How to improve the customer experience for your business

Without customers, your business would go nowhere. So it's in your best interest to always be thinking about ways to improve their experience. After all, the more pleasant the experience, the more likely those customers will be to offer you new business. And in this hyper-competitive climate, most companies can't afford one-time customers.

Therefore, it should be a top priority for your company to do everything you can to improve your customer experience (CX). Even the smallest improvement in CX can generate a huge increase in revenue. Isn't that the goal? And shouldn't you prioritize anything and everything that can improve your bottom line?

If that's the case, customer experience should be near (or at) the top of your list of improvements to make to your business.

But where do you start? It's actually not as difficult as you might think. Let's walk through some key strategies you can implement to start your journey to a much better CX.

Know who your customers are

This has to come first. To improve your experience, you must know who your customers are. Do they belong to a certain age group, economic status, ethnicity or religion? Knowing who your customers are will go a long way in improving the experience.

For example, if you know that the majority of your customers are millennials, you know that they prefer to interact via text or mobile apps like Instagram. That being the case, you would want to focus much of your effort on improving the experience of your mobile and social presence. If these are your customers and you put more effort into traditional interactions (like phones, email lists, and websites), you could be wasting valuable resources.

Sketch a vision

Once you know who your customers are, it's time to define a vision for how you plan to improve their experience. This vision can be as simple as creating a mission statement for that aspect of your business. This statement could be something like: “Make the customer feel like we are that friend they want to hang out with over and over again.”

It may sound extravagant, but it's something that can have far-reaching implications. You don't just want repeat business, you want to make your customers feel like they're doing business with a friend. This says a lot and can go a long way toward guiding your vision.

Develop deeper connections

Once you've defined your vision, it's time to not only make it a reality, but let it help you develop deeper connections with not only your customers, but also those who can help continue to improve that experience.

You can have a powerful marketing department and a team of diverse developers, both capable of helping to realize this vision. By creating deeper connections between these teams and your customers, your vision will not only solidify, but also be empowered to evolve to ensure that as things change, your business can shift to meet trends and help you take smarter business decisions.

Get feedback

As your journey towards improved CX continues, you must get feedback at every step. This feedback comes not only from your internal teams, but also from your customers. Now that you know your customers (and have a solid vision for improving their experience), you'll know exactly the best way to communicate with them to continue evolving the way you interact.

The importance of this feedback cannot be overstated. At the same time, however, you should avoid hounding your customers to give you feedback. This must be voluntary and never forced. Give the customer the tools they need to give their opinion and don't constantly pressure them. Do this and you will lose a customer. Can you pay for it? Probably not.

Implement the necessary technology

Improving your customer experience doesn’t have to cost a fortune, but you may have to incur some small additional costs. This is especially true if you don't already have the technology needed to help improve CX. For example, you may need to deploy bots to serve as the first line of contact for customers. Bots can help prevent customers from having to wait for a real human to talk to them. Given how little people want to wait in a 24/7 connected world, this is crucial.

You should also consider adding Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to the mix, as both technologies can not only help you make business decisions faster but also predict trends, meaning you can always stay ahead of the curve with CX.

Track the right metrics

Finally, you must track metrics. But don't just monitor any metrics, focus on metrics that will help you continually improve CX. You'll want to monitor and understand metrics like:

• Net Promoter Score: Measures customer loyalty based on the question “How likely are you to recommend us or our product to a friend?”
• Customer Satisfaction: measures how satisfied customers are with your products or services.
• Customer Effort Score: Measures how easy it was for customers to interact with your business.
• Customer Lifetime Value: Measures the total amount of money a customer has brought to your business.
• Customer churn rate: measures how loyal customers are to you.
• Average response time: Measures how long it takes a customer to respond.
• Average resolution time: Measures how long it takes for a support question or complaint to be resolved.

When trying to improve CX, each of the above metrics should be considered a mandatory measurement.

Conclusion

Take CX seriously and you will see your business grow dramatically in the next year. This topic has become extremely important as the business world becomes increasingly competitive. You'll want to have every advantage you can over your competition, and starting with customer experience is a surefire way to see long-term improvements.