Customer experience is crucial for all businesses as it defines how a customer interacts with your business. It’s also a big determining factor into whether or not a customer returns to you as well, so it’s important that you get it right. However, it can be quite hard to do if you don’t know where to start. Some businesses like to enlist the help of CX consulting as they’re professionals in this sort of thing and can really help turn your customer experience around. So, if you want to improve your customer experience, keep reading and find out what 3 simple steps you can take to do so with ease.
- Understand Your Customer’s Needs
First and foremost, you need to make sure that you understand your customer’s needs. Without knowing them, you’ll find it impossible to improve the customer experience. A great way to find out what their needs are is to take a look at any recent feedback or complaints that you’ve received. You’ll soon notice a pattern and be able to see what needs to be changed. You also need to understand the type of customer that you have too. For instance, if a lot of them are people who work your regular Monday to Friday, 9-5, then you want your business hours to be available for them. This might mean shifting your opening hours a little later and a little earlier. This can help them to get in contact with you a lot easier, which definitely enhances their experience. It could also be something incredibly simple like a lot of your customers are elderly and struggle with technology. If this is the case, then you don’t want to be a digital only business and start offering more traditional methods of communication. So, make sure you take the time to fully understand your customer’s needs and you’ll find that their experience with you is a lot better.
- Actively Listen
You might think that you’re already listening to your customers because you answer their calls and emails. However, if you aren’t actively listening, then it won’t really make a difference. Whenever you’re speaking with a customer, you want to make sure that you’re treating them as an individual and taking the time to actually solving their problem. It’s important that you think about how you can stop the issue from happening again too, as if it’s happened to one customer, it’s bound to happen to another. This can really damage the experience that they have with you and force them to go to your competitors. Take the time to really listen to each and every customer as you’ll soon start to discover ways you can improve their experience. It could be something that you’d usually brush off as general conversation, but when you look at it in the context of the customer experience, it could be causing a lot of problems. For example, when you answer a call, the customer might say that they found getting through to you quite hard. Normally, you might apologise and then focus on their main issue. However, if you want to improve the customer experience, ask them what they found hard as well and see how what changes could be made. Being proactive when dealing with customers will really go a long way in making their experience the best.
- Make It Simple
A lot of times, customers will mention or even complain that your business is hard to use, so you want to do everything you can to make it easy. To put it simply, the customer experience should be super simple. This means cutting out any unnecessary steps in the journey with you and working hard to make sure nothing is overly complicated. Simple might not always be achievable right away, but if you spend the time assessing the customer journey, you’ll soon see areas that could be simplified. For instance, if they have to click through four different pages on your website just to get your email address or phone number, then this makes their journey way too long. So, try looking at the customer experience as a whole journey and try it for yourself. If there are any things that can be made easier, you’ll quickly spot them. Once you know the changes that need to be made, you’ll find it quite simple to update. The difference it will make to the customer experience is astounding!
The customer experience is something that all businesses need to actively be working on to improve. If you put it on the backburner, you may notice a lot more complaints from your customers as they find that their experience isn’t that great. So, make sure that you take these three tips on board and work hard to incorporate them into your own business. You should see a much better customer experience that allows your customers to feel much more supported.