We all know that if you provide a negative experience to a customer, not only are they more likely to tell their friends and colleagues, they may abandon you for a competitor. The good news of course, is the opposite is also true: When you provide positive experiences, customers will choose your business and tell others, time after time. The key to Customer Experience Awareness focuses on improving the way customers interact with your business.
For many years, companies just focused their customer experience around a simple model, which only concerned what happens at the beginning, middle, and end of the customer transaction. However, today, the Customer Experience is far more complicated, with overlapping customer touch points along their journey. The experience is more fluid and customers expect consistency on their terms, at any time. Keeping up is difficult for small businesses and has decreased the quality of many customer experiences.
So how do you optimize your Customer Experience Awareness? Here are several strategies you and your team can use:
Be Empathetic: Take on the point of view of your customers. Provide experiences that
are best for them, not your company. Personalize emails and respond quickly to those emails and social media posts so your customers feel like they’re communicating with a person.
Focus on the Customer Experience: Close the feedback loop from customers and share any feedback with everyone on the team. Evaluate calls and customer interactions to ensure everyone is meeting the customer experience expectations. Develop and implement best practices so customers don’t have to speak to more than one person, avoiding the repeat game, and take the time to celebrate success with team.
Don’t Sell; Communicate: Replace corporate business jargon with a human voice, and use that voice to tell your story.
Embrace Your Uniqueness: When you stand out to your customers, they are more likely to remember your brand, business and recommend it. Always consider—and implement—new ways of showing that your products and service are different from the rest.
Stay Current: Know what factors influence your customers and be ready to quickly adapt to changes if needed. Try to understand your customer wants and needs and patterns along their customer experience journey.
Every business wants to have the “top of mind” awareness in their industry and community. Start by focusing on improving your entire customer experience and all the touch points along their journey with you. The results will be amazing and profitable. Now that would be Magical!