ys To Create A Stellar Customer Experience Strategie //
We are so focused as marketers and business owners on acquiring new customers, that we often forget the true lifeblood of scale – customer retention. Average monthly customer turnover rates are around 5% across all industries. This number may not seem impressive, but take into account your growth rate. If your business is a service-oriented one, then 5% growth in customers month-over-month may not be a problem. To realize revenue from this growth, you’d need to maintain churn at below 5%.
Fish churn is inevitable but how can you keep them in the tank longer?
If 5% of the business you are running leaves each month, then your bottom line will suffer. Customer experience is key. According to research, 86% customers are willing pay more for an improved experience. A better customer experience can help you increase sales, reduce churn and upsell to satisfied customers.
In this post, we’re going to look at five ways to build a customer experience strategy and improve the customer experience-regardless of what kind of business you own, or what industry you’re in.
These five strategies are:
- Get feedback and NPS Scores
- Use customer surveys to your advantage
- Every touchpoint can be personalized
- Cultivate an employee-friendly company culture
- Every step of the Customer Journey should be a learning experience
Let’s get started.
What is customer experience strategy (CXS)?
Let’s first define a customer experience plan before we dive into the five ways to improve your customers experience.
Customer experience (CX), is any interaction a customer has had with your business. This includes everything from pre-purchase experiences via marketing channels and touchpoints, to post-purchases and retention.
A customer experience strategy is a plan that aims to provide a positive, seamless experience for your customers in all marketing channels.
How to create a strategy for customer experience
These tips will help you create a strategy that is unique in terms of customer experience.
1. Get feedback and NPS Scores
The first and most important strategy we can use to improve the customer experience is to collect feedback. It is nearly impossible to improve business processes, marketing, customer service and products without knowing where your customers stand.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a kind of North Star metric that measures customer satisfaction. It measures how likely customers are to refer your products and services to others (read: will get you more business).
NPS is based on a simple survey question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” Based on the responses, customers are classified into three categories:
- Promoters (score 9-10): These are brand advocates and highly satisfied clients.
- The Passives are moderately happy customers, who may or not recommend your business.
- Detractors (scores 0-6) are customers who are unsatisfied, and less likely to recommend your business.
The percent of detractors is subtracted from percent of promoters to get your aggregate NPS score. The resultant scores can range between -100 and +100.
What is a good NPS score? Bain & Company’s creators of NPS say that a score above 0 indicates a good NPS. A score above 20 is considered great and a score above 50 is exceptional. The top percentile is anywhere above 80.
NPS can be a good way to gauge how well you are doing with your customers. However, it is only one metric and doesn’t provide you with detailed information about what you need to do to improve. surveys of your customers are a great way to dig deeper.
2. Use customer surveys to your advantage
You can use surveys to identify and improve both positive as well as negative trends that affect your customer service. This will ultimately determine whether your customers are satisfied.
Too often, customer experience is a one-sided affair. It’s easy for you to spend between 95%-100% telling your customers what they should think about your company and its products.
The surveys open up a dialog with your customers, and they make this proposition two-sided. They give your customers a platform to anonymously provide valuable and honest feedback. Without this, it would be difficult to make meaningful improvements.
A simple, yet effective survey to measure customer satisfaction.
Here are some simple ways to use surveys to collect feedback from customers:
- Website Pop-ups. Use a tool such as Hotjar (or another good pop-up) to add a banner asking customers how they would like their website or brand to be improved.
- Email surveys. Email surveys are a great way for you to stay in touch with your customers.
- In app or in-product survey. You can improve your SaaS product or mobile app by asking customers what they want to see in the product.
- Follow-up with customer service. After issues are resolved, ask your customer service staff for feedback.
There is no right way to request feedback. The important thing is to consistently give customers the opportunity to express their honest opinion about how you are serving them.
3. Every touchpoint can be personalized
Contrary to popular belief, a large part of the customer’s satisfaction is determined before they even try your product. It’s your customer service team’s job to address concerns after the event. It’s your product team’s job to use feedback to improve the product.
What about the introduction email you sent your customer when they were just newsletter subscribers? You used the customer’s first name in the Subject line. What about the demo your inside sales rep conducted with them? Did your inside sales rep look at the needs of the customer and tailor the demo to include features they would find valuable?
Know your customers and you’ll reap the rewards in the end.
Personalization plays a crucial role in this. Customers should feel valued and known from their very first contact with your brand. This will ensure that your relationship starts off right and make customers feel like you’ve got their backs, even when things go wrong. ).
Your customers will reward your efforts if you personalize every touchpoint along the funnel. This includes your landing page, email copy, chatbot, website and order confirmation emails.
4. Cultivate an employee-friendly company culture
Businesses can find it difficult to take a step back and adjust their business based on feedback from NPS and customer surveys. Even harder is to realize that employee satisfaction and company culture are important factors in determining customer satisfaction and improving the overall customer experience.
It’s true-no matter how many steps you take to provide the best possible experience for your customers, if the experience of your employees is lacking, they won’t be able offer the service that you need to be successful.
You’ll receive many reviews similar to this one if you cultivate strong employee satisfaction.
How can you create a strong culture in your company? By example. Leaders of companies play a vital role in shaping the culture they want. Leaders must consistently model the values and behavior they want from their employees. They should own up to their mistakes (rather then passing them on down the line). If their employees are performing well, they should not hesitate to acknowledge them.
Consider your values. Core Values must be defined clearly, continually emphasized, and aligned with your mission. Communication of these values and their relevance to employees’ work will help ensure that all customer interactions meet the standards set by your organization.
What is the last way to create a strong company culture? Hiring. You can save yourself a lot of trouble by prioritizing those candidates who have not only the skills necessary to succeed, but also share your company values.
5. Every step of the Customer Journey should be a learning experience
We spoke a little about the importance to personalize at each touchpoint. Every member of your team should also put education as the first priority when talking to customers and prospects.
There is nothing that causes churn more than a customer buying a product without being ready. They may not have known what they bought or how to use it. It’s great to make a sale. It’s better to create a loyal customer. You can make sure that every customer you gain has a strong life-time value if you educate them at each step.
Take a look at the statistics.
How does product education look? Consider the following examples.
- A detailed blog explaining how your product can solve a problem that is common to your customers.
- A YouTube Channel or support forum where customers can learn how to use your product and solve problems.
- Sales team that aims to educate as they sell. Prospects are given detailed and personalized demos, which leave them confident that your product can improve their lives.
- List resources that are up to date and displayed prominently on your site.
Taken together? Taken together? This is a powerful recipe for customer satisfaction.
Details are key to a successful customer experience strategy
This is it for the post. You’ll see that each of these strategies has a common theme: effort. It’s not hard to improve customer experience by making your customers feel understood and nurtured.
You’ll need to invest, but you’ll be able to limit churn and stimulate growth by making the necessary changes to your customers’ perception of your company.
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