Tips to improve your customer experience

There's nothing more disappointing than a great product with bad customer experience. Ever experienced this? 

For a company to be successful in today's competitive marketplace, it must deliver a great customer experience every time. This means providing customers with consistent excellent experiences, as well as developing more seamless and natural ways for customers to communicate with your business. 

What is customer experience?

In today’s world, where a positive or negative experience can be shared on social media in seconds, this journey has never been more important. Customer experience is the holistic view the customer has of your product or service from their first interaction to their very last. 

Over the last three years, our CX (customer experience) team has been consistent in hitting the 92-94% mark in the customer satisfaction category and just recently won the New Generation Best Customer Experience of the Year 2022 award. We’ve asked them to provide four tips on how to improve your customer relationship and provide an outstanding experience. 

1. Be an active listener 

When addressing a complaint or taking note of an enquiry, being able to demonstrate active listening is a key part of creating a quality customer experience. 

Customers want to know that they are valued and that what they say matters. Effectively demonstrating active listening to a customer may be done in many ways, and often only requires a subtle effort. However, doing so may significantly improve the overall customer experience. 

Some ways in which to show a customer you're invested in them and that your attention is fully present are to simply repeat back key points, ask relative questions and summarise or recap the content of the dialogue toward the end of the interaction. 

2. Have a positive mindset

Positive thinking is an important skill to have when dealing with customers. If we take an attitude of positivity, even when dealing with challenging issues, it can help put a more positive spin on the situation. 

Having a positive mindset is essential to improving customer experience. It helps you to be much more focussed and efficient in everything you do with the right attitude and you will create a great experience for your customers. 

Source: Unsplash

3. Build rapport and trust

When a customer engages with a company, they don't only buy into the product or service, they also buy into those who represent the company via customer-facing roles. 

Building rapport and trust not only improves loyalty, but helps to win over customers in general, which may be used to a CX consultant’s advantage. Achieving this may be done by identifying with customers on a few different levels, such as being conscious of their tone, cadence, and formalities, as well as sympathising with their emotional state. 

For example, if you're speaking to a customer who is upset about a service they received, try to acknowledge what went wrong and how you understand why that would make them feel the way they do. Them feeling your sympathy would likely help defuse the situation, to a point where you may start a productive dialogue. Likewise, if a customer uses formal language, it would be best to greet them formally and remain formal throughout your interaction. 

4. Go the extra mile 

‘Going the extra mile’ is an old term coined to describe doing more than is expected, trying a little harder and going above the norm. A customer might not remember the exact words spoken but will always remember their experience, therefore going above and beyond can only enhance a customer experience and differentiate you from mediocre brands. 

Kohle is a customer experience consultant on one of our FinTech projects and shares his experience with going the extra mile for a customer. 

“I recently had a customer inform me that they were unable to transact with a card they had just ordered for their overseas trip. We discovered that the customer had ordered the incorrect card. 

The customer was extremely upset because they had no other means of transacting while abroad and their flight was departing in just a few hours. I then reached out to the courier and arranged for an urgent delivery to the airport, and requested for the driver to call the customer on arrival. In doing so, I also coordinated between the driver and the customer, tracking the delivery until it was successfully made. Our customer received their card just in time and had a wonderful experience transacting abroad.

About two weeks later, I received a callback request from a different customer who asked for me by name. When speaking to them, they proceeded to explain how their son is travelling overseas soon, and that their friend could not stop singing praise about how great our product is and what fantastic service they received. They proceeded to open an account and order their own card, noting how they too would be recommending our product and service.”

Source: Unsplash

It’s very clear that good customer experience is important and should be regularly evaluated. The goal of having a good customer experience is not just to get them through the door, but rather it should have some type of impact on customers’ lives. If people feel satisfied and appreciated, they are more inclined to keep coming back and recommend your product or service.