In order to grow and transform your business, you need to focus on perfecting the customer experience. When your customers feel valued, and their experience with your business is a straightforward and smooth one, you will see an increase in retained customers and new acquisitions as well. This can all be achieved through listening to and acting on customer feedback.
Below are three leadership strategies that will help grow your business with customer experience:
1. Personalise based on your customers needs
Basing your service offering on individual needs is a great way to personalise your service and ensure both new and existing your customers are kept happy.
The first step is naturally to know your customers well enough to know what they need and how they need it. You'll find this out through conducting great market research and digging deep into your target audience and personas. Creating a customer journey map is also a great way of getting close to the experience that your customers have with your company.
The next step for personalising your services to your customer needs is through creating specific teams or people who are trained to help particular sets of your customers (pensioners, Gen Y, young families etc). This is also a great way you can differentiate yourself from your competition. Shout about this in your marketing and in your communications. It's crucial that you make your customers feel special—they should feel like you're providing an exclusive service just for THEM.
Today's customers are powerful and armed with data, information and access. Those who excel will be those companies who can understand, in fact predict, what customers really want.
The best way to determine what your customers actually want is to ask them. This can be done through surveys at the end of customer service calls, exit surveys and online customer satisfaction surveys. A way to explore your customer experience and understand each customers individual needs is to create a customer experience map.
2. Go digital or go home
We’re all digital in today’s day and age, and this changes operational procedures for most businesses. Customers can now access your products when they want and how they want. With technology, customer experiences are further advanced, so you want to be using it as a tool for success. Your business needs to adopt a multi-channel approach, as customers are more empowered and use multiple devices, especially to research products and services before they buy.
For example, the user experience needs to be optimised for various screen sizes and operating systems. Regardless of your industry or business model, all industries can and will be affected by innovation in mobile technology. It’s been predicted that they’ll continue their steady rise, as will the trend for more companies to embed mobile devices into their offerings.
Basically, it's important that you are where your customers are. Whether that's communicating and engaging via emails, social media sites or chat forums and across different platforms such as mobile.
3. Focus your efforts with the long term goal in mind
By now, you have hopefully seen the importance of understanding and improving your customer experience. This can be done through listening to your customer feedback and consistently measuring it - and subsequently acting on the feedback. To get the most out of managing your customer experience with advanced management software, and actually proving the ROI of this, consider the following:
- Securing lifetime value and ROI: Securing one hundred retained customers with a lifetime value of [X], by a monthly investment into an advanced customer experience management solution that highlights your customer experience issues, let’s you know what’s not working and what is; and via facilitating daily and straightforward feedback, enables you to save your customers before they end up leaving you. Or:
- Constantly focusing on customer acquisition: Keep fighting fires and not knowing what your business may be doing wrong and spending your budget on trying to acquire new customers (with advertising, sales and other acquisition costs).
Read more about proving ROI on your customer experience management solution here.
If you're a business leader and are looking for ways to grow your customer base, have a look at our ebook below.
