How to Create Amazing Customer Experience
Improvements in customer experience increase perceived value (justifies higher prices and wins competition), referrals (more customers), and turn one-time customers into regulars.
Ask your customers: How disappointed would you be if our service will disappear? Ideally, majority of users should answer “very disappointed”. Until you reach this level of satisfaction, focus on customer experience over promotion. Once there is a lot of love, turn your attention to scaling.
Action steps
- Find a few ways to improve customer experience.
- Implement them.
The first touch
The “front-end” part of customer experience is time from product discovery to purchase decision.
Polish your visual appearance. Invest in design of your touch points: website frontpage, business cards, a front door and reception area.
Be clear and educate your prospects. What problem do you solve? What is your solution? What evidence for its advantages do you have (reviews, notable customers)? Teach your prospects and make them smarter in your field.
Make direct contact between a prospect and a founder. Learn more about customer needs and explain in person how your product can be helpful. Make founder contact information very easy to find. No anonymous “contact us” webforms.
Greet first customers at the door. Get their email at the site. Send personal email notes from founders. Contact directly your first social followers.
Offer a free sample of your product. It should be compelling enough to demonstrate the value of the product, and limited enough to generate desire for the full solution.
Grocery store samples: cookies, cheese. Release the first two chapters of an ebook for free. Offer a free test day at coworking space. Free limited version of a web service. Free consulting in front of a paid course. Test drives at car dealership. Split your conference into an open part and for registered participants only.
Complements
Give additional, free products and services to your main offering. Do not announce them in advance, present compliments as a surprise gift. In particular, give gifts if something went wrong (e.g. a service was unavailable for an hour, you give one week of a free service).
Gifts with offline services. Samples of your newer and less known products can make great gifts. Nice looking t-shirts are great too.
A complimentary drink while waiting for the order. Chocolate bars in a hotel. Free drinks in a beauty salon.
Gifts in ecommerce. Small gift in the delivery box. Free upgrade for overnight shipping.
“Love is” bubble gum. Tea samples with order.
Gift cards, discount cards. It should be of a real value, not just an advertising.
Coffee House chain runs hugely successful flyer “two coffees for the price of one for your next visit”. Motivates customers to come again and bring friends.
Upgrades and additional services. Increasing usage limits is a particularly easy way of giving gifts.
“You rented a hotel room for four days, but we really like you, so your fifth night is free )”
Linode hosting service sometimes upgrades the computing power of rented servers while keeping the same price. Isn’t it great?
Loyalty
Invest in your most loyal customers. They promote you, give best feedback and spend more money than others. Give rewards to your favorite customers:
- Loyalty cards. Discounts and special offers. Free offers, e.g. free orange juice for all members. Better seats for members.
- Merchandise. Stickers, postcards, t-shirts and hoodies.
- Invite-only parties and concerts.
Encourage reviews and feedback. Does not matter positive or not. Direct feedback, social networks, specialized sites, blogs. Send gifts for best ideas for your project.
Encourage photos. Customer-taken photos of your product or service are a great tool for promotion. Consider having a contest for best photos. Publish best customer photos on your social channel.
Buzzfeed.com created a legendary internet flash mob encouraging its readers to shoot “horsemanning” pictures.
Support
Seek feedback proactively. Do not do boring and long surveys. Focus on just two questions: (1) what do they like most, and (2) what should be improved.
Be very easy to reach. Phone, email, social accounts. On every page. On the wall. Be personal, publish founder names, respond from an individual email. Specialized services like Zendesk or Uservoice can be very helpful.
Respond to complaints. Thank for feedback. If it is an error, fix it. If it is a feature request, consider only acknowledging it first. You can not implement all feature requests, so choose wisely.
This article is a part of Earlydays, an open guide for first-time entrepreneurs.
Written by Yury Lifshits — yury@yury.name — @yurylifshits
