59% of customers don’t return after a bad experience.
This is why perfecting your customer experience is crucial to your business’s longevity. A business should always consider ways to improve customer experience. But how do you do that?
We’ve listed seven of the most effective ways to improve your customer experience and boost revenues.
Keep reading to learn more.
1. Improve Customer Experience Through Surveys
Surveys are one of the most powerful tools for understanding your customers to improve customer experience. This is because you won’t know what they are feeling until you ask them.
When creating a customer satisfaction survey, have an objective in mind. If you’re not getting sales, ask customers about their shopping experience with your site. Do they not like the styles, are the prices too high, are they waiting for a sale?
You can also survey customers on their interaction with your customer service representatives. Send them an email to briefly rate their experience. The shorter, the better.
A majority of customers will kindly complete surveys for free. Click here to find out what size is optimal for the survey you’re conducting. If you need more survey respondents, incentivize your customers with a discount or other reward.
Surveys take longer to build. If you need a simple black and white response, poll customers via e-mail or Instagram/Twitter polls. Be aware that when running social media polls, some respondents might be potential customers and not existing ones.
2. Make It Easy
Part of a customer’s perception of a brand happens when they’re not even in touch with your customer service team. When a potential customer is browsing your site, you want to host information that you anticipate them asking. Make sure store policies, shipping and returns policies, and shipping times are addressed.
You want to state the obvious, even if it seems silly. If you have free shipping, make it clear so the customer doesn’t have to research your site to figure these things out. When a customer does have questions, list all of your contact methods clearly on your website and social media.
3. Be There
So you’ve listed your email and phone number, now what?
69% of consumers report that a great customer service experience is when the team is quick to respond. Time is the most valuable resource on earth. Don’t waste your customer’s time.
First, save them time by listing your hours of operation if you operate a call center. If you respond to customers via email, make sure to tell them by when they can expect a response.
Something like “We respond to all inquires within 48 hours. Thank you for contacting us!” is great.
Better yet, have an automated email response set up that notifies customers immediately. Inform them someone is reviewing their inquiry and will get back to them in two days.
4. Train Your Customer Experience Staff
Building lasting customer relationships comes from a staff that is dedicated to their satisfaction. There are many things a team should be trained on.
Train your staff thoroughly on product knowledge. There is nothing more annoying than asking an employee about a product and they can’t even tell you the basic features.
Nurture staff on customer-facing lingo. This will depend on the company language. If you’re a laid-back seaside company you might address customers using terms like “what’s up” or “dude(tte).” Another company might choose a more formal tone.
Get feedback from your employees and customers after interactions. This way you can address any gaps in training.
5. Personalize Their Journey
New customers are worth silver, but repeat customers are gold. It’s really important to make repeat customers feel special and understood.
If you run a brick-and-mortar or have an in-person experience with your business, treat your repeat customers right. Remember their name, and show them products you think might interest them based on their past purchases. This will make your customer feel special.
Digitally, you can easily personalize your customer process using automation. This sounds like an oxymoron, personalized automation, but companies like MailChimp and Shopify Email, allow you to send automated e-mails based on your customer’s point in the journey with you.
Other forms of personalization include tailored discounts, thank-you notes, and follow-up surveys.
6. Listen to Your Breakups
It’s inevitable. Every business will encounter repeat customers, one-timers, and customers who eventually leave. Some may return, and some maybe not.
Improve customer satisfaction and amplify the experience for future and returning customers. You can do this by surveying customers before they leave.
For example, if you have ever canceled a subscription service, you might notice that there is always a survey asking you why you’re about to cancel.
You might notice a customer on the brink of leaving, i.e. they haven’t made a purchase in months, reach out to them and ask them why or show them some new offerings.
7. Reward Loyal Customers
Some customers spend hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars at your shop annually. Make those customers feel special.
Include them in your business’s journey. You can invite them to special access shopping events. Invite loyal customers to a celebratory launch party for a new product release.
Sephora, the world’s leading beauty brand, has a great customer loyalty program. They have three tiers. All tiers come with benefits.
The higher tier has special access to events, AI beauty tools and receives various free gifts a year.
This incentives loyal customers to continue paying more to keep their perks. Almost like an exclusive club. It also motivates other customers to reach that status.
A loyalty program unique to your business can make the customer experience more inviting.
Listen to Your Customers
One of the greatest investments businesses can make is in their customers. Create workflows that enable you to understand your customer’s roadmap. Listen to what they enjoy and what they don’t.
Some companies are able to boost revenues by 25% or more a year just by investing more resources to improve customer experience.
Looking for more business tips? Continue reading on our business review.
