How to create a great customer experience

Customer experience refers to interactions between a customer and a company throughout their business relationship. The secret to keeping customers satisfied is to deliver great experiences at every customer touchpoint. It’s critical to remember that customer experience does not begin and end with a sale, but includes any interaction they have with your business before, or after a sale.

When customers are happy with your brand, they’re more likely to stay with you. This is why businesses that put customers first and build a customer-centric culture outperform their competitors.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the ways you can deliver great customer experiences every step of the way.

Make a good first impression

The customer’s first impression with your business isn’t typically formed when they interact with a company employee face-to-face or over the phone. In fact, it’s formed when they visit your website for the first time or view your content on social media.

Everything in your branding elements — from your logo and color schemes, to your messaging and illustrations — tells the customer what to expect from you and shapes their impression of you.

One way to make a great first impression on your customers is by strengthening your brand touchpoints, including your customer service centers, company website, email newsletters, as well as social media pages. Delivering good customer experience ensures customer satisfaction and also helps you get positive word-of-mouth marketing going about your small business.

Improve website usability

Another way successful companies create a great customer experience for their customers is by making sure their website is user-friendly and accessible. Delivering a seamless website experience is essential for a good user experience, and it’s all about using good information architecture. After all, you want your customers to be able to effortlessly browse through your site and quickly find the information they’re looking for.

We recommend that you test your site’s usability with a small team to get a better idea of the end user’s perspective. Tinker with your site to understand its ins and outs and identify the points where customers struggle.

For example, if you’re running a membership site, your goal might be to enable visitors to land on any page of your website and find the information they’re looking for, intuitively. By making it easy for customers to find information and complete tasks, you’ll be able to deliver a great user experience while boosting conversions.

Identify customer pain points

Being mindful of your target customers’ needs can help you accurately identify their pain points and address them. You can use this information to position your product or service as a potential solution. Solving the challenges customers face helps you deliver great customer experience.

Start by creating a customer journey map and identifying their pain points. This will help you find areas of friction that negatively impact their experience. This will help you figure out how your product or service can solve the customer’s problem.

A good practice is to collect customer feedback and analyze data to figure out the most common issues customers face. This way, you’ll be able to focus on solving their problems and positioning yourself as a customer-first business.

Offer coupons and discounts

Employee satisfaction increases employee productivity which in turn means delivering better service and value to your customers. This ultimately leads to an increase in sales and promotes profitability.

Successful businesses keep their customers happy by building a culture of rewarding and recognizing their employees. This enables them to increase customer satisfaction and boost customer loyalty.

You can improve customer experiences by keeping employees and customers at the forefront of your company. Consider offering staff members special discounts on occasion and rewarding loyal customers by sending them exclusive discounts via email.

Set up self-service options

Offering self-service options is a great way to enable customers to find answers to questions through your website (or via a telephone number) during after-hours. This is especially useful for companies that aren’t open around the clock.

You can offer self-service options to your customers by creating an online helpdesk or knowledge base with FAQs on your company website. Another way you can offer assistance to your customers is by setting up live chat options that they can use to talk to a customer service representative and resolve their issue, or leave a support ticket if an operator isn’t available.

Conclusion

By focusing on improving the customer experience, you can achieve your internal goals of driving up sales and increasing customer retention. We looked at some of the ways you can improve your customer experiences and increase customer loyalty and, hopefully, you’re in a good position now to take the next steps.

Do you agree that creating a great customer experience can help you get ahead of the competition? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.