Why customer experience should be your main priority 2019
How do you get your customers to stay? By giving them a seamless, unforgettable experience across all channels.
Think that customer experience isn’t important? Probably not. But this year, it will become even more significant to brands who want to stay at the forefront.
According to research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, customer experience will overtake price and product quality as the key differentiator for brands in 2019.
Less product, more experience
The report notes that customers today are looking for fast, effective and customized interactions. They’re busy and expect your company to make it easy for them to interact and do business with you. No matter which channel they interact with your brand, they expect their questions answered by qualified staff at all times.
A poor response or bad experience will likely cause them to leave and have a negative effect on your brand’s reputation. It’s probably a smart idea to focus less on pricing strategy and invest more in your customer success team, because according to the study, over 60% of customers are willing to pay higher for good quality services. Yes, that’s right.
This means that brands need to invest in technology that can help create a personalized, timely experience. Because without the right tools, companies will likely struggle to survive the competition.
They want it to be seamless
According to the report, having a holistic omni-channel customer experience strategy is vital. It’s actually no longer a choice, it’s a strategic necessity today, says Frost & Sullivan. In other words, businesses need to realize that customers use multiple channels. Those brands that can offer a seamless, consistent experience anywhere and anytime, will stand as winners.
At the end of the day, it’s about lessening the customer effort and increasing customer satisfaction. This can be done by being proactive, anticipating what a customer wants on beforehand. Or by tracking a conversation through an application, across multiple channels. Your customer doesn’t want to repeat information, your customer expects you to know the history.
With the right kind of applications and platform, you should be able to create this type of seamless experience.
Make your customers feel special
No, automatization isn’t the answer to everything. And providing great customer experience isn’t just about customer support and handling queries. It’s also about engagement and maintaining and initiating conversations. While applications and technology can create a more effective workflow and enable a more seamless experience, your customers still want a human connection and feel valued.
Providing a personalized experience involves everything from customer support to social media interactions to the user experience on websites and landing pages. For B2C businesses, displaying user-generated content (UGC) on product pages or checkout pages can serve to inspire and increase brand engagement.
Saving time for your customers, engaging them in a positive way and making it easy for them to find what they’re looking for will pay off. A smart content marketing strategy, making use of UGC, can have a major long-term impact on your business.
Utilizing unique information about your customers, like for their location through their devices’ geolocation, or speech recognition, might also improve the overall customer experience. If your customers are waiting to be served by a support agent, displaying the expected wait time will likely be appreciated.
Acknowledging the trend
Customer experience is not just important. Today, it can make or break a brand. To put it simple, a bad experience will spread faster than before the digitalization. What could take several days back in the day, takes seconds today.
Word of mouth doesn’t just apply to the physical world anymore, customers of 2019 are helping each other through forums, blogs, review sites and social media. UGC helps other consumers to make the right decision. Even more so because of our mobile lifestyle, where the internet is only a smartphone away.
As a brand, your best bet is to make good use of the UGC phenomenon because acknowledging it and using it in your marketing is the only way to avoid ‘shadow content’, i.e. negative social content which you have no control over.
AI, AR, social media and chat bots can speed up your customer interactions and improve the overall experience, but without the human, personal touch, your customers will feel left in the cold.
