Every business understands the importance of good service, but few are able to deliver an excellent customer experience that gets your most dedicated followers raving about you. Consumers value good customer service, and they’re much more likely to buy from a company again when they’ve had a good experience with a company representative. But how do you perfect the science of CX and deliver a consistent experience to every person who interacts with your brand?
With so many resources being focused on top-line revenue growth strategies, companies are really missing the mark by not optimizing their front-line experiences with their buyers. In order to deliver an excellent customer experience, you have to first take a look at what is missing in your organization and what is preventing you from delivering a stellar customer experience.
What’s the Difference: Excellent Customer Experience vs. Customer Service
The key difference between these two is that customer service is just one part of the puzzle. Customer service is directly serving a customer one-on-one and dealing with their unique challenges. The customer experience, however, takes a holistic view of everything the organization is doing to bring a joyful experience to the entire customer journey. This is the key piece that brings buyers back for more and turns a pseudo-buyer into a raving fan that can’t get enough.
When you create a strategic customer experience strategy, you’re no longer leaving each customer interaction up to chance. An excellent customer experience also increases brand trust, consistency and trackability. People don’t just value good customer service, they value the personalized service a brand can bring into their experience. In fact, Kustomer research indicates personalized experiences will be the most important attribute in customer service by 2025. Consumers increasingly want to feel that brands care about them and that the products and services match their needs and pain points.
However, brands are falling short in this department. A good customer service experience often falls to the bottom of the investment queue, while marketings and sales budgets take center stage. But don’t worry, there are ways a brand can maintain an excellent customer experience without breaking the bank.
The Importance of Good Customer Experience
A study by Nielsen showed that 73% of millennials were willing to spend more on a product if it was a socially conscious brand. This means a large demographic wants the companies they do business with to care about them and the types of products they’re bringing into the world. In another study conducted by Porter Novelli’s 2021 The Business Imperative For Social Justice Today, 49% of Americans say they assume companies that remain quiet on social justice issues don’t care. When you deliver a good customer experience that incorporates your core brand messaging and its values through impactful communication, it resonates and builds a stronger brand connection with your audience.
There are also devastating impacts to a business when they deliver a bad customer experience. It is estimated that more than $62 billion is lost each year due to a bad customer service experience, and roughly only 10% of buyers say that brands meet their expectations when it comes to a good customer experience. It’s not that these buyers have high expectations; brands are unconsciously making their customer experience services difficult to use, and not user-friendly.
An excellent customer experience strategy doesn’t involve reworking your entire organization top-to-bottom or even requiring excessive retraining of your support team. You’d be surprised how small incremental steps in the right direction can move the needle ten-fold. For example, putting yourself in your buyer’s shoes and going through a common problem they experience can reveal interesting insights into how your brand can improve and lessen the frustration a customer may experience.
4 Ways to Improve the Customer Experience in Retail
The retail landscape has changed tremendously due in part to the expansion of digital commerce and business owners moving to new e-commerce strategies that could boost sales and appeal to consumers worldwide. With this, little has changed with consumer expectations of consultative, personalized experiences throughout the buyer journey. It’s imperative you get to know how customers view your organization and use that information to tailor your strategy to deliver quality CX and stand out from the competition. Here are four ways your organization can improve CX in the retail space.
1. Get to Know Your Customers
Do you know what’s important to your customers? Are there social issues they’re fighting against? Brands that stand up and advocate for the very same causes your ideal customers care about can earn more money, more praise and more brand loyalty. Customers want to know that their brand is a part of a bigger vision than themselves. They do not want to support a company that’s just about the bottom line. There is a huge buyer sentiment shift happening, where modern consumers want brands to be transparent, they want employees to be treated fairly, and they want to know brands are supporting their local community.
By understanding what’s important to your customers, you can offer a personalized service that they haven’t seen or experienced anywhere before. You can do this by incorporating important initiatives throughout the customer service experience, whether that might be having one of your agents proactively explain the company’s values and social missions, or incorporating relevant statistics or facts within your website materials. This attention to detail ends up earning you a loyal customer who is happily recommending your services to their friends and family.
2. Develop Protocols to Quickly Act on Agent Feedback
Your customer service agents are on the frontlines and can spot common themes and trends with your customers. What are your processes right now to help capture customer sentiment and data points they are collecting “on the ground’? By quickly incorporating regular agent feedback, this can actually be the easiest way you can turn an ‘okay’ customer experience into an excellent customer experience.
3. Capture Customer Feedback in Real-Time
How happy are your customers after they’ve interacted with you? This is a critical piece in understanding more about your customer and what type of experiences they’re having with your brand. With the right technology, organizations can send an immediate and automatic feedback survey each time a customer has finished an interaction.
A customer satisfaction (CSAT) score can be used to measure a customer’s feelings about a specific interaction with your support team. CSAT surveys gather feedback from customers immediately after an interaction with your team, which helps you better understand customers’ experiences in real time.
4. Provide a Unique Shopping Experience
Through the use of reporting and analytics, businesses are able to determine how satisfied a customer was after their shopping experience. You can re-engage your customers based on their preferences at a future time and get them to come back for more. Personalization is key in the digital world where every business is trying to grab your buyer’s attention. If you already know what your buyer likes, values, and believes in, it becomes an easy entry point to offer the right products and services.
How Kustomer Can Help Your CX
Companies are having a hard time finding unique ways to deliver a personalized customer experience, but through automation, AI, and machine learning, you can free up agent time to build more meaningful relationships with your customers, instead of being bogged down in busy work.
Kustomer can help identify key gaps within your systems and processes and help you fill them. Through our CRM platform, CX organizations are able to access customer history across channels and platforms seamlessly, resulting in a dramatic improvement in customer satisfaction. Consumers want to know you care about them, and by offering personalized service, leveraging effective systems to collect feedback, and the ability to act quickly on that feedback, you will earn your customers’ trust and drive more sales.
Don’t miss the chance to improve the customer experience. Through the strategic implementation of the right tools, you can cultivate a loyal customer base that will never forget you.
The Kustomer CRM helps easily track and deliver on your brand promise across multiple channels. Interested in learning more? Check out this free, handy buyer’s guide.
