How to Improve Customer Experience?
Improving customer experience isn’t a one-day job, however it is something you can tackle piece-by-piece over time until you end up right where you want to be. 13 ways to make it happen follow:
Know Your Customers
It’s impossible to create your organization’s best CX unless you know your customers well and are clear about what they’re looking for from your product. Look into how they currently use your product, what they want from it, and details specific to each customer to help inform a full picture of who they are.
Establish your Ideal CX
How do you want a customer to feel when they interact with your brand? What are your organization’s goals and vision? Figure that out, then shape your CX plan around those ideals. Once you know what they are, you can work on the details that will make it happen. Check and recheck that every step along the way invokes the feeling you want for your customers to experience.
Develop a Customer-Centric Culture
Instead of creating a customer experience team to manage customer experience for your organization, make it a part of the culture for every single team and individual person within your company. By encouraging your staff to consider the customer in every decision they make, you’ll ensure your CX is on the right path.
Provide quick, simple, and accurate customer support
Provide the information they need in the place they’ll look for it, and make sure your team is both quick to respond and skilled. This is especially important if your customers are likely to have time-sensitive queries.
Personalize the Customer Experience
Top-notch customer experience includes making every customer feel valued as an individual. To do this, make sure your CX strategy includes ways to personalize each customer’s experience with your brand. Provide your team with a way to see a complete view of a customer, including purchases they’ve made, how they use your product, and suggestions on things you should recommend to them based on their history. Once you’re beyond a small number of customers, though, this level of customization will be tricky to do on your own. As your team scales, invest in a full-fledged customer engagement suite like Freshworks.
Boost customer engagement
Customer engagement is an essential piece of CX across industries. Whether you’re developing a plan for engagement for an airline, a piece of software, or a small business, the key to success will be in satisfying customers and keeping them engaged. To boost customer engagement, you can foster an active community to periodically engage with your customers about your product/ service or brand. This is a great way to get your customers to engage with in conversations amongst themselves. To learn more on improving your engagement skills, check out our guide to customer engagement.
Move to an Omnichannel Solution
If you’re still uni-channel multi-channel, now is the time to go omnichannel. Create a system for allowing customers to interact with you from any channel and receive the same level of support. Work to eliminate disconnected tools and workflows in favor of a unified approach. Know how you’ll handle it if a customer sends an email, tweets at you, and opens a live chat all within a few minutes. By avoiding information silos and opening support up between teams, you’ll instantly provide better service to your customers.
Improve Customer Service Experience
Develop your customer service to directly connect with your branding and goals. Make sure you’re offering top-notch customer service anytime a customer reaches out to your team. To help your team make this happen, eliminate unnecessary roadblocks so your agents have access to exactly what they need to get the job done right. Avoid sticking your team with the task of burdensome transfers and slow-moving tiers of support, and instead empower them to take care of the issue or make sure any hand offs are done smoothly and with as little extra frustration on the user’s side as possible.
Build Out Your Self-Service Options
Modern customers are busy and many are savvy enough to be able to help themselves. Why not let them? Be sure your CX includes self-service support options, with offerings like a complete knowledge base that includes help guides and how-tos, a community forum space to ask new questions, and any other resources a customer may need to answer their own questions. If the self-service approach fails, make it easy for them to reach a team member for help instead.
Communicate Clearly with Your Users
Any direct communication you have with your users is an important piece of CX. This includes customer service. Every support interaction is a chance to directly connect with the customer. And after every interaction, the customer will leave the conversation with an impression of your organization which will consequently affect how they feel about your brand overall. To be sure the customer leaves a support request feeling great about your brand, train your support team to use a conversational, welcoming style and give them the resources they need to get the job done quickly and efficiently.
Take a Proactive Approach
Some customers have no problem reaching out to support, but others will struggle in silence. Instead of waiting for customers to contact you with a problem, look for ways to prevent them from needing to. Look for ways to invite users to contact your support team when they get stuck somewhere, and consider reaching out to them directly to survey their thoughts on your product occasionally too. Ask directly for questions or complaints and be ready to resolve them when people reply.
Reward Engagement and Loyalty
As you put in all the work to increase customer engagement and loyalty, don’t forget to make it worthwhile to your customers to stick around too. Look for ways to offer incentives, such as special discounts, exclusive resources, or the chance to try out a new feature first. Your most engaged and loyal customers will not only keep using your product, they’re also the people most likely to recommend it to their friends too.
Collect and Leverage Data
Instead of guessing what your customers expect from your product or service, find out by undertaking a customer survey and analyzing customer data. Part of your plan for CX must include collecting data and organizing it in a helpful and efficient way. Ensure the data you collect makes an impact on the way your customer facing teams interact with your customers, and in turn on the customer experience, they deliver.
Strategize and Reflect
Develop your customer experience strategy and put it into action, but don’t stop there. Be sure to regularly reflect on how it’s going and be ready to make adjustments as needed. While your strategy may have been developed using data, you probably won’t get it totally right 100% of the time. Instead of dwelling on a failure, learn from it and move forward with a new plan.