Customer experience can be a complex thing to nail down and get right – after all, consumers have more outlets than ever before to voice their frustration when you get it wrong, thanks to the rise of review platforms, social media, and sites like TripAdvisor.
However, it doesn’t take an endless amount of time or budget to create a positive experience for those who buy from you or engage with your brand. Here are addmustard’s 5 top tips for improving your customers’ perception of your brand, which you can put into action today.
1. Reach out to your brand advocates
Brand advocates are the people who repeatedly come back to you to purchase or interact with your brand. Put simply, if you’re short on time and can only focus on one customer segment in isolation, these are the people who you want to ensure that you are rewarding. Whether that’s by acknowledging their long-term custom with a loyalty scheme, or actively engaging with them on social media, by deepening your relationship with this audience, you will encourage them to keep coming back, and they’re also more likely to share their positive experience.
2. Personalisation
This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to include recipient names in an email, but brands usually capture a lot of data when their customers are logged into their website (e.g. basket abandons and viewed products or pages). Brands who can utilize this insight to drive a more personal experience for their shoppers are going to get much more value from their data, not to mention an increased likelihood of future purchase. Alternatively, identifying clearly who your customers are and what motivates and/or frustrates them is another way that you can look to improve their experience.
3. Put yourself in their shoes
It’s worth routinely testing your customer journey so that you can uncover pain points, and then most importantly, fix them. By proactively tackling things like an irritatingly long sign up form, you can create a smoother customer experience that will not only please your existing customers, but may even remove barriers that are currently putting off potential future customers, too.
4. Make sure your customers can speak to you, when and how they want to
The right communication tools can increase customer retention, create a more efficient customer journey and even lower your own business costs. Whether it’s a live chat service, a visible email address, or simply ensuring your site is easy to navigate via all devices, it’s important to a customer’s experience of your brand that they can communicate with you in a way that is most convenient for them, not the other way round.
5. Consistency across all channels
Whether someone browses your site, follows you on social media, calls your customer service department, or visits your store in-person, their experience of who you are and what your brand is about needs to translate across all platforms and channels. Due to complex customer journeys and multiple devices, creating a seamless omnichannel approach is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ and is instead an expectation amongst consumers. It’s important to look at your own brand and ensure that you have consistency across all spaces.
By adopting an effective customer experience strategy, you can expect to see increased referral rates and higher levels of consumer satisfaction. Importantly, building a deeper connection with your customers usually means that a competitive price point isn’t your only USP, as the positive experience you are providing consumers will keep them coming back for more.
