In emerging as well as mature markets, uniformity has created a need for companies to be unique and outperform competition to meet rising customer expectations. In India also, the need for customer retention, extended loyalty bases and customer experience as a differentiator, are becoming the key focus areas for survival.
Customer experience is the summing up of all customers’ interactions at every touch point while interacting with a company. Every engagement has an enduring impact, strengthening or weakening the client’s faith and loyalty towards a brand. While most businesses acknowledge how service impacts customer experience, a majority of them do not have a well-established experience management process in place.
Why Customer Experience Matters
People want to purchase from places or deal with companies that make them feel good. Consistently delivering an experience that is awesome and memorable for the customer has several benefits. It will not only help increase brand loyalty, reduce churn, but also create a point of uniqueness that you can use as a competitive advantage.
Nowadays, consumers spend hours on the web researching their next purchase. They compare, evaluate and pose questions to their service providers about the reliability of products and the trustworthiness of the brands. Should they decide to choose your product/service to buy, it’s crucial that the customer experiences you take them through meet or exceed their expectations.
Tools to Leverage your Strategy
Instead of stressing on technology and the software to build a unique customer experience, the focus should be on what you should do to deliver an unforgettable experience. An ideal way is to find a technology that you could leverage around your strategy rather than altering your customer experience plan.
Considering these tools could help you build an impressive experience:
- CRM for managing customer relationships: Place all the data and communications in one location so that all your customer service agents can access and view the information and respond knowledgeably.
- Marketing tools to interact with customers: Send out emails, newsletters, voice blasts, SMSs to drive specific campaigns and requirements.
- Online survey mechanisms: Solicit customer feedback and measure satisfaction levels for improvement.
- Web analytics and tracking tools: Evaluate & analyze customer engagements, how many website visits, page visits, etc. and create customer profiles to help manage the experiences.
Some of the prominent customer experience software include Zendesk, Satmatrix, ResponseTek, HubSpot, Adobe and IBM Tealeaf among others. Let’s take the example of HubSpot’s marketing and sales platform. The solution allows you to track every action your customers perform on the website. This helps you to personalize the customers’ journey based on their individual interactions.
It’s imperative that you convert the data that you capture into actionable metrics that can help improve customer interactions and retention and align your actions with your business objectives.
Further, value segmentation can help you to find out which customer segment makes sense to step up efforts and resources. However, if you don’t segment customer personas, it will be extremely difficult to deliver outstanding customer experience, much less, stay competitive.
Steps towards Enhanced Customer Experience
. Here are some tips that you may like to consider:
- Aim for focused digital experiences, not just scale. Adjust your channels to meet your customers’ needs and they’ll stay committed to you.
- Emphasize on the ecosystem rather than the enterprise. The enhanced service model to meet customers’ needs should go beyond the standard “customer-to-company” kind. It should include dealers, distributors, brokers, consumers, producers, institutions and so on.
- Finally, focus on delivering customer value and you will see how it pivots the needle for your business.
Using these strategies will help you in formulating your new, incredible customer experience. We hope it evolves into something that keeps customers coming back for more and leads to plenty of helpful word of mouth.
[About the author : Guest article contributed by Ozonetel team. Ozonetel is a Telco grade Cloud Communications platform that helps businesses to engage with their consumers throughout the customer life cycle which is through Marketing, Sales, Support & Retention programs. Ozonetel not only helps its customers to run campaigns but also has built extensive analytics tools to monitor and track the success of these campaigns.]
