An organization should always be improving their customer experience. We are now in an age where customer expectations are continually rising. If your organization does not have a certain level of expectation they are looking for, they can easily find it somewhere else.
Customer experience tends to span from customer service, branding, your product and just the overall feeling they get towards your company. One of the largest companies in the world who have set the standard for how a company should treat its customers is apple. Apple over the years have developed this cult like following with hundreds of millions of fans from around world.
A lot of organizations should take out a page out of apple’s book. They sell very few products but they have done it so well by creating easy to use and amazing interfaces, knowing who their core customers are and how to serve them, creating an overall great customer service etc.
When you create a great customer experience you turn your customers into fans. When you have fans that are promoting your company anywhere they go and telling persons how awesome it is. You will get more customers and then turn them into fans as well; the network effect is huge.
To create a great customer experience is not a 2 year goal or even a 10 year goal. It should be a part of your company’s lifestyle. As your business evolves and grows your customer experience should get better. While at the same time setting a higher standard for your competitors to catch up to.
Examples of strategies to create a better a customer experience:
Keep an eye on your competitors
In the expectation economy which we are now living in customers can easily move from one company to the other. The competition is intense and fierce so you got to always be on your heels and on the lookout for new disruption in customer experience.
For example companies are now looking at virtual reality as new channel that they can use to communicate through with their customers. This technology is still in its baby stage though and virtual reality seems very promising. If this proves to be working those who aren’t adapting are going to be left behind.
Surveys
It’s important to use surveys to get to know your customers more and what they expect from your organization. A lot of companies have taken advantage of this method where they create a yearly survey for their customers. They then use the feedback data to look at their weaknesses to which they develop strategies to improve on it.
Describe the desired emotional response
As an organization in order to create a great customer experiences you have to layout the different types of emotions you want your customers to feel. Then develop your strategies around that to help them feel that emotion. So for example a skincare product company may want their customers to feel safe, cared for and satisfied.
Align your customer experience strategy with your brand
Customer experience usually works hand in hand with branding. In retrospect your brand is basically the way how customers view your company. For example suppose you want customers to get a greener impression when they see or hear about your brand.
You can start by changing your customer experience first. You can create advertisements promoting and helping nature, doing community clean up with your customers etc. This will help them to see that you really care for the world and they will help to spread your mission.
These are just some of the strategies you can use in your organization to improve your customer experience. Changing your company culture to improve customer experience can take a lot of work but it’s doable. So as an organization you must make the changes that are necessary to make your customer experience better or your competitors will.