Customer Experience Always Wins

Businesses of all sizes are fighting for one thing; CUSTOMERS. Some companies try to wow prospects by offering better deals on products, giving discounts, and other promotions to make a sale. Reducing prices, however, is not a viable long-term strategy. The impact of providing a discount can make the customer experience more transactional rather than memorable, further commoditizing your products and services. The best way to win over customers and getting them hooked on your brand is by offering them an experience they cannot forget.

Why Customer Experience?

In a nutshell, customer experience is what a customer's perception is of your brand based on their interactions. It is the "feeling" that they get when they engage with your content, your service, your product and any message you put out there.

Customer experience is paramount to your organization's success because it can impact your customers' lifetime value (LTV). Offering a high-quality product or service that does what it is supposed to do is not the benchmark for a great customer experience. You can meet customer expectations by providing them with what they want, but you can easily exceed their expectations by how you deliver. If a business wants to WOW their customers, there needs to be a jaw-dropping moment in the customer journey that makes your brand memorable. 

The Rise of Customer Expectations

In an ever-increasing competitive marketplace, another major challenge that organizations face is the rise in customer expectations. As a result, businesses need to develop newer and better strategies to get more prospects to convert to customers. By focusing on customer experience, not only does it bring a viable long-term growth strategy, it encourages positive endorsements and has an impact on social marketing. You cannot undervalue your customers' social circle if you aim to earn repeat business. 

Businesses nowadays cannot ignore customer service since having faithful customers has immense advantages. Unhappy customers will stop buying from a brand that offers them a poor experience, even if the transaction was minimal.

Accenture's study showed that 54% of customers started engaging with a rival business after receiving a less favourable experience from the initial transaction. Hence, organizations today have to give more attention to improving their customer experience strategy if they do not want to lose their customers to other competitor brands. 

For many businesses, having a customer experience strategy is an afterthought when it should be at the forefront as it is a requirement to retain their customers. You don't need to fret if you have no idea where to begin, as almost every business faces this challenge, especially during the startup and growth phase. It doesn't end there either. Consider the obsession that Amazon has with customer experience. By making every decision revolve around customer experience, Amazon continues to win the retail battle. 

The success of Amazon is proof that customer experience always wins. 

Where to Begin?

Start by getting a deep understanding of your customers. You can do this by building a customer profile and mapping out the customer journey using measurable key performance indicators. There are numerous platforms and systems you can utilize to track customer behaviour effectively. We can then understand, "what makes your customers tick?" providing you with the outcome your customer experience strategy needs to deliver. 

For example, when we approach a website redesign project, our goal is to design an experience for the target customer. Therefore, we start by evaluating the current website analytics, usually available for free through Google Analytics. We also install some advanced screen recording tools such as Lucky Orange and utilize A/B testing tools such as Unbounce. To evaluate whether the approach we are taking will work, we use an A.I. analysis tool such as EyeQuant that delivers predictive data before completing the design process. This approach not only saves us time but significantly enhances our ability to ensure the end-result meets customer expectations. To demonstrate in real-time, we can also recruit an audience as part of a focus group from UserTesting to gather results from a smaller audience before the project goes live. 

The above example primarily relates to digital experiences, but it is essential to make every customer interaction count, online or offline. 

To learn how we can help enhance your online customer experience, visit 2web.ca