To help you create a successful customer-centric experience, we asked customer service managers and business leaders this question for their best tips. From approaching customers as a personable problem solver to making contact easy for customers, there are several tips that may help you develop an effective customer experience that centers on the needs of your customers.
When it comes to employee-customer interaction, training is key. For customer interactions, employees should approach their interactions as opportunities to help problem-solve. When you treat every customer with care and understanding, you move beyond just a potential sale and into creating a lasting relationship. When your employees shift their perspective and focus on helping others, it can really help foster a customer-centric experience.
Linda Scorzo, Hiring Indicators
Collecting behavioral data is the best way to understand and better serve your clients. Such information can be collected in several ways, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, and online research. Once you have this data, you can start to build a picture of your ideal customer and what they need from your business. This, in turn, will help you create a customer success strategy to keep them loyal and satisfied.
Michael Sena, SENACEA
To create a successful customer-centric experience, you must ensure your brand’s strategy aligns with actual customer desires, not your interpretation of them. To get the critical feedback you need, look to user testing frameworks provided by modern marketing tools, like Userlytics or UserTesting. They offer a ready-made framework to help you collect quick and accurate feedback data that can validate user wants and help you design a customer-centric offering.
John Li, Fig Loans
The customer experience can only ever be as good as the people who provide it, and with this in mind it is vital that your staff at all levels are trained to the best of their ability and that they understand and agree with your mission to provide a fantastic experience for your customers.
From the staff who work in the background building and maintaining your online presence to the front line workers who deal with customer queries, everyone must be trained to identify any red flags that could inhibit the experience, and how to deal with those warning signs. Encourage all members of staff to spend some time experiencing the service you provide from the customer’s viewpoint, and to provide feedback on both what went well, and more importantly, where improvements could be made.
Morgan Taylor, Sourcery
Process automation is important in Digital transformation and often sought by all strategies, but one thing that is usually overlooked is process optimization. Process optimization can help companies remove all unnecessary wait times, process delays and unnecessary process waste. Customers would feel the process optimization values more quickly and it would enrich their experience than any automation efforts.
Customer surveys have shown that quick customer response, less waiting time, consistent customer support and accurate feedback are the main things that customers feel improves the customer experience. So focusing on optimizing your internal processes would take your digital transformation strategy a long way
Michael Nemeroff, Rush Order Tees
When you’re trying to create the best customer-centric experience, one of the best things you can do is reflect on your own experience as a customer. Many times, as service providers, we forget that we’re also consumers. In fact, it’s often a lack of service that caused us to start our businesses. That means business owners have a well of inspiration that can help them guide their customer lifelines.
Another similar source of inspiration for business owners is to simply reflect on your regular experience as a consumer interacting with businesses in your everyday life. If you find yourself yearning for more communication from businesses, include more updates in your customer lifeline. If you find yourself stifled by advertisements, you can reduce your own ad campaigns. Being present in your existence as both a consumer and a business owner is the best way to improve your customer-centric experience.
Kyle Risley, Lift Vault
We know that people considering working with us care about what our customers say about us, so we made sure to highlight this information on our website. We proudly display video testimonials from past customers to add credibility to our name and demonstrate how our service works.
It’s a strategy that we’ve been using for a little over a year, and it has been very effective so far. Many of our customers say that they decided to work with our company because of these videos. We focused heavily on this strategy over the past thirty days – producing four times more the content we made in previous months – and we’re already seeing twice the usual number of weekly inquiries. We plan to continue making more of these videos so that there will be a new one each month going forward. That way, potential customers can always get an accurate sense of what they can expect when choosing to work with us.
Debbie Meeuws, Nature’s Arc Organic
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is imperative for a successful customer-centric experience. Not only does CRM software organize and store all the customer’s information, but it also tracks all the communication the business has had with each customer, which allows for better customer service and support. Basically, CRM holds and highlights important customer information for a business so that the service the customer receives is fast, efficient, and specific to their needs.
Staci Brinkman, Sips by
Customer centricity means putting the customer first in all of your product or service fulfillment decisions. Their experience is rarely linear, branching off into many directions based on how they interact with your business. To offer a truly white-glove experience – one in which the customer feels like a ‘market-of-one’ – you must be prepared for where that journey will take them. Each touchpoint will dictate whether the customer continues to work with you, and the solution is to start with empathy and work backwards.
If there is a chance that delivery will be delayed due to supply-chain issues, offer a detailed explanation and compensation to make up for it. If the customer has been working with you for a full year, thank them personally for their continued custom. Remind them of milestones, and take accountability when you fall short. When each eventuality is carefully considered, good and bad, you’ll cultivate a frictionless and connected customer experience from start to finish.
Max Wesman, GoodHire
How often do customers or potential customers give feedback, only to feel like they’ve been ignored or not listened to? I’ve done it myself many times, and even when I feel like the company has been in the wrong, it’s how they deal with my feedback that matters. If someone doesn’t like something, listen to it. Obviously, you can’t deal with everything and anything, but you’ll get consistent themes that come up. Maybe something on your website isn’t customer friendly. Maybe your service or product needs some tweaking. Take time to truly listen to this.
Ravi Davda, Rockstar Marketing
Optimize your website for mobile users. More than half of eCommerce users access business websites from their phones. Capitalize on mobile access and optimization to ensure the vast majority of your users get the best experience visiting your website. Speeding up your landing pages alone, for example, can increase conversions by 12% for every additional second gained beyond two seconds. This isn’t an opportunity to miss out on when almost everyone uses their phone to shop nowadays.
Jason Panzer, Hexclad
If your business is serious about creating a successful customer-centric experience, it is vital to ensure that your customers have a reliable way to contact you at all times. Customers will want to contact you, be certain of that. Sometimes they need help or advice, but be prepared, sometimes they will also want to complain.
Regardless of the reason for contact, if the customer has contact details readily available and you have an efficient answering process in place you will gain your customer’s trust. The method of contact will vary greatly but it is always a good idea to have a phone number displayed prominently. Don’t neglect other forms of contact however, email, chat systems, and messenger services can all help to put the customer at ease and help to build confidence in your business.
Colin Palfrey, JollySEO
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