Acquiring new customers is great, but you also need to know how to hang on to them.

The best way to do this is to provide them with a great customer experience (CX).

What is the CX? While it includes customer service, it’s way more than that. It’s the entire journey of a customer through your business, from one end to the other and in-between.

If your business offers a poor CX, your customers could well disappear! In fact, some studies indicate that about a third of customers will switch brands after just a single bad experience.

So how can you make the CX better in your business?

Here are 5 suggestions.

1. Create a clear CX journey

One way to start this is to create a vision of what a great customer experience would look like in your business. From here you can then develop a set of principles and values to guide your sales staff. It’s important that these principles and values become embedded in your organisation.

2. Understand what impacts customer service

Some of the things that impact CX negatively include long wait times, poor communications, ignoring feedback, a slow or difficult purchase process and excess automation.

There are also many things that impact CX positively. These include a personalised approach, promptly answering queries and emails, and taking feedback on board.

3. Understand your customers’ needs

This starts with empathy – putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and seeing from their perspective. In other words, finding out what makes them tick.

Creating customer personas and segmenting your customers can be great tools for this. It’s also important to understand the how interactions with customers at the various touchpoints are delivered and received.

4. Develop an emotional connection

Humans are both emotional and social beings! We all make many of our decisions based on emotion, and we all like to be treated as people and to make positive connections.

Because of this, a customer is more likely to stay with you if they feel you understand their needs, treat them like a person and not just a number, and make a genuine relational connection with them.

5. Create a quality framework

A quality framework helps to create consistency across your organisation, as opposed to a piecemeal approach that fails to guide sales staff.

Your framework should include your guiding principles and values and be used identify the training needs of your customer service staff.

How we can help

At AS Virtual Solutions, we can help fill any gaps in your customer service, in turn helping improve your organisation’s CX. Ask us how!