8 practical ways to improve your customer experience
The customer experience is continuously changing and what we can condemn is that there constantly needs to be a shift in behavior and when this occurs, you need to shift your customer experience strategy to adapt to these changes.
However, many business owners and marketers stagger when adjusting their marketing strategy. Business struggles usually occur when the customer experience isn’t as good.
Well, let’s not wait any further because in this article, we will discuss what practical methods you need to follow to improve your customer experience.
8 ways to improve your customer’s experience
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Always listen to the customer
Your customer should be your priority and they are always able to provide you with enough feedback that you can consider and help you take action. This act is simple and not only does it help you better communicate with your customers, but it also improves the quality of your products and services.
However, keep in mind that only listening is never enough. You need to respond to customer feedback with actions and reply to any comments they may have. If customers see that you aren’t taking their feedback seriously, they may not leave too many positive comments, which will affect your brand’s reputation.
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Keep your customer service top-notch
Also, remember that your customer support needs to be at the top level. Even if you aren’t quick enough to address any negative experiences, you can set up a live chatbot that will act on the first steps and clarify a few things that need to be clarified. This is crucial in improving the customer experience and customer loyalty in the long term.
Your customer service shouldn’t only focus on what benefits your business but what benefits your customers. To improve your customer experience, you must evaluate every interaction that takes place within your business.
According to statistics, customer-focused companies will be up to 60% more profitable than those that aren’t.
The appropriate customer service will grant your customer’s the right level of customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers will always create positive reviews about you and help you set up a powerful customer engagement strategy that provides you with real-time support.
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Measure brand awareness with brand intelligence software
If you want to dive deep into insights and identify how good your brand awareness level is and your overall business performance, consider using a brand intelligence software. It will allow you to determine how your consumer preferences are being affected and your business needs.
If you want to take the right level of insight, consider defining your goals first with the help of brand intelligence software. There are plenty of helpful features you can use with brand intelligence software solutions:
- Surveys: Your goal isn’t just to sit and wait for what people say about your brand. You can approach and ask them yourself. How? With the help of market research, surveys allow you to collect data influencing your marketing decisions. Based on the surveys you conduct, you can ensure that the insights you gather meet your business needs.
- Web listening: Brand intelligence software can give you automatic alerts and track specific keywords, which can give you a significant advantage over the content on the internet.
- Social media monitoring: Are you concerned about your reviews and how many followers you have, or if your posts are going viral on social media? Social media monitoring software allows you to monitor what people say about your social media channels.
Other than that, there are several brand intelligence software solutions you can use to get the best results possible, such as:
- Attest: Whether you want to receive feedback on your survey or entirely optimize it, you can do so with the help of Attest. Attest is highly experienced in providing you with insights, reaching out to your target audience, and more.
- Meltwater: Allows you to manage your media presence, analyze competitors, track brand mentions, etc.
- SurveyMonkey: Provides you with competitor analysis, smart reporting tools, and large integrated panels.
- Brand24: Allows you to monitor campaign impacts, your competitors, AI-powered sentiment analysis, and more.
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Be consistent in your postings
It’s always important to continuously interact with your team and to ensure you do this through email, social media, your website, and any other places you interact with your users.
Employees will also have a hard time whenever internal and external messages don’t manage to align. Post more on what interests your audience is interested in and set realistic expectations. For instance, if you reply to your audience’s messages within 24 hours, claim it. Don’t ever set expectations that aren’t true.
In other words, this term is called “Brand Consistency.” It shows you how you deliver your messages, your tone of voice, and the colors of your visual elements. Customers that understand you are the ones who will say good words about your brand and uphold its reputation.
Therefore, staying consistent and creating something that will make you remember them is always important.
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Don’t forget about AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a real trend in the everyday world. From chatbots to many other AI technologies, customer service and their experience has enhanced with the help of these new technologies.
You would be surprised that chatbots save you up to 30% of your costs and help businesses respond much faster to their customers. These are excellent for responding to real-time requests and reducing overall customer frustration.
Now, how do you create AI chatbots? Here are a few ways:
- Chatbots entirely engage with customers at all times and provide simple answers to their questions. Getting quick answers will help customers not be on hold and wait for a response.
- Bots can easily collect basic information from every visitor interested in your product or service.
- Bots always deliver quality support outside business hours, so the conversation continues.
However, no matter what occurs, never disregard the fact that the AI can’t do all the work for you. For example, when the business becomes more detailed and conversations become more dynamic, without a doubt, you always need to have human intervention to handle more complex conversations.
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Motivate your employees
There’s a saying that goes, “The higher powers reflect the employee’s motivation,” so you need to ask yourself if you are motivating your employees enough. Motivated employees will always have the strength to make the most out of happy customers.
If employees are demotivated, they won’t ever have enough positive energy to enhance the customer experience. On the other hand, motivated employees always think of new solutions and ways to help customers find what they are looking for.
Even if your employees aren’t feeling well, always find out what might be blocking them from delivering a better customer experience. Try setting up a survey; through these insights, you can learn more about your employees’ pain points.
Also, don’t forget about your company’s culture. Regardless of their position, all team members who work together will always share their values and support an excellent customer experience.
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Be active on social media
It’s always important to find out where your audience hangs out the most. For example, your audience might be most active on Instagram, Facebook, or any other social media platform.
Your primary goal shouldn’t only be to use social media and focus on which channel has your target audience in it. After you identify that, you can focus more on depth on which are the next steps you should take to provide a better customer experience.
Great brands won’t only use their social media channels for marketing but also for expressing their creativity and keeping their customers fully engaged and happy in the long term.
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Personalize customer experiences
What better than personalization? The customer experience always becomes a blast when personalized kicks in. But unfortunately, 71% of customers expect a personalized experience; most companies don’t succeed in delivering this.
The real question is how you can personalize experiences. It’s all done by segmenting your customers and using automation to divide your subscriber list based on your email marketing. You can also consider using marketing automation to track customer interactions that support this segmentation.
The bottom line
We come to an end for this article. These are the eight important rules you should prioritize when seeking to improve the customer experience. Of course, the most important part is to respond to their feedback and continuously seek improvements you can make when needed.
Customers always want to be understood, so nothing can get any better when you do so and take action!
About the author:
Tony Ademi is a freelance SEO content and copywriter. He has been in the writing industry for three years and has managed to write hundreds of SEO-optimized articles. Moreover, he has written articles that have ranked #1 on Google. Tony’s primary concern when writing an article is to do extensive research and ensure that the reader is engaged until the end.