How to Earn Loyalty by Focusing on Customer Experience

Relationships are hard work. This applies to partnerships, but also marketing. Targeted ads, comparison platforms, and free trials tempt our customers to go elsewhere with only a few clicks required, and fewer are willing to settle for lock-in contracts. So how do we avoid our product becoming a commodity, and encourage customers to stay? The answer is to provide a great customer experience.

Why Managing Customer Experience Is Essential for Loyalty

What is a great customer experience? What it’s not, is simply meeting the standard features of good customer service, such as employing friendly staff and having refund policies. Rather, it means building a genuine emotional connection. As with our relationships, this can only be achieved by understanding each other and providing something others cannot. In this post, we explain why we think investing in customer experience is essential, and more rewarding than you might think.

Great customer experience leads to customer loyalty. Here’s why building loyalty is worthwhile in the first place:

Loyal Customers Are More Profitable

Customers who have a consistently good experience tend to be loyal, and loyalty pays off. Significantly more revenue can be brought in by regular customers compared to first-time buyers. Those who repeatedly purchase from the same shop spend on average seven times as much as impulse buyers or first-timers.

Emotional Connection Is More Difficult Online

While we now discover, research, and purchase products online, as customers we still value the same things we did when our purchases were all local. Throughout all steps of our customer journey, we value things like personal support, convenience, sustainability, value for money, and rewards. Many of these are harder for a business to fulfill without a shopkeeper who gets to know their regular customers. Relationships develop naturally when people meet face to face, but in a digital world, this requires deliberate investment. For omnichannel businesses, providing a convenient purchase process often isn’t enough. To build an emotional connection, brands have to look for opportunities to help and engage customers at all stages of the customer journey. Building this customer engagement might mean answering questions from people who have no intention of buying in the short-term.

How to Deliver a Better Customer Experience

Build Detailed Customer Profiles

Observe and record as much information as possible about your customers, so you can understand their needs, desires, and behavior. This is known as X-data or experience data, and it includes:

Requesting feedback using qualitative and quantitative surveys
Tracking metrics such as NPS, CSAT, and CES
Conducting in-depth interviews
Monitoring user behavior on your website and digital platforms

Vitally, X-data should not be viewed only at the macro level. It should be connected to individual customer profiles so you can see which feelings drove which purchases. In other words, knowing your overall NPS (Net Promoter Score) is of little use unless you know which customers recommend you the most and why.

Share Information throughout Your Organization

If you work in an enterprise, you might know how tempting it is for departments to hoard information in silos. But of course, this prevents collaboration and makes it harder to be creative. That’s why your customer profiles shouldn’t be isolated in a traditional customer relationship management platform. Rather than maintaining one CRM database of customer contact details, with customer feedback and insights stored in other marketing or sales software, this information needs to be combined and accessible to as many employees as possible. This doesn’t mean that every staff member has to view an extremely detailed profile filled with information irrelevant to their role. It means they need access to related information easily, in a context that makes sense. For example, this could allow your product development teams to view product feedback without relying on the customer service team to pass it on. Alternatively, with customer feedback connected to your sales team, you can set up automated processes such as special offers sent by email.

Provide Validation in Exchange for Customer Loyalty

Collecting and managing customer data centrally and in real-time allows your employees to instantly understand how the customer feels. Allow your employees to respond accordingly by providing incentives for happy customers to tell their friends, or custom offers to make up for poor customer experiences. Simply addressing a customer with their name instead of a generic greeting can make an enormous difference.

A consistent and predictable experience creates customer confidence, which can lead to loyalty.

Shep Hyken, customer service and customer experience expert

Ask Clearly for Consent

If your customer information is gathered without informed consent, the kind where customers genuinely understand what is being recorded and why you can easily lose trust and suffer growing reputational damage. Understanding privacy legislation such as GDPR (Europe) and CCPA (California) may be essential for legal reasons, but it’s equally important to inform customers of their privacy rights so they feel more secure.

Most customers are happy to exchange their data in exchange for services, but this doesn’t mean companies should automatically request as much as possible. In some cases, it may be wise to request only the most valuable data points, to keep your sign-up process fast and avoid pushing the faith of your customers too much.

Treat B2B the Same as B2C

Whether you’re providing your product or service B2C or B2B, customer expectations are the same. Customers who are used to personalized offers in their private life also want this experience in their working life. For this reason, B2B enterprises must adapt to what has long been common practice in the B2C market: an automated and personalized purchase process from the initial product search to delivery.

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