You may have an outstanding product. However, if your customer experience feedback is not outstanding in return then you might need to step up your game to achieve a great customer experience.

There is no wonder why customer experience is a trend in every business. Because businesses struggle with how they can improve customer experience as it plays a large part in their product and services.

The majority of the customers reach out because they have problems or concerns with the product. Instead of just leaving the problem as it is after it was dealt with by the customer support representative, the customer service team must come up with strategies to counter every customer’s feedback in a larger customer service ecosystem instead, and this is called customer experience.

What does it mean to achieve a fantastic customer experience? How can you ensure that you provide a great or at least a good customer experience? Customers aim for a positive personalized experience, not just a transactional relationship with the product brands.

As a business, you should aim to provide a positive and satisfying customer experience so you stand out among all your competitors. In this post, we are going to give you ideas and strategies on how to achieve a great customer experience.

What is customer experience?

As per Zendesk, “Customer experience (CX) is the relationship between a company and its customers.” It is not a just relationship but it requires a serious commitment from the company toward its customers. You are with the customer’s journey, regardless of whether or not the customer purchases your product.

Why is customer experience important?

A great customer experience is your ticket to stand out from your competitors. Because your customer has the power in making your product and brand on the frontline among all brands.

The benefits of having a great customer experience:

Generate more sales. It is no surprise when the customer is happy and satisfied with the service they received, they are more likely going to purchase again.According to Garit Boothe, the CEO and Founder of Digital Honey, “Aiming for high customer satisfaction is essential to ensure a great customer experience,” he says.

Getting more customers and loyalty. Customers do not just trust the brand or product based on the advertisement, they trust them when they experience the brand and its company service to them. As a business, your role is to engage the customer not just on the surface level.

CEO and Founder of House Hold Money Saving, Pete Chatfield says, “Customer service experience is to establish a connection with the client by appealing to their sentiments. Customers are faithful to a business or brand because of the positive associations they have with using the product or service in question.”

Improve your brand image and reputation. There is no doubt, if your customers are happy and satisfied with your service, they will promote your brand themselves. We know how powerful “word of mouth” is.

Strategies on how to achieve a great customer experience

1. Provide customers with multiple seamless ways to get in touch with you.

If customers want to reach you, it should be easy as 123 and not complicated because this will serve as the customer’s first impression of your brand. And so you need to provide multiple ways for your customers to get in touch with you.

There should be options for the customer where and how to reach you depending on their concern.

Aliza Naiman, Oglam Life Marketing Manager says, “It’s essential to offer customers a variety of easy options to get in touch with your company. The objective should be to make it possible for any consumer to contact you via phone, email, live chat, the web, etc. Additionally, make sure they don’t have to wait for a long time to talk to you.”

Regardless of what platform or channel you use to help your customer reach you whether it’s offline or online, it should always be seamless.

This way even from this point you already established a positive impact or experience on the customer.

2. Train your customer service representatives.

Your customer service representatives are the front liners of your company. They are the ones whom the customers first interact with.

The customer’s impression of them will be an impression that lasts and the representative’s job is to ensure that the customer is feeling valued whatever their concern is.

It is essential to always conduct regular training for your representatives to better serve the customers by answering their queries, issues, and problems with the service or product professionally.

To create a fantastic customer experience, The True Wilderness founder, Fred Hoffman says, “Customer service representatives should make sure that they are empowered to take initiative and come up with creative solutions to customer issues.”

In what areas should you focus on training your representatives?

Product Knowledge.

Your customer service agents should be knowledgeable enough about the product to ensure that they can answer the customer’s queries. Your team should understand the product, how it works, and its benefits.

Communication Skills.

It is expected that upon hiring they should have exceptional communication skills. Your customer service team and your customer should understand each other to properly deliver the solutions to the issue or customer’s concern.

3. Enhance your customer experience by using Artificial Intelligence

Businesses today are heavily using new technologies like Artificial intelligence (AI). AI is useful in every aspect of company processes. Why not use it to improve your customer experience?

About this, the Co-owner of In youths LED Mirror, Kevin Wang said that their top priority is regularly tracking and analyzing customer feedback. They can only do so by using AI.

“We are constantly exploring new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation to automate customer service tasks, thereby creating a more efficient workflow,” he says.

One of the best examples of utilizing AI is the use of Chatbots. Chatbots will help you manage the support queue and help speed up the response time. If the customer has only basic questions like FAQs, the chatbot can answer them immediately.

They don’t need to wait long. On the other hand, if their concern is a little bit complicated, Artificial Intelligence is going to be utilized again, by simply routing the customer to the customer service representative standing by. Of course, you cannot leave everything to the hands of AI, human interaction is very much needed.

4. Focus on personalization techniques.

Businesses should connect to customers in-depth by not just treating them as “customers” but treating them as “individuals”.

Every customer is different which is why if you want to improve the customer experience you need to focus on personalization techniques.

According to digital marketing expert Serbay Arda Ayzit, “Personalization is also an effective tool for creating a great customer experience. Customers feel more valued and engaged with the company when the approach is more personalized.”

Although there is no fit-to-all solution, you can work on these strategies to create a personalized customer experience:

Establish customer profiles.

Keypoint to ensuring a great customer experience is knowing who your customers are. You should be able to identify your target audience, know their preferences and customer information.

Next is to identify what types of customers you normally encounter every day. As a result, you can finally assess what the customers want and need.

Create a vision that centers on the customers.

Define the vision of your company centering on how to satisfy the customers and/or potential customers. Create the vision based on the customer’s profile you have collected. And from this, compose the vision by heart.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes, what are the words that are written for all customers but you feel like it’s especially for you?

Practice employee feedback regularly.

The customer support team is required to deliver personalized interaction to the customer. They are the ones who talk to the customer every day, so it is significant to know their feedback and suggestions for ways to serve the customers well.

With the gathered feedback, you can figure out ways to better communicate with customers.

Once again, customers will appreciate it if we approach them in a professional but personalized manner.

5. Select the right customer service experience software.

Customer experience software analyzes all customer interactions and gathers valuable insights to then take action on issues to increase customer loyalty, and enhance the overall experience.

Giving a positive customer experience is more than just the facade of greeting and solving customers’ concerns for their satisfaction, it should be deeper than that.

Define your overall goals first before deciding what software to use. The founder of Aquajudge, Dr. Peter Gleick says, “With these strategies in place along with thoughtful planning and execution of them throughout all of your customer interactions, you will be well on your way towards building lasting relationships with loyal customers who are advocates for your brand.”

These are the are software commonly use today:

Netomi
Zendesk Sunshine
Sprinklr
Adobe Experience Manager
HubSpot
Clarabridge
Contentsquare x Clicktale
Gemius Prism
Genesys
Medallia
Oracle Maxymiser Testing and Optimization
Qualtrics
Responsetek
Satmetrix
Tealeaf by IBM
UserZoom

Every business has its own needs, select the software that meets the requirements of achieving the goals of your company about improving your customer experience.

6. Make your customer experience more transparent.

Transparency is what we all prefer. When someone or something is transparent your trust is built easily. Transparency is mainly for customers to see and verify your company’s actions. In other words, you should be more open and accountable.

Why does transparency important in customer relationships?

Successful Negotiations.

When you are visible as a company it establishes an effective and positive relationship with the customers and/or clients. Why? Because this kind of relationship builds trust, and satisfaction and results in customer experience satisfaction.

Transparency ends in successful negotiation because it suits the idea of “openness”.

Having lifelong loyal customers.

Transparency is one of the key factors to keep loyal customers. If you want to have this kind of relationship with your customers, you need to establish clear and open communication.

Through transparency, customer expectations will be shown to be met and as a result, customers will remain.

The expert insight of the CEO and Founder of Motion Selection, Aaron Jerez mentions, “We strive for transparency in our communication with both existing and potential customers, providing immediate responses to inquiries and clear information throughout the purchase process. This helps to build trust and establish a meaningful connection with our customers.”

7. Aim to create and deliver smarter CX surveys

When you create and deliver customer experience surveys, think like you are doing research. What is your survey’s objective and goal? How are you going to achieve it? What outcomes you are expecting? What are the necessary steps and actions you need to do that could influence the results?

How to create and deliver customer experience surveys?

You ask for the right survey questions.

Creating surveys is not easy because you need to carefully understand your customers. The questions that you are going to use in the survey should cater to your goal. The outcomes of the survey’s effectiveness will depend on the questions you raised.

As per Joy Troyers, the CEO of Digital Triggers, “Yes, your clients enjoy providing feedback, regardless of their level of satisfaction. The quality of their comments depends on the question and how it is posed. This means that when you make your surveys, the most important source of information about what your clients want is 1) Be entirely neutral in your line of questioning and 2)Adopt a policy of zero tolerance for leading inquiries.”

Explore best practices in delivering surveys.

Make your survey short – Avoid lengthy survey questions because customers may tend to not understand them and just randomly answer them.

Use direct, clear, and unbiased words – Of course, you need to not confuse your customers, you should be direct and avoid sounding biased.

Offer an incentive – Offer incentives enough for the customer to engage.

Check it before sending or launching it – We wanted to avoid mistakes because one mistake may ruin your survey and could result in negative feedback.

Choose the right type of CX survey.

Post-interaction or post-purchase evaluation – a survey from the customer right after the service or product is delivered.

Periodic Satisfaction Survey – an annual survey from a certain target audience or customers.

Continuous Satisfaction Tracking – continuous feedback from regular customers.

Most of the time businesses want to get immediate feedback from the customer. In this case, you can use post-interaction evaluation.

This is also suggested by an expert who is a Creative Director of Model Chic, Raine Gui. “You should inquire; ideally, you would record responses in real time. Use post-interaction surveys and other customer experience tools to follow up with each consumer through email after a live chat session has concluded. Whether it’s via email, live chat, or a self-service knowledge base, SuperOffice Service makes it easy to get feedback in real time,” she says.

“One of the most effective ways to motivate a team is to share the positive impact they’ve had on the company by sharing client feedback tied to an individual customer service representative,” she added.

Surveys play an important part in achieving great customer experience. This can also be used as your stepping stone to improve your product or service because you receive it directly from the customer.

Final thoughts on achieving a great customer experience.

Achieving a great customer experience doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, effort, and commitment but it will all be worth it in the end.

It is very important to focus on building good relationships with customers because they are the backbone of every running business.

It is up to you how to utilize what you learned from this post. At the end of the day, you always go back to the point of letting your customer feel the best experience so that they will be happy and satisfied and will remain with you.

Again, just bear in mind that our goal is to make the customers happy, feel valued, and satisfied because they are making your business alive!