How many times have you given up on a product or service because of a bad experience? As a customer, it’s sad to walk away from a service that provides all the features you need and fits within your budget but provides bad customer experience. Here are 4 simple ways to boost your customer experience and retain your customers.
1. Communicate proactively
The simplest way to improve customer experience is to proactively communicate with them. It can start with a Welcome email when they sign up for your service. In the email, you can ask if they have any questions/feedback. Couple of weeks later, you can follow up with them asking if they are facing any problem and offer to talk to them, if needed. Occasionally, you can communicate to them about new features & offers. This tells your customers that you are constantly adding value to your service.
Many times, customers just give up & walk away when they have a bad experience. Mostly, it is because they couldn’t find what they were looking for or they couldn’t understand how to use your service. Very few of them speak up. Reaching out to them, answering their questions helps them understand your service better. It gives you an opportunity to understand their problems and improve your solution.
2. Personalize customer experience
Imagine seeing your name in a subject line or email greeting. It stands out among all the emails that crowd your Inbox. Similarly, would you rather communicate with an organization or a person? Use a person’s email ID (e.g., [email protected] instead of [email protected]) to communicate with your customers.
Providing personalized recommendations when your customers shop on-line or sending triggered emails based on their preferences show them that you care about the customer. Personalization makes a message more relevant. It helps customers find what they are looking for. Else they come across as spam.
Most customers have some question or the other about your products & services. Personalized replies go a long way in establishing trust and improving customer experience. For example, although we have a list of FAQs, we reply to each customer question separately, with their context. This shows that you are not just pasting replies from a template but actually trying to help them.
3. Prioritize customer feedback
Customer feedback is valuable information. What’s more valuable is the feedback that is repeated often. If a customer is repeatedly facing an issue or requesting a feature, you need to prioritize it. Likewise, if you hear similar feedback from multiple users, you need to pay more attention to it. Prioritizing customer feedback in a smart way can help you improve customer experience rapidly.
4. Identify & remove bottlenecks
Customers can face hurdles in various aspects of your service such as customer onboarding, finding resources for help, making payments, etc. One of the best ways to improve customer experience is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes, walk through the processes yourself, identify the bottlenecks they face and remove them. Find out where your customers get stuck while onboarding. How can you fix it? What percent of your payments are failing? How many users drop off before making the payment? Can you provide alternative methods of payment? The more frictionless your service, the better the customer experience will be.
Good customer experience leads to repeat business, high customer retention and growth in revenues. It leads to better word-of-mouth marketing and attracts more customers. It has the power to turn customers into loyal brand ambassadors. Treating your customers the way you expect to be treated is the key to build a good experience.
