Top 5 Tips to Improve Customer Experience

Whether you are a start-up, small medium enterprise (SME) or a large corporation, a positive customer is one of the key factors which can determine the overall long-term success of your business. As more and more businesses are competing for market share and with many global economies facing the prospect of recession, maintaining customer loyalty has never been so challenging for businesses today.

To find out more on the importance of customer experience and how it impacts your business check out What is Customer Experience? 

In this article we share with you our Top 5 Tips to Improve Customer Experience for your business:

Listen to Your Customers

It’s fair to say that customers are not always right, but listening to their concerns and feedback is crucial in helping businesses to develop products & services that meet the preferences and requirements of the target customer. As much as product development and sales teams believe in their product, it’s ultimately the customer's feedback and purchasing decisions which decide if your brand or product is successful in the market.

Great Ways to Engage and gain feedback from your customers include:

• Surveys
• Reviews
• Testimonials
• Customer Success initiatives (Don’t be afraid to call a customer to ask how they found your product/service)

Personalise the Experience

Having a good understanding of your customer's past purchases, interactions and preferences is a great way to create a tailored experience for your customers. If you are an E-Commerce website, you can use customers' previous purchase history to recommend new products which may be of interest. If you are a streaming platform you can use past viewing history to learn about the types of content customers enjoy and make recommendations based on this.

Customers who receive a personalised experience when interacting with businesses feel more recognised and have a stronger sense of customer loyalty.

Popular ways of personalising customer experience include:

• Recommend products/services similar to those purchased by customers previously.
• Birthday Offers & Discounts
• Provide VIP experience for the best customers
• Keep a track of customers' history such as enquiries, complaints, and feedback. This can be referred to when engaging with customers in the future

Streamline Processes

Make it as easy as possible for customers to interact with your business by having a good understanding of the customer journey and experience. Touch points such as your website or App should all be developed to be as user-friendly as possible and allow customers to achieve what they want in as few steps as possible.

Some of the popular areas that can be streamlined include:

• Website UX - (Plan and design your website experience based on what works for your customers)
• Customer Service - How long are your waiting times, How many steps does it take to resolve an issue?
• Registration/Purchase process times - How much information can you obtain from customers in the least amount of steps? Every extra step you require a customer to make will lead to some customers falling away.

Offer the Best Support Possible

When we think of customer experience the first thing that often comes to mind is complaints. Having a variety of channels open for supporting customers is vital in resolving issues and complaints fast and effectively. It's also important to understand which channels are most convenient for your customers to interact with you. The idea of having an automated chatbot sounds great but is it as effective as having a dedicated customer support person on standby?

Some of the most popular channels for supporting customers are:

• Social Media Messaging
• Whatsapp Messaging
• Telephone Support
• Customer Enquiry forms

Focus on Providing Value

Depending on your brand's positioning in the market, you may not always be able to be offered the lowest prices and widest range of products. However, you can always look at other areas where value can be added. For example, Monthly flash sales are a great way to boost sales and offer customers an opportunity to access bigger savings. This is also a great way to stay engaged with your customers through email and social media marketing.

Some popular ways of adding value include:

• Promotions & Discounts
• Added Services
• Package/Bundle Deals
• Customer Loyalty Programs

As well as our top 5 tips above, one of the most important things you can do as a business to improve customer experience is to evaluate and improve the customer experience. By treating customer experience as a long-term effort you will have a much better understanding of your customers as well as the ability to introduce new ways of improving the customer experience journey.

A well-planned customer experience strategy is a must for your business in order to plan out the customer journey and understand which touch points you need to focus on to deliver a positive customer experience. Be sure to set goals (KPIs) which will make it easy to measure your long-term success and more importantly achieve your goals.

For example: To improve the customer experience you may choose to set a goal to reduce customer service complaints by 30% over the next 6 months. To effectively do this you will need to monitor and also be prepared to introduce new processes in order to achieve this goal.

Vodus is a market research company in Malaysia which offers a variety of solutions to help businesses to measure and improve the customer experience of their business. Our Customer Satisfaction Research solution, allows us to survey your target consumers, measure customer perception and customer satisfaction as well as diagnose any underlying issues with your brand. 

From this, the team at Vodus can then construct a strategy to improve the overall customer experience for your brand.