5 Tips for using Customer Experience to Ensure Customer Loyalty

Consumer loyalty is the act of actively preferring one company’s goods and services over its competitors. It is something that all companies must strive to achieve. A business that consistently meets the expectation of its customers wins it’s their trust and loyalty. And when you have a relationship build on good experiences, customers are not easily influenced by other brands.

The purpose of starting a profit-making business is to attract and keep satisfied customers who buy the goods to drive revenue. Loyal customers mean repeat customers, which indicates they are committed to your brand and spend more. They also tell their friends and coworkers about those brands that they love, which helps drive more business via referrals and recommendations.

How can Customer Experience ensure Customer Loyalty?

Creating outstanding experiences for your customers and prospects sets you apart from the competition. If you make customer experience one of your core values, you will never have to worry about loyalty again.

1. Foster a Feedback customer : Every business wants to know whether their customers are satisfied or dissatisfied with their product. Customer feedback gives you insights that are not limited to the product but also informs you about their general experience with your company. Feedback can be collected via different touchpoints, right from service calls to the buying process. Every interaction that they have with your brand is a prospective feedback touchpoint. This not only helps you improve the process but also helps you map the customer’s journey. Gathering feedback also gives your reference point for what worked and where did the experience drop. As a business, comprehending what your customers think about your product and services is crucial for you to give your customers the best experience possible. Understanding their perspective and aligning your efforts to fit your customer’s needs.When you have data from different areas of your business, you can use them to plan better. Make changes to your marketing efforts, features, updates, as well as employee training.

   And the feedback that is gathered from your user is tailored for your business, which means you can serve your prospects better.

2. Support system : Customer support is an important pillar for any business, providing resources and services that can be used by customers to solve their problems. The mode of communication is getting increasingly personal with time; they haven’t changed but rather increased. Customers expect services like call support, helpdesks, emails, user guide, knowledge bases to ticketing. In addition to that, they have social media at their disposal if they do not hear from you soon.Customers are as unique as their queries, and they all deserve to get personal attention irrespective of the urgency of their issue.

   Personally, I prefer speaking to a support executive on a call over emails any day. It gives you a sense of acknowledgment like someone is actually listening to you. A one-on-one conversation makes customers feel reassured.

   When it comes to Customer support, make sure to factor in the tone, quality, wait-time, speed, timing, language, process, and style.

   These are the basics that you need to plan and also train your executives on. Depending on the issue that the customers are facing, their tone can be anything from cheerful to angry. Adapting, according to the customer, is a valuable skill—the time and quality of service matters just as much as the relevance of the information you provide.

   Hiring more employees will enable you to answer your customers’ questions faster, especially if you commit a 24×7 support. It is important to track and improve your average response time.

3. Better – Speed, Solution, and Service : While automation and chatbots have their benefits, they cannot replace the human side of the support. Ideally, a real-time conversation is the best. A call with a customer support executive or a live-chat makes for a more easy conversation. In customer service, having a good response time is crucial, and following-up with the customer after they raise a complaint is too. While the speed of your response is important, the solution you provide takes higher precedence over it. Say your average response time is 1 minute, and you follow-up within 8 hours of the complaint being registered. But even after a month, the customer is facing the same issue again and aging, your response rate does not matter. Speed and solution are equally important aspects of the service you provide, compromising one for the other is not the best way out.
4. Act on the knowledge : Gathering feedback is the first part; gaining insights and using them to improve your business is the main goal. Customer experience has taken the center stage and it doesn’t seem to be leaving anytime soon. How you use the data that you have totally depends on you. When you have insights on your customer’s likes and dislikes, you can replicate what is working for you in different areas that it fits. While you can change or improve on things that are not so famous amongst your users.

Constant monitoring can help you understand whether it is a business trend that is impacting you or is one of the changes you made, causing the tweak/dip.Also Read: 10 Customer Experience Trends to Watch in 2020

No wonder data scientists are in demand these days, gaining insights from data has become the primary focus of many companies. And Experience management tools like SoGoSurvey have made it easy for brands to understand the data without being a data scientist.

When you act on the feedback to improve your product and services, customers are more likely to provide feedback.

• Effort – The path of least resistance

  An interaction with a customer support executive or finding the payment portal on the website, everything requires effort. When your customers don’t have to invest to much time and effort in completing a task, they are more likely to be loyal.

  Imagine you visit Starbucks, there is a queue, and it takes you 20 sec to reach the front of the line. The barista takes your order, and you get your coffee in like 5 minutes; you did not like the taste, so they replace it, which again takes 2 minutes. How would you feel? Happy right, you are more likely to come back again. But say you go to another coffee shop, you have been waiting in the line for 2 minutes, you place your order, they take 20 minutes to deliver it.

  Experience impacts your business in many ways, from loyalty to retention. And every interaction attributes to experience, whether it leaves a positive mark or a negative one, depends on you.