In a crowded market with multiple options, customers need a compelling reason to choose your brand.
How many times have your customers remarked after an interaction with your business – what an excellent experience?
Whether you are a B2C or B2B company, the customer is king (sounds clichéd, but it's true), and customer satisfaction is your business's ultimate aim if it has to remain competitive.
For that, you need to look at things from a customer's perspective, not a seller's.
The spotlight, thus, is always on a customer's journey, the interactions a client has with your business.
A customer journey is a map that tracks the client's experience. The starter's block is the point of the first contact with the seller, and the purchase order represents the end line. The journey traces the process of engagement.
Contrary to belief, the customer journey need not always end with the client placing an order. It's also about long-term relationships, trying to map a customer's behavior after they have received their product.
Previously, it was the marketing department's business to track the customer journey, but today, that's no longer the case. Since the journey spans the entire industry, almost all departments need to align with this journey to understand what's going wrong or what's being done correctly.
Predictive analytics (anticipation) today plays a significant role in understanding customers. Businesses need to establish a way to anticipate and evaluate potential problems before they become actual problems.
On the CRM side, some factors can degrade a customer experience.
A lack of a mechanism to record complaints or feedback, breakdowns in communication between the business and the client, over-promising, under-delivering, lack of transparency, and other similar factors can all lead to an unpleasant experience for your customer.
Result: customer attrition and inability to acquire new customers.
That's why customer journey mapping is so important. It helps by revealing friction points and also segmenting your customers into personas. Starting with the mapping, we will now explain the other ways you can improve a client's overall experience.
Win new customers with customer journey mapping >>>> Learn more
5 Ways to Better Customer Experience
1) Mapping the customer's journey
Like any other, a customer journey map is a visual depiction of the steps leading to an objective. It's a document that records all interactions.
Ideally, a customer journey map is represented by an infographic to make it easy for key members of your company to understand. But whatever its final form, the aim always is to teach organizations more about their customers.
The customer is at the center of every B2C and B2B company, and a map of the customer journey gives managers a ringside view of how customers or leads move through the sales funnel.
Two things will happen because of the map: The manager can identify opportunities or identify weak points in the funnel to enhance the buying experience.
Also, in today's digital world, it will demonstrate to a company how to adapt to mobile, social media, and the web in line with customer behavior.
Hint: Make sure the customer journey map records all touchpoints. These are the interaction location or channels.
2) Get intimate with customers
How well can your business claim to know its customers? And we're not talking just geography or gender here.
Emotional Quotient (EQ) is a new tool for attracting new customers, increasing loyalty, and gaining market share. Your business managers need to get intimate with clients.
Customer behavior, its study, and recording are crucial here. Many times, behavior is mistaken for customer activity. It's not.
Increasingly, businesses need to run emotionally intelligent companies. They need to deploy a statistical model to analyze customers.
They can implement a model that involves constructing a "complete view" of the customer experience from start to finish – from product development and marketing to sales and service – and all the emotions a customer associates with that experience. That could lay the groundwork for a high EQ.
At the other end of the scale, enterprises can invest in big data analytics or bring in outside consultants with deep expertise in measuring a customer's EQ.
For both, the business needs to collect customer feedback at all stages of its buying journey. This includes not only formal surveys but also inputs from online reviews, call center feedback, and social media feedback, all of which can capture the various stages of a customer's sentiment.
The intent is also something that needs to be measured. Does your business understand why they seek a product or service? Do not make assumptions about a customer's goal; use data analytics instead.
3) Deploy analytics
Running a business on gut feeling or random research is old hat. Big data and its analysis are the foundation on which modern-day enterprises make decisions.
Analytics provides the knowledge base from which vital customer information can be extracted. Tied in with the journey, it can enable proactive interactions tailored to the individual client.
The analytics ecosystem enables optimization of the customer experience.
4) Check your metrics
Poorly recorded data, for one, can lead to misinterpretation and prove costly for an enterprise.
Merely quoting the high number of downloads for your app could be misleading; it may not indicate that your business is actually growing. Obviously, that is not the right metric to measure success. A better metric would be the frequency of app use, for example.
Standard metrics include customer sentiment or satisfaction scores, activities such as abandoned carts or web pages, time on site, and return visits. A business also needs to share its metrics for inter-departmental collaboration.
5) Go mobile
PayPal's Director of Mobile Commerce, Rob Harper, once said, "If an enterprise's number one strategy wasn't mobile, it must be prepared to ignore customers".
His remark comes at a time when the world over, everyone, from B2C and even B2B businesses, serious about selling online, is still trying to understand how to use smartphones (or mobile computing devices) for lead generation when, by now, they should have been selling to those leads.
Mobile has revolutionized the way we shop, yet despite its rapid proliferation, enterprises continue to operate in a desktop mindset when it comes to lead generation. Get your business on mobile before it's too late.
Interested in knowing more about how to retain your existing customers or get new clients? Fill in this form and our experts will get in touch with you.
