As you begin a new year, developing a customer experience strategy for your business has never been more important. Every business benefits from a positive customer experience. Whether you are a small business, mom and pa business or a large company, creating a magical customer experience strategy will improve your bottom line.

Think about this. As a customer, how do you feel when you receive a poor customer experience? You’re most likely going to become frustrated, disappointed or even angry. This means you will be less motivated to engage with this business again. Further, you may speak negatively about your experiences with other people.

On the other hand, if you have a positive customer experience with a business, you are probably going to become an advocate for that business. When we become advocates for a business, we recommend it to others. Positive recommendations and referrals are extremely valuable and profitable for helping businesses to grow.

In a recent survey of thousands of consumers and business buyers regarding how they viewed the importance of the customer experience the results were eye-opening.

  • 80% of customers think the experience that a company provides is just as important as its products and services.
  • 57% of customers have taken their business to a competitor due to unsatisfactory customer experience.
  • 86% would pay more for a better customer experience.

Would these statistics effect your business? It is clear that nurturing positive relationships with customers will bring value and profits to your business. People invest in businesses when they feel positive about them. A large percentage would even pay more for a product or service if they’re guaranteed to receive great customer care. Despite what the costs might be, the benefits of establishing a positive customer experience strategy this year will pay off. Customer loyalty will help to increase your bottom line. Improve your customer experience and you’ll quickly notice your profits rising.

So how do you begin? First, think about the three main elements of a good customer experience.

  1. A customer experience should trigger an emotional response from your customers. The most important factor is how your customers are feeling at every step during the experience. Try to acknowledge how your customer feels and validate those feelings with good consistent experiences along the way.
  1. Be sure to make the customer experience easy. A good customer experience should require minimal customer effort on the part of the customer but achieve maximum impact. In other words, is it easy for your customers to do business with you? This should be the case in the entire process of the customer journey, before, during and after the sale.
  1. Your customer experience should be efficient in solving problems leaving your customers feeling satisfied that their issue has been resolved. True resolution means that the customer does not need to spend time an energy having to follow up with you by phone or messages just to make sure they get what they want. If a resolution cannot be met, why? Do your services need to adapt? Are you missing something? Evaluate your current processes to improve the resolution rate. This will benefit your business financially.

We know that customer experience should fulfill the customer’s need in terms of ease, efficiency and emotion. As you begin the new year, get everyone in your business from managers, support staff and all front line staff involved in providing input on evaluating your current customer experience. Their opinions, thoughts and engagement matters. Especially those who deal with your customers on a regular basis. Then begin making any and all meaningful changes to boost or create a positive customer experience in your business.  Even one change might add profits to your bottom line. How valuable would that be for your business this year? Need help, contact me today! Best wishes for a “Magical” Year!