National Customer Service Association
...Customer First
Business Owners: Create an Experience Customers Love
By Richard Mayer
Creating an incredible customer experience is paramount to the success of your business. In today’s highly competitive business environment, you need to make a positive impression on your customers if you want them to stick around. In fact, creating an unbeatable customer experience is one of the best ways to compete with big brands that can offer lower prices and a wider selection.
Thankfully, many online resources and services exist to help enhance your customer experience.
Evaluate Your Customer Support Process
Get started by taking a look at your customer support process. When customers reach out for support, are they leaving with a positive impression of your business, or are they walking away frustrated and unsatisfied? Try to identify pain points in your customer service journey and find areas where improvements can be made.
For example, bouncing your customers between different support agents and communication channels is a common source of frustration. This experience is even more aggravating to customers when you have to ask them for the same information again and again. In this case, implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) tool would streamline the support process and enable you to solve customer issues much more efficiently.
Understand Your Customers
Does your branding feel like it fits your target customer? If not, you might not understand your customers as well as you could. MarTech suggests asking yourself a few simple questions to better understand how your business fits into the lives of your customers:
Answering these questions will force you to think carefully about how you want your customers to think and feel about your business. As a result, you’ll be able to make branding decisions that elicit these feelings in your audience and create a brand that your customers will love!
Create an Attractive and User-Friendly Website
Web design plays an important role in the customer experience. Make sure your website is attractive and easy to use—for all users. Don’t overlook the importance of creating an ADA-compliant website. ADA compliance ensures your website is accessible to people with disabilities. Typically, this includes color and display adjustments, content size adjustments, and different options for navigation functions. Take advantage of website accessibility software to make your website ADA-compliant quickly and easily.
Once your website is fully accessible, including clear navigation and layout options, you should also make your website is visually appealing. Make sure that your brand colors and fonts are present, and that content (including wording) is clear. People are very attracted to videos, so integrate a few purposeful videos that help communicate something about your mission, your services, or your values. And you don’t have to make all original content. There are many good stock video options online that you can customize to fit your needs.
Personalize the Customer Journey
Personalization is the best way to leave a lasting impression on your customers. VentureHarbour.com lists several great examples of personalization used by other brands, such as Amazon’s powerful product recommendations. Today’s online brands can leverage some very innovative ways to personalize the customer experience through every stage of the customer journey. For example, you can show different content to website visitors depending on whether they’re returning customers, active shoppers, or first-time visitors.
Keep Your Store or Office Safe and Clean
The cleanliness of your brick-and-mortar store or office matters not just for aesthetic purposes, but to ensure that customers and clients feel comfortable when entering. Not only does a clean environment reduce the risk of illness, but it can also help reduce stress and anxiety. Be sure to avoid products that contain carcinogens, phthalates, and even formaldehyde, which are harmful and surprisingly common in commercial cleansers.
Try to keep furniture items organized and within their intended areas to further enhance the overall ambience. The colors you choose for the walls and floors, as well as the size and flow of the space will make an impression as well.
Taking care in maintaining a clean environment within your store or office can have tremendous benefits. It will show your customers or clients that you care about their comfort while they conduct business with you.
Listen to Customer Feedback
Customer input can tell you a lot about the customer experience. Collecting customer feedback ensures you always understand the needs of your audience, even as those needs change over time. You can leverage a variety of methods to collect customer feedback, explains Help Scout. For example, surveys, contact forms, and social media are the easiest methods. Whatever method you choose, be sure to listen to what your customers say, even if you don’t agree with them.
Focus on Your Customers
Optimizing the customer experience is a powerful way to get ahead of your competitors. Whether it means improving your customer support process, collecting customer feedback, adding personalization to your marketing emails, or redesigning your website, the work you do to enhance the customer experience will set the stage for business growth for your company.