4 Secrets to Happy Customers and Better Brand Experience
By Chris Spears, Chief Marketing Technology Officer, Arke
Customer experience is a curious thing. We can all articulate exactly what we want when we’re on the receiving end. And yet, when tasked to provide exceptional experiences, we often fail to invert the equation.
Rather than ask, “What would I want as a customer of this brand?” we tend to get mired in what we as businesses want from our websites, apps, and other touchpoints.
We forget to walk in our customer’s shoes — or, as digital anthropologist and futurist Brian Solis says, “ See the world through our consumers’ eyes (and smartphones).”
Brand Experience Is Customer-Centric
As a proponent of brand experience, I’m working to change this paradigm. Brand experience is bigger and bolder and bolder than customer experience.
It tracks and maps both online and offline interactions. It considers a person’s interactions with your brand as well your competitors. And it focuses on a bigger vision of the overall impact your brand has on the people associated with it.
Brand experience encompasses every touchpoint a company has with not only its customers but also other key stakeholders: employees, partners, distributors, vendors, and so forth. Supported by the customer journey, physical and digital channels, and strategically important technology, it sets the priority as the quality of a user’s experience.
It forces us to not only consider what our customers experience when they interact with our brand, but to consider their related feelings and expectations.
So What Do Customers Want?
If I ask you to define what your customers want, you’ll probably do two things. First, sigh in exasperation over the weight of such a deep question. Next, you’re likely to turn to one or more sources of customer data.
And while I’d never tell you to ignore your data, I will suggest you slow down, take a step back and rethink the question. It’s not as overwhelming as it seems.
Your customers want the same things you want when you research or purchase products or services: clear information, easy to find answers, empathy, support. All of that builds trust — the foundation of brand excellence.
And remember, as Forrester notes, simply telling your customers “you’re trustworthy isn’t enough to make them trust you; they need to feel it.”
4 Ways to Improve Customer Happiness
1. Be human. A survey last year by Verint and Opinium confirmed what empathetic businesses already know: everyone — even digital natives — prefer more human interaction when it comes to customer service.
- Four out of five prefer that human customer service interactions remain a part of customer service.
- Nearly a quarter (24 percent) of consumers still prefer calling a business with visiting the store close behind 23 percent.
- More than four in five (83 percent) believe speaking with a person will always be an important part of the customer service equation.
- Two-thirds (67 percent) of consumers and 91 percent of businesses feel customer service online and via mobile devices needs to be faster and more intuitive to serve end users.
2. Aim for seamless, frictionless experiences. Frictionless experiences enable buyers and sellers to instantly find the products or services they need. It’s a key factor in keeping customers happy because speed and convenience now rival price as points of brand differentiation.
Think about the popularity of companies like Instacart, Seamless, Lyft and Uber that offer personalized, frictionless customer experiences. As Arke VP of Strategy Margaret Wise explained, such services put the customer in control of the experience. They eliminate unnecessary steps that do not add value and negatively impacts the consumer experience — from digging out a credit or loyalty card to restating information the company already has on file.
According to a 2016 Forrester Consulting thought leadership paper commissioned by Accenture Interactive, “Companies will never be able to compete with the CX leaders that their customers are actually comparing them with until they dramatically change their mindset and re-architect their businesses with the goal of creating seamless experiences for the customer.”
3. Provide complete information. This comes back to the idea of walking in the shoes of your customers. What information will they find helpful? Can you provide more clarity or ease of use?
Take product reviews as an example. In large-scale usability testing of product pages, Baymard Institute, an independent web usability research organization, found 95 percent of users rely on reviews to learn more about products.
However, it also found more than four out of 10 e-commerce sites fail to offer a ratings distribution summary at the top of the product review page. A ratings distribution summary allows users to quickly assess the overall rating for a product or service. Customers rely on it more than the actual review content.
Providing it gives customers information at a glance — and that ease of use can enhance overall satisfaction.
4. Think broadly about customer-obsession. Your brand does not exist in a vacuum. It’s part of the larger lives of your customers, who may also regularly interact with your competitors.
“The key to customer obsession is understanding what is important to your customers’ whole lives, not just the narrow slice of life your brand exists in,” Solis said.
“It is more than simply being customer-focused. True customer obsession requires a mind shift, a proactive perspective that incorporates the consumer’s point of view at every stage of the design and level of the organization. That type of understanding is only possible through genuine empathy, and it’s the secret ingredient of meaningful, holistic customer experiences.”
To summarize, give your customers what you want to receive.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on August 25, 2017.
