Customer Experience Management — The Critical Aspect for Every Business

For every business, the most important aspect to becoming successful is customer satisfaction. Customers are the reason why businesses are willing to spend impressive budgets on marketing, just to grab the attention of potential customers. The main goal is to transform customers into brand ambassadors. In order to achieve that, businesses should prioritize their customers’ experience.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience is any interaction between customers and the business itself, through its representatives, and not only sales reps, but also from the logistic, operations, and management departments. Customer experience comprises all the collective efforts of the team in any customer-facing interactions. This includes:

• How the staff welcomes customers. The first impression is always memorable and this is true for businesses as well. The first time a customer steps in your office or store, they already create a perception of you as a brand. Further, customers have certain expectations in their interactions with you — they expect to be welcomed and be properly guided by the staff.
• How the staff addresses their questions and concerns. Every customer-facing employee should have an impeccable knowledge of the business and the potential questions customer might have. Staff should be able to address customer concerns quickly with a satisfactory solution.
• How the staff provides support. Customer service doesn’t stop with the sale. Providing support and helpful guidance after-sales is a great way to score sympathy points with consumers.

Providing Excellent Customer Experience

There are many things impacting customer experience and here are three steps to successful customer experience management:

Maintain Customer Profiles

Delivering a great customer experience means you need to know your customer. Create and maintain customer profiles that help you understand customers’ journeys across multiple channels. As you get a better understanding you can provide better offers and customer service, driving metrics like loyalty and retention.

Personalize

With a thorough understanding of the customer, you can use that knowledge to personalize every interaction. Data can help you enrich your customers’ experience and pleasantly surprise them by making their buying process easier or complementing their purchase with helpful information. By adding context to your customer focus, you can deliver relevant offers, recommendations, and advice when a customer is most receptive.

Right Message, Right Place, Right Time

In order to deliver an improved customer experience you need to map analytics to specific stages in the customer life cycle so you can deliver the right message to the right place at the right time. Every step in the buying journey is important — from initial consideration, to active evaluation, to the moment of purchase and to the after-purchase experience. At every stage your business has an opportunity to improve the customer experience. And each stage is an opportunity to gain more insights that you can feed back into your marketing processes.