- make CX strategy a significant growth lever to propel you to the next level
It might seem that the whole concept of Customer Experience is way beyond the reach of the average small business. If you are thinking that way you are not alone. The fact is even the big players like Amazon or Microsoft or to bring it home the likes of Tropical Cable among others all started small and have grown through hard work and persistence.
So how did these giants overcome their difficulties and grow so massively over time? My point here is that being customer-centric is helpful for any type of business and I daresay even more so for the small business (including the petty trader) whose welcoming poise is a joy to behold. Overlooking the importance of customer experience can be costly. Therefore, paying attention to your customer experience strategy is imperative in delivering the best solutions to your customers effectively.
Getting your CX right has immense benefits including customer satisfaction, customer retention, increased cross-selling and up-selling, and brand advocacy just to highlight a few. Investing in a CX strategy is the way to go, if you have been thinking about investing in a CX strategy, now is time to kickstart that plan. Customer experience design (CX) is the practice of aligning products/services with all your touchpoints through which customers interact with your business.
A customer journey map depicts the journey from inception through all the various touchpoints from the initial inquiry, customer service, ad campaigns, how the store looks and feels like, and so on. Within your team, some are good at resolving customer issues, and others are simply not good at it and would not bother to go the extra mile. Both are good assets for your business however those who lack empathy will not add value to your business. The key is to identify the basics and proffer solutions to turn the situation around.
These are some of the things you should bear in mind as you design your strategy and manage customer interactions at touchpoints. Three things you should focus on are; first, build a good rapport with your customers by interacting with them regularly and developing a close association such that you get to know their names and remember their faces, this makes them feel valued as they remember the interactions.
I recall this Italian who ran a Café in London years ago where I passed on my way to work every day, I always enjoyed a conversation or two with him and trust me it was worth the time, I always looked forward to buying a hot tea or coffee and enjoy a banter or two before I start work.
Second, by offering standardized services you ensure that everyone gets the same standardized service level. Customers who experience this will share with their colleagues the awesome experience you hand to them. third, by seeking their opinion regularly through surveys (one on one, online, open invitations, online platforms) customers love it when they are listened to and by learning from their feedback directly you engage them proactively and make them feel good because their concerns are addressed promptly.
There are some basic keys to help activate a good customer experience strategy regardless of the size of your business, the following traits are essentially commonplace. They are; personalization, journey mapping, goal setting, hiring customer-centric employees, devising an effective feedback system and, revising and optimizing the experience.
Personalization
Where to begin is to understand the type of people and personas you are targeting and for whom you are developing your customer experience strategy. One famous example of personalization was from Ford when they allowed customers to choose any colour they wanted as long as it was black. The meaning they ascribed to this was that customers could have a personalized customer experience as long as the product offered features that were favourable to them. The flexibility offered customers meant they could purchase a car that met their exact taste and that what they associated with was the brand and not so much the colour of the car.
Know your customers by developing their persona, this is a fictional character created to depict the type of customers who patronize your products or services. The persona is usually created to be representative of a particular segment. Each persona fits into a target segment. So the local school teacher who purchases stationery from you may require your best efforts to ensure that you have a good supply of his/her stationery needs and perhaps a textbook or two.
The average family in your community who buy their groceries from you regularly, especially when the kids are going to school will be looking for a reliable supply of snacks every morning and so on. These days with technology dominating buying platforms many focus on demographics encompassing their age, gender, location, purchasing habits, interests, and more. Having this information will help you in identifying their pain points, interests, how to respond to their pain points, and how to deliver a personalized solution to them.
Journey Mapping
This enables you to know how customers have interacted with your brand since its inception. As the name suggests the customer journey provides the route taken by customers from the point, they heard about you to the time of purchase and possible return. These are things your customer feels, sees, and hears as they interact with your business building the foundation for their experience.
Understanding these experiences enhances your ability to accurately map and control the customer journey. Your goal is to make them keep coming back. Some great learning points here would include why the customer moved from say shelf A to B, the route used, and what motivated them. If your touchpoints include your website that is even better as your customers get a seamless experience while navigating your website depending on its usability to help them meet their needs efficiently.
What you decide to put on your journey map depends on the nature of your business and how you perceive your customer’s journey as they interact with your brand. Key questions you may ask include how they got to know about you or found you. In today’s digital ecosystem your journey touchpoints may include on-site (one on one interactions), email, call centre, mobile apps, and website.
My story about the Englishman who found a hotel in Elmina and was bought by their promise of a tourism bouquet including a meet at Kotoka International Airport and visits to places of interest in Ghana tells the story of a customer journey as he remotely discovered their offering (from his online research) and managed to book a room at the hotel with all the accompaniments. I hope it went right for him and the hotel’s sake because then he will share his experience with others and perhaps win a few more people.
Three major steps make up the customer journey. These are Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. However, with the advent of digital platforms, two critical additions appear in the customer experience: Retention and Advocacy. These new stages explore brand touchpoints with online shoppers.
Awareness involves spreading general information about your products and services. Note how visible Hisense and Melcom are in Ghana, need I say more. At the consideration, stage customers begin to look for alternatives to past purchases. Here your business strives to convince potential buyers to include you on the list of available options using market research strategies to communicate with potential customers effectively.
At the conversion stage, the customer is prompted to take a particular action, use this phase to sell your product/service as the best fit to solve your customer’s problem. At the retention stage a loyal customer brings you consistent business, this costs you less than the effort to acquire new customers, your goal here is to keep the customer happy with a good relationship strategy.
The final stage in this process is where word-of-mouth becomes useful to your business. By encouraging customers to share reviews or opinions you extend your reach very significantly. This can be by traditional word-of-mouth or through social media.
Hire customer-centric employees
Employees play an integral part in your experience strategy as they interact regularly with customers and design features for them. The need to involve them in your strategy is imperative. They are the ones who empathize with customers and as such are better able to deal with complex customer situations.
To get your CX strategy right start by hiring employees for a customer-centric culture. Customer-centric employees are willing (without any prompting) to respond to customers’ needs in a way that not only solves the problem but adds a personal touch.
Having employees who are caring about the customer experience is a valuable resource for your business. I know this young lady who mans a shop somewhere in Korle Bu who exhibits customer-centricity effortlessly and makes you always feel at home in her store. Alternatively, you can train your employees on how to have customer empathy. It is a virtue that will help them provide positive CX in both good and difficult situations with the customer.
Devising an effective feedback system
Your customer experience strategy will be complete only when you build an infrastructure where customers can give their feedback. Whether or not the feedback is positive it serves you better than no feedback at all. This is where you learn whether customers are satisfied or dissatisfied with your customer experience.
An effective feedback mechanism lets you listen, learn and improve by tracking metrics. The goal is outside-in thinking, it gives you the unique opportunity to internalize customer suggestions and demonstrate to them that you are taking action to address their concerns.
Since the world is digital today, you can leverage technology while creating a customer feedback system. There are some useful tools you can adapt if your business has digital touchpoints such as Usersnap for quantitative feedback, emoji, and star rating, Zendesk for omnichannel customer support platform.
Omnichannel retail (or omnichannel commerce) is a multichannel approach to sales that focus on providing a seamless customer experience whether the client is shopping online from a mobile device, a laptop, or in a brick-and-mortar store. Calendly allows you to schedule appointments to speak to your customers in-depth to understand their pain points.
Essentially your feedback system encompasses such things as reviews, market research, user testing, and the old-fashioned direct contact (as highlighted earlier). Another useful method is to create a diagram of experiences where you monitor the customer’s journey as they play up at your touchpoints. What makes this process authentic is that it shifts your mindset from ‘navel-gazing’ (inside-out thinking) to outside-in which is where you want you and your team to be.
Revise and optimize the experience
Refining the customer experience is not a one-off process. As you encourage more customer feedback you get to know what is working and where to improve. By adjusting and tweaking your customer experience strategy your learning about your customers is continuous.
A worthwhile thing to do is to learn from some of the big players such as Amazon. Even if everything seems well you can never over-deliver in your customer experience, there is always scope for improvement. By consistently focusing on improving your customer engagement, you build trust, improve brand awareness, gain customer loyalty, drive sales, and attract new customers through valuable recommendations.
This is the way to keep your customers happy and is more important for your business than anything else. Make sure you have a good hang on the pulse of your customers and aim to deliver 100% customer satisfaction both offline and online. According to recent research, only 28% of organizations focus on improving call center effectiveness when optimizing the customer experience.
That means nearly 75% of the remaining respondents are failing to create a seamless customer experience throughout their whole organization. Additionally, it has been discovered that only 30% of businesses focus on their social media channels when optimizing the customer experience, a significantly small number.
This is a worrying statistic considering how popular social channels are for modern businesses. Consumers like to make contact via social media because it is transparent, immediate, and easy. And they expect prompt answers too. It is reported that 52% of consumers expect a response within 30 minutes.
Customer Experience can be your game changer if you manage it effectively and efficiently. The goal is to focus on the outside-in thinking of your customer and leverage this information to address the needs of the customer promptly. Understanding who your customers are is a big part of this.
The truth is whether you are a small business or big player if you get your customer experience strategy right you are setting yourself up for massive growth in your business, however, don’t rest on your oars when success beckons, keep making your customers happy and you will stay happy.
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The writer is a Management Consultant. He can be reached on 059 175 7205, [email protected],
https://www.linkedin.com/km-13b85717
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