Customer experience plays a key role in a company’s growth and development. There is no standard way for delivering excellent customer service and each industry has its own way of approaching their customers. In today’s challenging digital world, customers have so many options and they can go to a competitor if they encountered a bad experience. Keeping this in mind, it is very important for any business to understand customer expectations and provide excellent services.
Why delivering better customer experience is critical for your business?
A company’s relationship with its customers is not only based on improving quality of products or service they provide, but also understanding and meeting their expectations.
Every business wants its customers to have an excellent customer experience whenever they do business with them. Sometimes it may go wrong and customer may experience a bad service which they may publicize and decide to walk away from your business.
So, how can you protect your valued customers from a negative customer experience? In addition to helping them, your company should also avoid the bad customer experiences. Here are some of the best practises that every business should keep in mind to avoid bad customer experience.
1. Paying attention to customer feedback
If you are receiving feedbacks from your customer and failed to act over it, then, you are missing an opportunity to build better customer experience. Failing to act on customer feedback can adversely affect your business growth and you won’t be able to know the areas that you need to improve. Customer feedbacks and responses are important in the success of every business. It helps you transform your products and services to better suit the needs of your customers.
What you should do?
You need to collect and analyse feedbacks and act positively over it. Here are some reasons why customer feedback is important to your business.
- Helps to improve products and services
- Helps you to measure customer satisfaction and create best customer experience
- It shows you the value customer opinions
- Encourages customer retention
- Get more customers by word-of-mouth
2. Listening to your customers
“You learn when you listen. You earn when you listen—not just money, but respect.” —Harvey Mackay
Listening to your customers is important to maintain a good relationship with them. For example, when you are in a meeting with the customer, you must listen to what they say and take appropriate action in response to the conversation. Not listening to your customers is one of the biggest mistake’s businesses have ever made and it may lead to the following consequences which may be irreversible in some cases:
- Annoyed customers
- Loss in business
- Damaged reputation
3. Always follow up
Another important aspect that every business shouldn’t neglect is making each customer feel like the most important client of your business. One way to show your care is, to always follow up on customer concerns or problems. This helps you to learn likes and dislikes of customer for your service and take necessary steps to improve and satisfy customer. Delaying or neglecting emails give the impression that the customer is not important to you. The best way to follow up your customer is to send an email or survey asking for feedback on how the projects were handled. This will help your customer service stand out and open the door for future communication.
4. Stop over-promising and under delivering
Some businesses over-promise to get clients and under-deliver later which may lead to disaster. Over-promising and under-delivering doesn’t just affect small businesses, it can also destroy the reputation of prominent organizations.
So, avoid over-promising to any customer. Make sure you meet the timelines to provide best customer experience. It is always better to under-promise and over-deliver, which will mean your clients become raving fans of your business.
5. Do not suffocate customers
It is important to make customers know how much you care for them but your attempts to convey the message should not overburden them. Don’t overburden them with details unless they specifically request for it. Keep in mind that frequent calls to customers make them frustrated, so calls should be kept to a reasonable level.
6. Training employees to project confidence
You must provide proper training to every employee in a company for providing best customer experience. For example, if a customer asks a question about your product, not every employee of a company would have an immediate answer. Instead of saying I don’t know, you can promise them that you will get back to them after a quick research. Customers shouldn’t have an impression that proper training has not been provided. Every employee in a company should be confident while interacting with clients.
7. Having proper user interface
In the digital world, a website is a basic need for a business, either it is big or small. Increasing visibility is one major factor that makes a website important for every business. Even if people heard about your company, they will do a quick research online to know you better. Another important reason to have a website is to represent your business and give you credibility.
So, if you don’t have a website, you are missing potential prospects. Thus, it is essential for every business to have a website. Designing a user interface website with clear call to actions like contact address, phone numbers plays major role in a website to attract the customers. The more professional your website, the more advantage you can gain.
8. Following customer focused culture
Building a customer-centric culture is harder than it sounds. To avoid bad customer experience, create culture internally in an organization before taking it to customer. In order to create a customer focused culture, leadership must create a vision that is easy to understand and remember. Before conveying your vision to your customers, you must convey your customer service vision to your employees.
Also, the management must keep employees in alignment with the vision as individuals and as teams. Thus, the internal culture of a company is the secret in delivering amazing customer service. All of your efforts will work, only if you have a clear customer service vision that becomes deeply rooted in your company’s culture.
9. Following a proactive approach
The businesses following reactive approach face loss of income due to operational downtime, dissatisfied customers and damage your reputation.
Following proactive approach of customer support makes your business more productive with many benefits like improving customer loyalty and enhancing the value of your business.
10. Avoid making it difficult to get in touch
When a customer wants to reach you immediately for any queries and if it is difficult to contact you, it leads to bad customer experience making them even more confused. You can help them by publishing/providing accurate contact details of company in all of your websites and email communications to enable them to contact you instantly via their preferred channel of communication such as emails, phone calls, and social media.
11. Do not delay in responding to your customers
The most important attribute of good customer service is a fast response. Most of the time people do not respond promptly when a customer comes with an issue or feedback. In order to maintain customer loyalty and retention, it is crucial to respond to customer feedback in a timely manner. A quick response to feedback can help customers feel that their opinions matter and are being heard. Rain, shine or corona virus, we need to respond to customer at high speed as our customers are very important for us.
These are some of the practices that every business should adhere in order to provide best customer experience. If these practices are followed, the company can build a foundation of loyalty and improve customer retention.
If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
~ Jeff Bezos
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