5 Tips For Better Customer Experience Your Business Should Consider

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Nextiva


These 5 Tips Will Improve Customer Experiences with Your Business

Today, customer service is one part of an overall package called the customer experience (CX for short). CX includes every “touchpoint” at which customers interact with your business, from browsing your website to purchasing your product or service, from post-purchase follow-up to customer service interactions. But what matters most in creating a standout customer experience for your target market?

A report from Econsultancy and Adobe offers some insights. Here’s what the more than 2,000 marketers in the survey say matters most to the overall customer experience:

  • Desktop website experience: 90 percent
  • Mobile website: 86 percent
  • Email: 85 percent
  • Telephone support: 79 percent
  • Digital advertising: 77 percent
  • Social media: 76 percent
  • Mobile apps: 72 percent
  • Tablet apps: 65 percent
  • Off-line direct marketing: 60 percent
  • Off-line advertising: 58 percent
  • Text/SMS/MMS: 44 percent

Clearly, there are a lot of factors involved in creating a positive CX. In fact, 37 percent of survey respondents say the complexity of the customer experience is their biggest obstacle in improving their CX.  But that doesn’t mean you can give up. Here are five ways to improve your customer experience:

How to Improve Customer Experiences

1. Segment Your Marketing

Choose offers to send customers based on data you’ve collected about them. You can start by segmenting them into general groups, such as age, gender and where they live. Then, as you collect more information about your customers, you will be able to generate increasingly personalized messages.

2. Be Proactive

Reaching out to customers with personalized marketing messages, whether via email, text or off-line direct marketing, creates a positive impression of your business. When customers feel that you’re paying attention to their habits — what they buy, how they shop and what marketing they’re most responsive to — it builds a relationship with your business.

3. Get Input from Your Customers

Customers want to feel their opinions are being heard. Listen to what they’re saying on social media and take action on their suggestions. Actively encourage input by conducting surveys about all aspects of the customer experience, including your customer service, so customers have an opportunity to provide feedback that will help you improve.

4. Personalize Customer Service Interactions

If a customer calls your business’s customer service department, will they be greeted by name? If the customer service rep is able to pull up their account, past purchasing history and other personalized information, they can. Use cloud storage for customer data so all of your customer service employees have access to customers’ previous interactions with your business readily at hand, no matter where they are. Cloud-based storage also allows customer service reps to quickly access information such as best practices to use in resolving problems, and to update and share information in real-time so all of your customer service reps are on the same page. That means better service overall.

5. Speed It Up

Everyone wants to get their customer service problems resolved as quickly as possible. Because speed is a major factor in a positive customer experience, look for a call center solution that offers features such as automatically routing calls to the correct queue and enabling remote or mobile agents to handle calls. You’ll get calls resolved faster — and provide a better customer experience.

Customer Tablet Photo via Shutterstock

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Rieva Lesonsky Rieva Lesonsky is a Columnist for Small Business Trends covering employment, retail trends and women in business. She is CEO of GrowBiz Media, a media company that helps entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses. Visit her blog, SmallBizDaily, to get the scoop on business trends and free TrendCast reports.

One Reaction
  1. Hey, Rieva! Thanks for republishing this insightful content.

    I’ve witnessed how classifying customers in different groups, knowing what to say next vs. what not to say next, personalizing customer interactions across all platforms, and doing all of these with a sense of urgency can help businesses deliver exceptional customer service and making it a one-of-a-kind customer experience for each one. Working in sales, I know how hard it used to be to get these done.

    But with the advent of technology, gathering relevant data and analyzing each and every transaction that goes in and comes out of your communication channel is much easier. Through utilizing tools like CRM and phone systems and integrating them using CTI solutions, data and analytics have become second nature for most businesses, and I hope more will follow suit.