A study by Temkin Group revealed, “65% of buyers believe a positive experience with an enterprise is more influential than great advertising”. Numerous other studies suggest that customers now consider user-experience as a key differentiator between the brands.
With every enterprise diverting investment towards creating a positive experience, the Gartner study that predicted “50% of enterprises will double their investment in customer experience” finds new ground.
The changing dynamics of customer acquisition is coaxing business into spending more while attempts to retain existing customers find no buyer. Businesses today need to pivot from customer acquisition mindset to customer retention because retention is a proven way of acquiring referrals. A retained customer (promoter) is likely to tell 5 out of 10 people about the positive experience while a detractor is likely to tell 7 about the bad experience.
Is it possible to use Customer Experience as a Marketing Strategy?
1. Leveraging Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score is a mathematical classification of customer’s willingness to recommend a company to others. An NPS survey tells us the percentage of customers who are going to act as a Promoter or a Detractor. With a huge probability of customers either bringing in more customers or taking away a few, doesn’t it make more sense to work on increasing the number of promoters?
Enterprises can increase the number of promoters by improving their customer experience. By diverting marketing budget to strengthening user-journey for positive customer experience, businesses can increase retention and acquire free referrals.
Positive word of mouth generated by rendering quality user-experience will benefit more and bring in more ROI than any advertisement.
Interesting Fact: Retaining 5% of Users can Increase Sales by 24%.
2. Using Social Media as a TouchPoint and a Marketing Channel
Handling customer queries on social media can help enterprises garner positive word of mouth. By turning social media into a TouchPoint for customers, businesses can provide quality customer-service in public domain and acquire better exposure.
Businesses can double social media as a touchpoint as well as a marketing channel. Social Media can prove to be a great way of handling customer queries and promoting existing products.
A brand that handles customer-queries on social media is bound to win in the long run because it is helping customers save time by directly tweeting their problems. Earlier customers used to login to your platform and raise tickets but with social media, delivering quality customer experience has got easier.
Entrepreneurial giants like Apple, Sony, and Samsung have social media handles specifically created to leverage troubleshooting support to customers.
3. Focus on Controlling Churn Rate
Churn Rate is defined as the percentage of users who decided to never again transact with your businesses. A high churn rate signal towards a weak customer-service, which can be controlled by relying on latest technological advancements like AI-based Chatbots.
How investing in AI-based Chatbots can control churn rate?
Earlier customers used to ditch brands for better pricing but in contemporary times, customer-experience has emerged as a key brand differentiator, which means people are willing to pay more for a positive experience.
AI-based chatbots can serve customers better because it can render personalized experience to every customer. Data backed chatbots can collect information from varied sources on its own and help customers resolve their queries thus bringing the churn rate down.
The fact that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a positive experience means businesses can benefit by redirecting their marketing budget towards customer-experience improvement. Since the churn rate is one of the five key customer experience metrics that can help enterprises double the revenue, it makes sense to invest heavily into it.
End Thoughts
The marketing landscape has changed and it is an opportunity for enterprises to bank upon. By providing an experience that retains customers and coaxes them to talk about it, businesses can improve their sales as well as acquire more referrals.
