If you want to have a really successful business, one of the main things you’ll always need to do is to ensure that you are making the customer as happy as possible. And to do that, it’s vital that you think about the customer experience as well as you can. There are a lot of things to do here that can help, so it’s something you can approach from many different angles and use your creativity for.
In this post, we are going to discuss some of the really powerful, yet simple ways in which you can hope to improve the customer experience considerably. All of these are really going to make a difference in one way or another, so they are all worth being aware of. You should find that these help you out a great deal in making your business that much more successful.
Empower Employees
One of the easiest ways to boost the experience for the customer is to ensure that you are empowering your employees. This works for a number of reasons, most of all perhaps because you will be much more likely to have staff interacting with customers in some useful and interesting ways. So how can you make sure that you are empowering your employees in such a way that this is going to happen?
One way is to make it clear to your employer that you expect and feel happy for them to take on more and more responsibility. You should find that this already leads to an improvement, but really it’s just a stepping stone to better things. All in all, having a powerful approach to this is going to make a considerable difference.
Provide A Quick Response Service
Customer service can obviously be aided in a lot of ways. One of the things that your customers will generally respond well to is when the service is fast, especially in terms of getting a quick response from your employees. This shows that you care and that you are able and willing to create a customer experience which they are going to find responsive. So you will need to make sure you have a few essentials in place to help this along.
There are so many ways you can do this. You might want to think about making use of certain technological tools, for instance, such as chatbot software for your website, so that you can always provide a quick response to customers. This works especially well if you also make it clear that your customers can get a follow-up response from a real person.
However you do it, providing a quick response service to customers when they express some need or other is a hugely important way to improve the experience they have with your business.
Make Everything Personal
The more personal you can make the experience of your customer, the better. They will be more likely to respond well to you and more likely to return to your services again and again. A lot of businesses are currently trying to make the customer experience a lot more personal, and it might be easier than you think to do so. Generally It’s a case of finding out as much as you can about your customers and then working to incorporate that understanding and data into how you engage with them.
Over time, this naturally leads to an approach which your customer will find incredibly beneficial and, well, personal. If you can create the feeling of there being a real human engagement, rather than a faceless corporate one, you’ll find that this helps things along nicely. So work on finding out more about your customers and you’ll find that this can help a great deal all in all.
Make It Easy To Get Feedback
You’ll find that your customers really appreciate being able to provide feedback to you on your experience with them. The more easily they are able to do this, the better it is going to be for your customers’ experience on the whole, so this is the kind of thing that is really worth looking into. If you can make it as easy as possible, it means that you will have a much more likely chance of knowing how to keep your customers happy.
Fortunately, there are quite a few ways to make it easier for customers to provide feedback. You may find that it helps to broaden the number of methods available, for example – so you can ensure that they are able to provide feedback through your website, as well as by email, phone and so on. The more methods there are available, the better that is going to be and the more feedback you will get to work with.
Of course, it’s important that, with that feedback in place, you actually respond to it and make use of it. That’s the kind of thing that can really help a lot and which is going to mean that your customer feels so much more valued, which is central to providing a great experience for them.
Provide More Training To Frontline Colleagues
Your frontline colleagues are simply those who are dealing directly with customers. It probably goes without saying that these individuals need to be particularly able to deal with customers in a good way if you want to make sure that your customers have a good experience. So with that in mind, you should make sure that you are providing as much training as necessary to these colleagues, so that they can respond a lot better to the customers they are dealing with.
If you think your business might need to improve in this way, then it might be that you need to alter the infrastructure somewhat. For instance, you may not currently have the time to train colleagues regularly, in which case you should try to change that as soon as possible. Or you may need new tools in order to make sure you are able to train people. Whatever you need in place, make sure that you get it as soon as possible, and you should find that this helps a great deal. Ultimately, it will be in the service of your customers.
Address Customer Concerns Quickly
This is quite a basic thing, but it’s something that you should definitely make sure you are doing if you want to make sure that you are improving the customer experience as much as possible. As a general rule, the quicker you address customer concerns, the happier they are going to be with the service, so this is something you really need to be focused on as best as you can be. You need to make sure that you are addressing all and any customer concerns as quickly as possible.
That doesn’t mean rushing them to the point that they are not going to get resolved properly, however. While being swift, you also need to be accurate and concentrated. If you have the right tools in place, as well as a good team and the right understanding of what’s important, you will find that you can address customer concerns quickly and without too much trouble, resulting in a much better experience for the customer overall.
The sooner you make the necessary changes here, the better, so make sure that you are thinking about this as soon as possible.
Show You Are Listening
In general, if you can show the customer you are listening to them, this is always going to go down well, and it’s the kind of simple thing which can really make a huge difference to how your customer feels about the experience, and about your business in general. You can do this in both big ways and quite small ones, so it’s something that you might want to spend some time on in both senses of the word.
For instance, you need to make sure that you are doing this in direct conversations – literally listening to your customers. But you also need to do it in a bigger way – to show that you are listening to their needs, opinions, values and so on. If you can do both of those, you will find that it does really affect how your customer feels in a positive way.
Of course, this is something you’ll need to train your people to do as well as possible too, as that is going to really make a huge difference.
Those are just some of the main, powerful things you can do to improve the customer experience. As long as you have done those, or you have a plan to implement them in the future, it’s going to make for a much better experience for every customer you have. And there is nothing that better improves your business’ chances of future success than this.
Tammy Litke is a Dallas blogger, blogging since 2008. She loves to watch movies, play video games, spend time in the kitchen, and travel. Between recipes and reviews you’ll find many helpful and some just plain funny posts on her blog. Welcome, pull up a chair and stay for a while!