Satisfied customers drive business success.
There are, of course, many ways to keep customers satisfied. Obviously, you need a good product if you want customers to keep coming back.
But in recent years, companies have shifted a considerable amount of their focus towards customer experience. This shift makes sense as it has produced excellent results.
Here are a few reasons why you should adopt the strategy of building a pleasant customer experience for your business in order to stay ahead of the competition.
Loyalty
Customer loyalty should be the goal of every business. Acquiring new customers is not easy, and therefore keeping existing customers happy and loyal is important.
Positive customer experience is one of the best ways to keep people loyal to your company. Having a good product is not enough, the customer also needs to feel excited about using it and therefore have the desire to come back again at a later stage. Your customers will generally want to try out different products, including those of your competitors.
What products they continue to use in the future depends partly on the quality of the product, but a large portion of their decision will also depend on the overall user experience.
In time those experiences will add up and create a large pool of loyal customers that will continue to provide revenue even without huge investments in new marketing campaigns.
Branding
Your brand is how customers will recognize you on the market and it’s the key point that sets you apart from the competition. Building a successful brand takes time and effort.
One of the best ways to build a successful brand is through customer experience as happy customers will spread the word about your product much better than any marketing strategy.
At the same time, bad customer experience can easily destroy an existing brand in a very short amount of time.
In order to detect unhappy customers and solve their dissatisfaction in a timely manner, you need to invest in proper customer support. Make yourself reachable with services such as ten-digit 1300 numbers so that customers can talk to you and find a solution to their problems before they use their frustration to influence other potential customers.
Understanding the customer
It’s very important to understand the difference between customer service and customer experience. Customer service is just one aspect of the interaction your company has with the customer, while customer experience is all the interactions combined.
For example, if a customer orders food over the phone and is satisfied with the conversation he had while ordering that is good customer service. If the food is delivered on time and is still warm, then he also had a good customer experience.
In order to deliver the best possible experience for your customer, you need to understand all the interactions he has with your business and know what his expectations are every step of the way.
A business that is focused on customer experience therefore usually has a better understanding of its customers and can more easily adapt to changes that could negatively impact business results.
Revenue
There are many factors that determine the price of your product. You will have to keep in mind the production cost, the cost of shipping, distribution, marketing as well as other external factors such as market demand and competition.
But in the end, it all boils down to what the customer is willing to pay. One of the ways to increase the cost of your product is through positive user experience. The customers will always choose the company that keeps them satisfied, sometimes even if it’s the product is inferior to the competition.
Therefore, having good customer experience will significantly increase your revenue without having to make huge investments.
Free marketing
If you want customers to know about your business, you will need to invest a lot of resources in marketing campaigns. The thing with advertising in the modern day is that customers are constantly bombarded and have started to become desensitized.
If you want to stand out among the competition, you will need to constantly come up with innovative marketing strategies. And even then, a lot of customers will ignore your attempts to reach them. What customers trust though are other customers.
If you provide people with amazing user experience, they will spread the word to the people they interact with. Being praised by other satisfied customers will provide more value to your company than any marketing strategy.
Good customer experience will also make your existing advertisement more noticeable by people who have used your business before.
For example, you might start a new marketing campaign because you were inactive for a while and need to make a new appearance on the market, or maybe you simply want to promote a brand-new project.
In those cases, while your customers might ignore some advertisement being directed their way by the competition, they will immediately recognize yours because of the pleasant experience they had in the past.
Emotions
It’s important to remember that your customers are human beings with complex desires and emotions. Even though we are rational creatures a lot of our decisions are controlled by emotions. This realization is what sets top companies apart from others.
The best companies in the word focus on delivering a positive experience to the customers in order to make them feel satisfied and build trust. There are many companies that had innovative ideas but failed because they couldn’t get their customers to care about the product.
Pleasant customer experience will make people happy and keep them coming back in order to experience that joy again. Not only the joy of using your product but the whole process of acquiring it from you.
The times when having a good product was all it took to make a profit are long gone. Customers these days expect more. Therefore, if you want to remain competitive on the market you need to focus your efforts on delivering a positive customer experience.
While this means that you have to invest more time communicating with them, if done right it will also significantly increase your revenue and give you a huge advantage over your competitors.
