Would you like to create better customer experience for your organization’s customers by changing your business processes? Here are seven ideas what you could do to take your customer experience to the next level:
Make a connection with your customers: A personal connection with customers creates an emotional bond, regardless of the channel the customer is using. For example, many organizations have instructed their employees to greet customers within 15 seconds and engage those who would like to have a dialog about their interests. But be careful not to fall into that classical dialog trap: “Good day, sir! How may I help you?” … “Hi, no thanks, I am just looking around!”. How can you make your customers truly welcome?
Inject the unexpected into service or product: “Adding some small cool things to give service a twist is a simple and inexpensive way to give your customer experience a positive vibe”, suggests CEO of a retail company in Finland. She says that an imaginatively differentiated product or service can be an engaging element of the customer experience and can encourage recommendations. One hotel chain has greeting card under each bed, which says: “Yes, we clean here, too!”
Get rid of stupid rules: Get rid of any processes that hurt customers. “Getting rid of one or more of these rules can quickly and cost-efficiently increase satisfaction”, the Customer Expectation Management (CEM) professionals say. For example, using CEM Method hundreds of organizations have been able to get rid of useless rules that hurting the business.
Use online communities for your benefit: You can get really good insight through online communities and forums. Your customers will Google you, so why don’t you also? It is important to listen to customers’ conversations in social media to gain a better understanding of customers’ behaviours, needs, and preferences.
Reuse the buzz that customers are creating for you: Nowadays many organizations are realizing that when it comes to the Internet, social media, and online technology, they should take an “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach and go where customers already are. This way, customer discussions across multiple social networks are centralized in a single searchable space. In practice, this means that a comment or an article submitted by a customer on your Facebook page or Twitter feed becomes available to your website and other places, too.
Find passion internally: You should search your organization internally for customer champions rather than only relying on outside experts. The best data and the insights that you need to carry out customer experience activities are right within your own organization. You should appoint a customer experience leader and designate her/him to form and lead a centralized customer experience team.
Leverage analytics and reporting tools: Too many organizations have gathered a lot of information in their CRM systems without using them properly. A quick way to gain a strong lead in customer experience is to use analytics and reporting tools to look at this information. For example, Best Buy used a reporting tool early on in the economic downturn to understand why more customers were applying for financing for their purchases, but there also was a drop in purchases costing more than 1,000 USD.
Here are some reflective questions you can use to think about how you could create better customer experience:
- Do you connect with your customers in a genuine, meaningful way?
- Do you rules or processes that you should get rid of?
- Do you evaluate your customer experience periodically?
- Are you reusing the good customer experiences that your customers share?
- Do you use your CRM and customer data efficiently?
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