Five mistakes companies make while trying to provide customers with great experiences
Customer experience is only getting more important with each passing year. It is through customer experience that businesses drive the all important rate of retention. When you consider that it is nearly seven times more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to retain existing ones, you begin to see why such importance is placed on customer experience.
Customer experience covers a lot of ground, from support efforts to overall usability and brand messaging. A strong customer experience can be invaluable for a business.
But even businesses with the best of intentions can make any of these five fatal mistakes which can negatively impact their customer experience.
1. Platform reach
In order to effectively serve your customers, you have to be able to reach them on the platforms they frequent. Forcing your customers to meet you on the platform of your choice creates an extra step in the customer experience that may prove cumbersome and cause them to seek service elsewhere.
To determine your platform reach, you first have to take a look at what platforms your service is currently offered on.
For starters, are you available on social media? You should have accounts on all major social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and more.
What about your company website? You should have self service functions and a means for customers to contact you somewhere on the site.
Are you available via phone? What about email? Do you have a physical location?
The next question you have to ask is, where are your customers? You can determine this by examining your ideal demographic information. How old are they? What sites do they frequent? Where do they live? What are their shopping habits?
Once you have all of this information, make sure that you are putting yourself before the eyes of your audience in order to provide them with the level of service they want and need.
2. No omnichannel support
We’ve established that having your presence across multiple channels is important. But it is equally important to make sure that those channels can communicate with one another, acting as pieces of the whole, and not as individual entities.
This is known as omnichannel support, wherein all platforms can communicate between themselves and share information on customers, issues, promotions, and more.
So you have to understand where your people are, and then reach them on those platforms, but once you have, ensure that those platforms are connected under one central support system.
Why is this important? Because people hate repeating themselves. If someone reaches out to you via social media and then they follow up with a phone call, they don’t want to repeat the problem again.
Failure to provide omnichannel support could be detrimental to your company. That’s because 72% of consumers equate having to repeat their issue to various representatives with poor customer service and 72% also expect agents to know who they are, what they’ve purchased, and have insight into their previous interactions with the company.
With numbers that large, it’s clear why omnichannel support has become a necessity for a flawless customer experience.
3. No personalization
Not only does your service need to be timely and efficient, but it also has to be personalized. It sounds like a tall order, but customers want personalized content more than ever before.
Figuring out how to add a flair of personalization into your service and overall marketing could be the key to preventing churn.Studies have shown that 33% of customers who abandon business relationships have done so because of a lack of personalization.
One way that you can personalize the entire support experience is to make sure that your company messaging differs based on who the customer is. That means no form emails and one size fits all solutions.
Personalization might seem like a daunting task, but it can be easily done using an artificial intelligence interface.
4. Poor service
This may seem obvious but you have to maintain a high level of customer service in order to keep your customers happy. That’s because bad customer service leads to poor customer experience and it is one of the fastest ways to lose customers. 56% of people worldwide have stopped doing business with a company due to poor customer service.
Bad customer service can mean a lot of things. Lack of speed, for instance, is a dampener. In fact, 12% of Americans cited lack of speed as their number one customer service frustration. Another 27% said that their biggest pet peeve was a lack of effectiveness in the solutions they were given.
Some other common customer service issues you’ll want to avoid include rude representatives and an overall lack of empathy for the customer’s plight.
5. Failure to act on feedback
Sometimes you’ll find that no matter how much planning you might do, mistakes will still happen.
(But though you may make mistakes, it’s important to learn from them and not repeat the same.
You can find out what your customers like or don’t like by mining customer experience data. Once you have compiled your information, analyze the data and make improvements where necessary.
This is important because it will show customers that you care and value them.
Conclusion
Customer experience is one of the best ways to turn your audience into brand ambassadors. In fact, customer experience promoters have a lifetime value that is more than 600%-1400% higher than that of a detractor.
