5 Building Blocks of Stellar Customer Experience

Wondering why you should be investing in customer support instead of marketing or sales? And why many B2B and B2C companies are spending an enormous amount on technologies to understand, evaluate, fix, and optimize customer experience across all touchpoints?

The answer lies in data.

According to a report by Walker, Customer 2020: A Progress Report, 82% of your buyers are willing to pay more for a better experience and customer experience is poised to become the key brand differentiator by 2020, more important than product and price.

Your customers, especially Gen-Z and millennials, care least about ‘price’. Brand experience is what matters most and it has to be impeccable and uniform across all touchpoints, online (website, community, and support) and offline. Even one bad experience can cost you a customer.

After learning about the importance of CX and its potential impact on sales and revenue, many organizations still find it difficult to select the right strategy, tools (software), and resources. They struggle to come up with a strategy that can deliver the right experience and improve customer engagement, loyalty, and advocacy. This blog is for you if your organization is one of them. Here you will discover the basic building blocks of stellar customer experience.

1. Get Customer Personas Right

“No one cares about your product expect you,” states David Meerman Scott, the author of, The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

What does it mean? It means that brands need to be customer-centric and not product-centric. Because of the constant bombardment of emails and advertisements, the attention span of customers has been reduced to merely 8 seconds. But it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to hear from you. If you personalize your messages, you can get heard. You can pull this off by collecting, analyzing, and leveraging customer data.

Note: Developing a comprehensive understanding of a customer and creating sophisticated customer journey maps is the need of the hour.

2. Listen to Your Customers

Your customers take to social media to express their sentiments and they want you to listen. Many CX experts are already leveraging text analytics for social listening.

Customers expect brands to openly and publicly express their views on multiple social and environmental factors to show their human side.

3. Deliver Impeccable Customer Service

Is your customer going to stay or leave? This is decided solely through the service experience you are going to deliver. Customer service should not be limited to phone or chat support. It can include how you are powering self-service through digital platforms.

Self-service is the new norm. You are expected to create support material and make it accessible through online communities, forums, or a help center. Further, constant performance analysis and support articles’ update should be carried out frequently.

4. Aligning Multiple Departments

To achieve customer-centricity, you should enable close collaboration between the various departments of your organization, such as sales, support, success, marketing, and product development. You can initiate collaboration by easing information flow among the tools they are using. Seamless information flow will provide a clear visibility into your customers’ lifecycle and help you fix the inefficiencies in your processes.

5. Spend on Training the Resources

Spending on Chatbots and AI is increasing. The technologies are attracting a lot of attention from organizations of all sizes. But that should not lead you to undermine the importance of human touch during customer interaction. Though millennials prefer to self-solve their issues, sometimes they still want a direct connection with your support reps. To get the most out of this interaction, organizations should spend on equipping their support reps with the right communication and technology skills. 

Tell us how you are delivering stellar customer experience with your Brand. Comment below.