Customer Experience

10 Tips for Building a Better Customer Experience

Customers are the lifeblood of every business. Delivering a superior customer experience is the key to building brand loyalty, retaining current customers, acquiring new ones, and increasing profits. These 10 tips will help you improve your customer experience and in turn allow your business to grow and scale.

1. Effectively Obtain Real-Time Customer Feedback

Customer feedback allows you to understand what your customers enjoyed about their experiences and what they would have changed. Using the right software you can employ a variety of methods to obtain feedback including:

  • Live chat tools
  • Follow-up emails
  • Surveys

Customer feedback should be set up to reach the appropriate customer support team members in order for it to have value. It does absolutely no good to capture feedback if it never reaches the right people. Lastly, take action on the feedback so that your customers know you are listening and care about their experience. This will go a long way toward gaining the trust and loyalty of your consumers. It is pertinent to mention that much of the customer feedback process can be automated with the use of analytical tools. Yogi, for example, allows you to decipher feedback across multiple channels, which can be challenging without the right tools.

2. Use Social Media to Learn Consumer Behavior

Social media is a great way to learn what your customers are interested in. This, in turn, allows you to better tailor your marketing efforts to your target audience. Easy-to-use tools allow you to find out which social media channels your email subscribers have accounts with and follow them with your business account. The by-product is that many of your subscribers may follow you back and share your content with their friends and families, generating positive and productive engagement.

3. Provide Content With Real Value

Regularly publishing content in the form of blog posts, white papers, social media content, etc. are important for SEO purposes and keeping your customers' attention. It also plays a large role in building a better customer experience. Content should not just be a series of sales pitches or gimmicky blurbs. Instead, give your customers content that they can use. For instance, if your company sells light fixtures, you may consider publishing a blog post that discusses how to update light fixtures in a way that will increase the value of their home.

By steering clear of being overly promotional and providing quality content, you are establishing your brand as an authority in its industry. This will increase your current customers' loyalty and help you gain new ones much quicker than constant sales pitches.

4. Implement Personalized Marketing

Customers crave a custom experience, they want to feel as if they are not just another number. Personalized marketing is about placing the right message at the right time on the right channel. Captured data provides visitor information such as which pages were clicked on, products visited, geographical location, and more. This information can then be used to optimize experience and engagement with relevant products and services.

5. Easy to Navigate Website

Think of your website as an online storefront: comparable to a brick-and-mortar store which should be given the same attention to detail. The owner of any storefront will think about the layout, capturing visitors' interests as soon as they walk in the door, and making sure they can easily find what they've come to look for.

Your website is no different. The landing page is the front door and it is up to you to make sure that they can find what they are looking for (links to products or information) and that their attention is captured. A confusing and difficult to navigate website will quickly make for a negative customer experience

6. Are All the Components of Your Online Store Working?

Broken links, page errors, slow uploads will cause frustration for your visitors. Analytics and tools can help you make sure all components are working as they should and that pages are uploading at acceptable speeds.

7. Improved Communication Strategies

Part of a great customer experience is consumers being able to get the answers they need to the questions they have as quickly as possible. Offering visitors as many forms of communication as is feasible ensures that every customer will find a method they are comfortable with. For some, this may be email, for others phone, and still, others would prefer to live chat.

The addition of live chat is becoming more and more popular because it offers instant gratification and increases the chances that a purchase will be made. The most important factor is to ensure all lines of communication are monitored so that inquiries are answered in a timely manner.

8. Forecast Your Customers' Behavior

Understanding what your customers' will most likely do next is vital to personalizing messages, being proactive, and increasing sales. Predictive analytics have the ability to accurately forecast customers' wants and needs. In some cases, this can happen before the visitor has made up their mind. In other cases, you may be able to tell the customer what they need before they even know it.

For instance, if you sell cell phones, and a customer has chosen a phone to purchase, you may suggest an accompanying accessory that will enhance its functionality. The consumer may not have even known the accessory existed until you showed it to them. This approach provides exceptional customer experiences.

9. Reduce Customer Churn

There is no doubt that it is far more cost-effective to retain a customer than it is to acquire a new one. Predictive analytics is useful for identifying customers who are a high churn risk. This enables businesses to be proactive and take measures to increase the customer experience in an effort to prevent the loss of high churn risk consumers.

10. Increase Shipping Efficiency

Consumers expect to receive their purchase quickly after purchase, including next day or even same-day deliveries. Predictive analytics allows businesses to ensure that deliveries are made when the consumer was told that they would receive their shipment.

As If You Can Read Your Customers' Minds

Yogi is a state-of-the-art analytics platform that allows you to understand your customers like never before. Our team understands that feedback comes from more channels than ever before, making it confusing to sort out and turn into valuable information. Using deep machine learning architecture, NLP algorithms, and cutting-edge visualizations we turn all of your feedback data into actionable information that can be used to provide a better customer experience and grow your business! Request a free demo and see what we can do for you!