Customer experience involves knowing exactly what your customers are looking for, and then working hard to provide it. The fact is if you aren’t providing at every step in the customer journey what customers want, they will leave you for competitors who can and do provide what they are looking for. And many businesses are...
Customer experience involves knowing exactly what your customers are looking for, and then working hard to provide it.
The fact is if you aren’t providing at every step in the customer journey what customers want, they will leave you for competitors who can and do provide what they are looking for. And many businesses are already ahead of the curve when it comes to knowing how to deliver a superior customer experience.
Implement a customer-focused strategy by concentrating on the customer experience
Gartner reports that by the end of this year, 89% of business will already be competing on customer experience, confirming predictions that by 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as a key brand differentiator.
According to the Direct Marketing News reports, “The focus of the customer experience must be on engaging, not managing customers.” In other words, customer experience requires the ability to connect with customers on the basis of their needs, not manipulating customers to meet yours. And considering that 97% of global consumers say that customer service is very important in their choice, knowing what customers want must be a top priority for any ecommerce business hoping to better engage its customers.
Discover The 7 keys to offer the best customer service
A recent Forrester report shows how, across all industries, good customer experience correlates with customer loyalty, willingness to recommend, and likelihood of making a repurchase. This is because companies which regularly solicit and act on feedback are better positioned to uncover flaws in their business, whether they are technical problem with the website, prices that are too high, or some another issue which, otherwise, would have remained off the business’s radar.
Three Ways to Improve Customer Experience
One of the most reliable and easy ways to tackle customer experience improvements is by collecting highly usable bits of customer insights through surveys. Whether you deliver the survey via onsite pop ups, mobile, or email, the key is to ask the questions that will get you the answers you need, answers which should enable you to optimize your online business to deliver an increased customer experience. Here are the three ways to focus your questions to maximize delivery of your customer experience:
Fine-tune the customer experience
One of the best ways to keep users coming back for more is to ensure that every aspect of their experience with a brand is of the highest possible standard. This might sound obvious, but many businesses still don’t place enough importance on customer experience or provide the right kind of experience. Tellingly, a study from Bain and Company shows that while 80% of CEOs believe they deliver a superior customer experience, only 8% of their customers agree.
To uncover points of friction in the customer experience, first ask:
1) Overall, how satisfied are you with the customer service experience that you received from us?
If you’ve read our articles on customer satisfaction, you’ll have seen this “CSAT-style“ question before. Maintaining consistency in your methods of evaluating customer satisfaction is extremely important, as doing so will enable you to track your KPIs over time and determine if changes you have made are having a positive effect on the customer experience.
2) If you were less than totally satisfied, what could we have done to serve you better?
Of course, whether or not you include this question depends on the customer’s overall level of satisfaction, as determined earlier in the survey. This is why it’s necessary to develop and structure your survey using EFM software. To get the most in-depth and comprehensive feedback from your clients, you can ask this question in an open-ended way. However, analyzing the answers to this type of question will take more time.
3) How would you feel about recommending us to friends and colleagues?
This “NPS-type“ question has the benefit of being easy to monitor, and enables you to easily distinguish detractors, passives and promoters. This will allow you to integrate up-to-date customer segmentation into your CRM, which opens the door to various different marketing and sales initiatives.
Simplify the customer experience
94% of customers who have a low-effort service experience will buy from that same company again. They want a pain-free way to be able to access the information that they need. This means websites must be user-friendly, providing self-service capabilities that not only improve the ease with which users complete tasks but also encourages them to engage more deeply with your business. To find out how low-effort your site is, ask the following:
4) How easy is our website to navigate?
No need to send an e-mail to your contacts to ask this type of question. Identify points of friction in your funnel, and display the question in a modal window, or if the visitor is in the process of leaving the page.
5) How happy are you with the speed with which you were able to find what you were looking for?
6) How happy are you with our attention to detail and thoroughness?
Personalize the customer experience
If your business adopts a structured approach to collecting and analyzing customer feedback, it will be much easier to deliver personalized service, increasing the relevance and impact of your business. And there is no question that personalization is everything for today’s customer. Marketing-Interactive.com shares findings from a study which demonstrates that the majority of consumers (68%) are willing to provide more personal information in exchange for more personalized and seamless experiences that deliver faster resolutions. To improve personalization, consider these questions:
7) How happy are you with the extent to which we helped you learn about our product and service?
8) How happy are with our ability to provide you with relevant recommendations that are in the best interests of you or your organization?
9) How well did we understand what you wanted?
Customer feedback survey should be part of your overall brand experience. As you design your customer feedback survey, keep in mind that your goal is to effectively engage with customers by asking them to help you become more relevant and easier to use. Your well-design survey program should create a useful, accurate, and timely channel for gathering customer knowledge on a continuous basis, customer knowledge which will enable you to align your ecommerce delivery with the expectations of your customers.
