Along with the development of new technologies and the many changes they brought to the buying process, your customer expectations changed as well. People expect something new and different and even if your customer experience was good before, that doesn’t mean they will be satisfied with the same experience in future.
Also, the marketplace is flooded with businesses that offer similar products, so you need to find a way to differentiate yourself and provide your buyers with an excellent and personalized customer service that has something your competition didn’t think of.
One research showed that 72% of consumers say they expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, while 66% of them say they’re likely to switch brands if they feel like they are not treated as individuals. The same as good customer service can keep your customers buying from you and help you acquire new ones, never forget that bad customer service can ruin your company.
To really stand out with your customer service strategy, have in mind the following:
Don’t keep the customer waiting
In the age of technology, reaching out to your customers and responding to their needs and requests in a timely manner is literally everything. If you’re not doing this properly, they will leave for the competition that does. This often happens even if your products or services are of better quality than those offered by your competitors.
Open up different channels of communication for customers with different preferences and track your response time in order to be more effective. Don’t forget that your response time depends on the communication channel as, for example, customers reaching you via phone or chat expect your answer immediately, while they might wait a bit longer for you to respond on their emails or social media comments.
To get things correctly, the communication with your customers requires much more than responding to their emails, social media comments and mentionings of your brand. It means communicating with the customers throughout the whole buying journey such as keeping them updated with the delivery process and reminding them that you have new offers or special deals for them.
One of the best tools to keep up with your customers while they’re on the move is the good old SMS! SMS marketing is the fastest and most effective tool to reach out to the customers and also an easy one to integrate into the customer experience strategy.
SMS has extremely high open rates and it’s just ideal for instant marketing solutions. Automated text messaging enables you not only to reach your customers any place and any time, but also to send personalized and targeted content directly to their phones.
UK furniture retailer Brewers Home excelled with their customer experience by sending out personalized and timely text messages to their buyers. This one particularly refers to their delivery system and contains comprehensive information on the process but also provides the customers with other options of picking up their order.
Use technology for a better experience
CRM software allows both large and small businesses to organize, automate, and synchronize every feature of customer interaction. It enables you to get a full view of your customer, which you can then use to create (highly) customized offers based on their purchase history, location, yearly spend, time spent on your site and more.
CRM enables a faster response time to queries and needs pointed out by consumers, provides for effective maintenance of customer database, and also gives you an easy access to customer data needed for marketing analysis and strategy development.
Amazon provides a great example on integrating the CRM software in their business model and making it practically inseparable from the way they do business.
With the help of CRM software, Amazon emailed their customers with recommended purchases and presented them with targeted web pages which promote products likely to be of their interest. Amazon also enabled their buyers to make purchases without re-entering payment details and managed different pricings for different groups of customers. With the help of CRM software, Amazon also manages their loyalty program and offer promotions and incentives to different customer groups and used the technology to contact customers for feedback and surveys.
By excelling their CRM strategy, Amazon has remained the top online shopping destination for millions of their loyal customers around the globe.
Be proactive and engage with customers
Some people like Facebook and Twitter, others are a bigger fan of email or SMS. Therefore, make sure you build and nurture the community of your buyers across different channels and make the customer experience go beyond the product or service you’re selling. This can be done in a few simple steps:
– Get the data
In order to make customer’s experience truly unique and personal, you will need to collect and use the data you gathered from their previous purchases, and also all the other information you’re able to get from them. These can be their buying habits, interests, social media engagement and such. To get more data on your customers, track their activity on your website, conduct surveys and listen to feedback they leave across social media.
Also, don’t forget that a simple landing page can be a very valuable tool in gathering more data from your customers. By asking that additional question in the form such as their job position, company or website, you can get some pretty telling insights about your best customers.
– Send that newsletter
Along with engaging with your customers on social media, find creative and unique ways to keep them interested in your brand by sending out outstanding newsletters.
Provide great value in the content of your newsletter as people will only read it if there is something both interesting and useful for them. Along with keeping your customers up to date with new deals and new products, put any discounts or coupons you may have on the top of your weekly newsletter. As these two are a quite obvious elements of every business newsletter, many marketers are asking themselves what else can be done and how to design something truly unique which will keep their customers attention. Here are some tips:
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- Create the original and compelling content! These can be ‘How to’ and ‘Did you know’ educational articles, new blog posts related to your business and/or industry, but also satisfied customers reviews. Put yourself in a customer’s shoes and think about what would you like to read if you were one.
- Encourage customers to leave the valuable feedback by asking them to rate or comment products or services they purchased. This can be done through the survey or by simply asking them to leave the comment on your social media pages.
- By having in mind that the average time a person spends to read the newsletter is less than a minute, keep it short and interesting.
Remember that newsletter marketing is not there only to sell or promote new products, but also to inform, to entertain and gather more data for your future marketing strategies.
Companies such as Lumi are doing a great job with their newsletter marketing, which we can see in the example below. Along with the promotion of their products and their website content, Lumi’s newsletter has useful and interesting product-related tips. Also, it’s visually striking, optimized for mobile and customers just love it!
Offer solutions for the quiet ones
Not everyone wants to talk to a company all the time. Find out who the quiet ones are and segment them so that you don’t annoy them with to many emails. You don’t want them opting out. Ask meaningful questions on landing pages to find out more about these customers and/or track response rates to emails you currently send them then try to make them less frequent.
Some of your customers prefer to solve their issues in peace and quiet, so make sure you have a strong FAQ section, a lively forum and, lately very popular, a well-built chatbot, so you can offer a compelling user experience for everyone.
For example, you can request a ride from Lyft via chat on Facebook Messenger or Slack, or via voice on Amazon Echo. The Messenger bot will let you know the current location of your driver and show you a picture of the license plate and car model, while in Slack, you can simply use slash commands (such as “lyft home”).
Wrap-Up
We live (and work) in the age of customer experience where our relationship with buyers is becoming more and more important. On the other hand, we also live in the age of technology which makes maintenance of this relationship much easier.
To create a truly remarkable customer experience you will need to follow a few simple steps:
- Don’t keep the customer waiting and use all means of communications to get in touch with the different groups of customers out there. Track your response time and don’t forget about the power of SMS – the fastest and most simple way to reach out to your buyers
- Use technology and employ a comprehensive CRM software strategy to get access to customer data which you can then use for marketing analysis and strategy development
- Collect data, segment the audience and engage with your customers accordingly. Don’t hesitate to use marketing automation platforms as they save valuable time you can dedicate to creative work related to your goals
- Don’t push too much and offer solutions for those ‘silent customers’ you have out there. Make sure you have detailed info about products, comprehensive FAQ and chatbots as this is what the quiet ones hope for
