A happy customer is more likely to become a loyal customer in the long run. Hence, great customer experience equals increased customer retention. In fact, a Forrester study showed that experienced-led companies achieve an average order value of 1.9x greater than non-experience-led companies.
But how do you achieve it?
The answer is quite simple.
Ask for feedback, analyze your customer’s response and take action.
You probably have some idea of what your customers want. But to get a complete picture, it is crucial to gather feedback to understand the needs, drives, and struggles of your customers in their buying journey.
It can be defined as the perception your customers have of your brand. It is the subjective response they have to any direct or indirect contact with a brand.
Direct contact includes the purchase, use, and service that is initiated by the customer. Indirect contact includes encounters that a potential customer may have via recommendations, newspapers, advertisements, and social media.
Providing a remarkable experience whether directly or indirectly to your customers is of paramount importance to ensure sustainable growth of the business.
Read also A Complete Guide to Social Shopping
Whether it’s browsing products online or getting them delivered, shoppers prefer convenience over anything else. In fact, a study found that 37% of people are looking for easier navigation online while 22% look for easier payment options.
Shopper experience is crucial in every step of the buyer’s journey. When your brand ensures a smooth experience from product discovery to loyalty, it will be rewarded a thousandfold. Prioritizing your customer experience can help you:
✅Increase customer retention
✅Boost customer lifetime value
✅Build customer loyalty
✅Impact brand reputability
✅Competitive advantage
Here are some supporting statistics that show cx can boost revenue
Here are some key differences to note:
☐Problem: The number one problem that customers usually face while interacting with a brand are unanswered FAQs and long wait times.
✅Solution: Integrating Conversational AI with messaging apps allows brands to be available 24/7. The AI-powered bot can understand what the customer is looking for and respond to the customer’s query in real time. Any dire issue can be transferred to a live agent after the bot interacts with the customer and understands the problem.
☐Problem: The second problem is the lack of personalization. Sending product recommendation alerts that aren’t relevant to the customer leaves a bad impression. It also implies that the brand is not familiar with its customers.
✅Solution: Conversation AI has opened up doors for brands to ensure personalization at every step. An off-the-shelf conversational commerce tool like Vizury can help you build conversational flows, store your data and create actionable segments of users based on demographics, behavior, and intent. Segmenting your users and building individual user profiles can ensure that your brand caters to personalizing your customer’s experience more efficient.
☐Problem: The third problem is the lack of human touch. Customers prefer personal interaction with their favorite brands. In fact, 70% of shoppers want to interact with sales associates.
✅Solution: A connected omnichannel approach can help brands ensure human touch while selling online. For instance, when a customer wants expert advice before completing their purchase, it is possible to give them the option to speak to store staff using the latest technology. Customers can now connect to store staff from the comfort of their homes and avail convenient post-purchase options such as BOPIS or try and buy.
There are several metrics that brands need to measure to work on improving cx. They include:
Customer effort score is a metric that reflects the amount of effort a customer had to put in to use a product or service, find the information they were looking for, or get an issue resolved.
This survey is usually conducted in real-time such as a phone survey after an issue is resolved, an email survey after completing a purchase. Here’s what it usually looks like:
A high CES score usually means that your brand is successful in providing an excellent shopper experience while a low CES score means that your customers find your process difficult.
Hence it is essential to make improvements based on this key metric to improve your cx.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the metric used to measure customer loyalty, satisfaction, and enthusiasm. The survey usually asks one question “on a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend the product/brand to a friend or a colleague?”.
A high NPS indicates that your brand has a healthy relationship with customers. Customers are more likely to recommend your brand to other people.
Customers rating your brand between 1 to 6 are called detractors while customers rating between 9 to 10 are called promoters. Customers rating 7 or 8 are called passive
A key customer experience metric is measuring the customer satisfaction score (CSAT). This survey is a questionnaire that helps businesses understand what is their customer’s opinion on their brand, products, services, and customer support.
A report found that customers who had an excellent experience spent 140% more compared to those who had a bad experience. An excellent brand experience results in a higher customer lifetime value.
To ensure the sustainable growth of your brand, here are some ways you can improve your cx experience:
Deploying AI chatbots has helped countless brands deliver exceptional experiences. You can deploy chatbots on messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram DM, and others.
With this, your brand is available 24/7 which means that in case any customer has a query, the answers are delivered in real time.
A true omnichannel retail experience ensures a consistent brand experience across all customer touchpoints. According to a report, 83% of shoppers say convenience while shopping is more important to them. Hence, maintaining a consistent experience across channels is of paramount importance
Customers want personalization while interacting with their favorite brands. In fact, 81% of consumers want brands to understand them better.
Some of the ways you can personalize your shopper's experience:
✅Offer recommendations based on purchase history, demographics
✅Follow up surveys post-purchase
✅Use geolocation tech to personalize based on location
Customer journey mapping is the visual representation of a customer’s processes, needs, and perceptions throughout their interaction and their relationship with the brand.
The journey mapping involves a flow chart or a diagram that shows all the touchpoints related to the user and provides immediate solutions to what they are looking for.
This can be done by analyzing core metrics to have a better understanding of the customer’s experience and improve accordingly. Before creating your customer journey mapping you must:
✅Build your customer personas
✅Understand your customer’s intention
✅Map and analyze the customer’s touchpoints
✅Look to solve the customer’s pain points
A customer-centric brand that uses data to understand its customer behavior and interests is already winning. Do you have a winning customer experience strategy in place?
Send us a hello at hello@vizury.com if you want to learn more about how you can boost revenue by delivering exceptional experiences.