience. Audiences want their consumption to be driven by kindness and environmentally friendly standards. By empowering your audience, engagement and loyalty will grow. The relationship between customer demand and what brands are delivering should be of paramount consideration.
This is Method's 3 stage cycle for enhancing your customer experience:
1. Make your brand user friendly
There is nothing more infuriating than a dysfunctional website or poor customer service. Taking time to fix troublesome bots, address lazy employees or identify glitches in the buyer's journey, can result in customers switching to and staying with your brand. By designing a user-friendly website, refining, refining and further refining the CRM, enhancing and aligning algorithms and automation, creating a satisfying, intuitive environment for users, well, developed products and services will teach you increasingly about your client's pain points and drivers. Knowledge is power, so level up!
2. Personalise your engagements
People have sought out your brand to make a purchase. They have identified and invested in a product or services designed and retailed specifically by you. Recognising the individuality of a consumer validates them on many levels. Although it can be challenging to recognise individuality when marketing en masse, certain features such as geography and gender can be easily identified and actioned. The value in adding a name to each personal contact made by email or paper mail, for example, is a high-value strategy for customer satisfaction.
3. Ensure there are clear routes for resolution
Problems will occur no matter how intuitively software or customer service programmes are designed. Plan to resolve any unforeseen issues comprehensively. Anticipate the frustration triggered by complications or frustration customers encounter when researching or purchasing products or services. Aspire to pacify and placate your clients, systematically sorting out problems. Never be too proud to offer an apology when things go wrong, pride makes us artificial, and humility makes us real. When these complications turn into full-blown obstacles for potential leads, negative experiences can incur bad reviews and result in reputational damage.
