Customer Experience tactics for long lasting customer relationships

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What is Customer Experience ?

Customer Experience is the exceptional services offered by a business or company in all aspects from the leads management process to the sales process and after sales process. Customer experience may be slightly different from the popular customer service in terms of depth and broadness in the interaction process.

Think back to when you called a popular service provider to enquire for a service or assistance. How was the overall experience from the moment the caller answered to the after sales process? In this article we look at why customer experience is important, how it helps businesses build lasting relationships with their customers and good tactics to improve your customer experience going forward.

Why focusing on Customer Experience Important for business?

In modern day most customers are keen on trust and transparency. Trust is built depending on the quality of the experience they receive in their journey to purchasing the product or service. If the customer experience of a business is questionable from the beginning, customers would not even consider proceeding to checkout. This applies to all avenues of first time interaction either online or offline. Focusing on customer experience also reduces the rate of customer churn which has become a hot topic with many business owners looking for solutions to curb it. 

Customers’ expectations keep on rising by the day and people are searching for meaningful, memorable and consistent experiences across all departments of a business or company. 

All these circumstances will negatively affect the growth of the business.

How customer experience can help build long lasting relationships with customers

A big element of customer experience is the ability to treat customers of all types as individuals with custom or tailor made interactions based on what they are looking for. 

A good example would be when ordering food via a phone call from Jumia Food , a food delivery service. More often, a registered customer would not need to introduce themselves or give their location details as most of their information is usually already recorded. The service provider would only need to confirm their address if there are multiple addresses registered under the customer. The service provider also usually calls their customers by name personalizing their interaction which simplifies the process and many have reported this to be a good customer experience. 

With similar customer experiences like these, customers often feel special and are sure to keep on using their products or services in the long term. 

Tips on how to improve customer experience for businesses.

To summarize all the tips snippets that we have talked about here is a list of 3  tips you can tap into to improve the overall customer experience of your business and keep customers coming back for more. 

1. Personalize your interaction - Customers feel special when they receive personalized treatment. Some of the examples you can use is always calling them by name when you need to pass any information or send out any marketing materials via email, messaging or calls instead of “Dear Customer”. Another example would be when packaging products. Many small businesses often use a very effective tactic of including a thank you note or message in their packaging to appreciate their customers. This gives them a memorable feel that they would definitely want to experience again. 

2. Be Transparent about your business’s policies and guidelines- Every business should have a policy and guidelines statement that governs how it operates. Customers should be fully aware of them so as to not cause any conflict. Such policies can be like return policies, warranty agreements or discount policies. It is also good to include a FAQ page in a business's website or social media pages and a support line or email for customers who may need more clarity of your products. This builds trust and in turn a stronger relationship.

3. Feedback feedback feedback! - It is also very important to adopt a feedback mechanism process to improve customer experience. It is critical to gauge whether they are experiencing any changes or challenges within your products or services. There is so much a business can gather from customer feedback including how to better improve their products or services or keep their customers satisfied.

4. Use a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) over a spreadsheet - Many businesses have completely switched to using CRMs to automate their business processes. One of them is record keeping. Spreadsheets have proven to be less effective overtime because of the inability to keep consistent records. CRMs like HelloDuty connect all data from an organization's sales leads and customers in one place. This data may include client forms, documents, quotes, sale purchases, calls, emails, text messages, meetings, tasks and many more. Businesses which use CRMs often report an increase in sales, improved customer relations, satisfaction and loyalty.

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