Guest Post: 5 Inevitable Tips That Can Ensure a Superb Customer Experience

Be Nice—It Doesn’t Cost You Anything 5 Top Customer Service Articles For t...

Guest Post: 5 Inevitable Tips That Can Ensure a Superb Customer Experience

This week we feature an article by Rakshit Hirapara , a content marketer at PeddleWeb. He writes about the importance of ensuring a positive customer experience, especially during a world crisis.

The customer experience (also referred to as CX) seems like a simple concept. However, it can be interpreted in several ways. Put simply; customer experience can be defined as thoughts and feelings that the consumer associates with the brand. It’s not just about interaction with sales or customer service.

Consumer experience involves all the interactions, everything including TV ads to the monthly statement. It is the sum of all the disappointments, delights, highs, and lows experienced while dealing with the brand.

Here are tips that can help ensure improved CX even while the world is facing the coronavirus crisis.

#1. Becoming a partner in every consumer’s life

In 2017, insurance firm John Hancock offered Apple Watch to its life insurance policyholders at a discounted rate. The firm provided it for free to policyholders who performed the planned exercise regularly for two years. Consumers who completed the exercise target for the month did not have to pay the watch’s monthly installment. The insurer managed to become a partner in the consumer’s day to day life and healthcare. It created a new path, a whole modern philosophy of customer experience.

Put simply, now; CX is more about life journey rather than customer journey. Perhaps this is the reason certain top brands’ mission statements have been changed from transaction-driven ones to statements that talk about becoming a partner in day-to-day life. Thus, every brand needs to adjust its products and services to become a part of the customer’s life.

#2. Creating better content

Content in any form can create a bond with customers and make them feel closer to the company.

These days, people ignore ads, block pop-ups, and skip video ads on streaming sites. Thus, the branded content needs to be extremely interesting. Consumers should be able to relate to the content and enjoy the same. The audience’s social media activity can help understand the type of content in high demand.

Getting customers involved after posting relatable product content on social networking sites can be a good idea. For example, posting pictures of the latest products and asking customers to highlight their favorite ones can be appropriate. Replying to comments can help in increasing customer loyalty towards the brand.

Content can be designed to raise revenue, sell products, educate, or entertain the consumers. However, the focus needs to be on building connections, and building emotion, humanity.

Sponsored pieces in newspapers, promotional Instagram videos with influencers, podcasts, and editorial blogs should be included in a good strategy. However, videos deserve top priority.

As per stats released in HubSpot’s 2020 State of Marketing report, videos were the most preferred form of content for brands in 2019. The same study highlighted that 73% of customers worldwide love to watch videos on social media that are entertaining.

#3. Post-sale monitoring

The post-sale monitoring process involves a set of tasks that need to be performed as soon as the consumer buys the product or service. These procedures ensure the customer continues to use the product or services and returns for more.

The best way to retain these consumers and ensure repeated sales is by reaching out to them after completing the sales procedure. Proactively checking if they need any assistance for using the recently purchased product or service can take the relationship to the next level.

Customers appreciate personalization. Thus, emails with discount codes for future purchases, details about new product launches, festival wishes can be an excellent way to stay connected. Stats suggest that post-sale, thank you emails have an open rate of 42 percent and click-through-rate of 14 percent. Some buyers also appreciate customer survey emails seeking their feedback within one week from the first purchase.

As a part of post-sale monitoring, brands should also monitor reviews written by customers on various portals. The data can help in improving the products and introducing changes that the consumers expect.

All these steps can help in strengthening the company’s relationship with customers and building a reputation.

#4. Follow customers on social media

Traditionally, organizations focused extensively on social media marketing activities for improving sales numbers. Customer behavior, motivations, and attitudes are changing faster than ever. Consumers are becoming more sophisticated and have several options when it comes to choosing products and services.

Understanding customers requires ongoing deep listening to point out factors that can delight, motivate, or annoy them. Organizations must listen to customer trends, needs, thoughts, and feelings based on their emotional, sensorial, social, behavioral, cognitive responses during various stages of engagement with the company. Twitter can play a crucial role in analyzing changes and pinpointing everything that works.

Monitoring mentions and hashtags with the business name can help in tracking customer feedback. You can use relevant keywords to monitor related conversations as well.

Following individuals who talk about the brand or belong to, the relevant industry can be appropriate. Such users feel delighted to know their favorite brand follows them on Twitter. But remember, randomly following everyone under the sun can prove to be disastrous. Following all the followers is not considered legitimate. It is advisable to ensure that the handle always has more followers than the number of users it is following.

Building relationships with industry influencers by following them is a good strategy. Interacting with them, asking questions can help in starting the conversation.

Journalists, business owners, sportspeople, models, and celebrities are often considered top influencers due to their follower count. Analyze the likes and retweets that they get on most of their tweets to choose and follow the best ones.

#5. Maintaining relationships throughout the crisis

Unfortunately, the world has still not recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. Studies have pointed out that the coronavirus crisis has changed the way people shop. As per a research report from Accenture, buyers around the world are cutting their spending on things that they do not need urgently.

Going on cost-cutting mode and maintaining social media silence may seem logical to several brands due to a lack of sales. However, staying connected with consumers is crucial during these tough times. If the service or production of goods is affected, it is advisable to keep customers informed about the steps that the firm is taking to restore the same.

Customers prefer buying from brands that focus on health, safety and are sensitive to the crisis. Such brands and businesses would win customer loyalty as per brand experience firm, Big Red Rooster. These new habits and spending patterns are here to stay according to the firm’s VP, Emily Miller.

Rather than thinking about selling more, experts suggest brands should focus on how they can help consumers during the current pandemic. Providing services and products at discounted rates in the most affected areas can be a gesture that consumers would remember forever.

Rakshit is a content marketer at PeddleWeb, an internet advertising company in India. He holds spectacular skills in digital marketing, branding, lead generation, customer retention, and a few more.

F or more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.