Companies that lead in customer experience outperform those that don't by 80 per cent. An improved customer experience during all steps of the customer journey can lead to a better retention rate, and increasing your retention rate by just five per cent can lead to an increase in profits of up to 95 per cent.
A great customer experience builds consistent and long lasting customer engagement. Here are five ways you can improve the customer experience.
1. Use a CRM
A CRM helps improve the customer experience by allowing for personalisation and better resolution of problems. When a customer calls you up with a problem, you can access their purchase history and previous calls or emails to better understand their situation and help them find solutions to problems quickly. Reps can reach out to high-value clients and help them with the onboarding process. They can be proactive at getting feedback and ensuring clients are getting what they need. Reps from different departments (such as marketing and sales) can share information quicker to build better relationships and offer more personalised interactions.
2. Provide Live Chat
Customer satisfaction with live chat is at more than 83 per cent. Live chat is the perfect balance between phone calls, which provide immediate answers, and emails, which don't take up much time. Customers can chat live with a representative to get immediate solutions to problems while multi-tasking and being productive. They can have multiple tabs open at once so the rep can guide them through an online process. You can even build an automated chatbot that answers frequently asked questions, helps customers find answers in your knowledge base, and forwards customers to a live rep when needed.
3. Send Out Surveys
To improve the quality of your service and increase customer satisfaction, it's crucial to collect feedback from your existing clients. Surveys are a great way to do this, as you can include multiple-choice or free-text questions that don't take long to answer. You'll be able to find out whether your clients are satisfied with your service, discover problems that often come up, and learn new ways to improve your service so that you increase customer retention and make new sales. The very act of asking for your customers' opinions shows them that you care about them and are willing to improve. This helps build trust and strengthen relationships.
4. Improve Your NPS Score
Your Net Promoter Score is a score of how likely a customer is to recommend your product or service to their friends and family. This goes beyond customer satisfaction because it shows how customers feel about you as a brand as a whole, not just whether they were satisfied with the quality of your product or the level of support they got from customer service.
Improving your Net Promoter Score is a process that involves improving all aspects of your business, leading to increased growth. It starts with improving customer loyalty, which you can do by increasing trust, building strong relationships, and setting up loyalty programs. You should be offering competitive pricing, helping customers with onboarding, being there for them when they voice concerns, listening to them, increasing accessibility, expanding your customer support capabilities, and collecting feedback.
5. Increase Your Social Media Presence
Having an active social media presence not only conveys social proof and boosts authority but also helps enhance the customer experience. Everyone's on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram these days. You can use social media to get announcements and messages out to your customers quickly. You can let them know about flash sales, seasonal discounts, and giveaways. Social media is a great way to increase engagement by asking questions and listening and responding to replies and comments.
Final Thoughts
The most important thing to remember is that enhancing the customer experience is not a one-time hack but a constant process that needs to be a central theme in your strategy.