Five Strategies for Improving the Overall Experience of Dealing with Your Organization
Thinking about the customer experience is a way to take a broader view than we sometimes afford ourselves when thinking about improving customer service. Customer service is critical, but the total customer experience is a larger concept that includes every single way that customers interact with your company. This is rue from the first time that they discover you exist all the way through to their purchase and after. This means that it includes several elements that we might overlook when only concerning ourselves with customer service in the organization.
There are factors that play directly into the overall reported customer experience that in fact, might have nothing to do with the traditional targets of your customer service improvement efforts. For example, have you considered that your:
- Advertising and Marketing
- Website interface (mobile and desktop)
- Social Media Presence
- Apps
- Direct contact with customers
are all parts of the overall customer experience? Well, here are five strategies for making the experience that your customers have with your company as positive as possible.
- Fast and Faster :This is something that too many companies overlook because they like their policies and procedures the way they are, or because current procedures favor organization or management internally. However, customers want their concerns solved quickly. The faster you can do this, the better it is for their overall experience. One place that many customers experience delays is when dealing with an organization over the telephone. Using the right type of call center to manage your calls is a great way to speed up this process, reduce hold times, and decrease the time between initial contact and call resolution.
- Target Your Marketing: The broader you aim when marketing your company to your audience, the greater the chance you have of missing the mark. This is where gathering information about the demographics of your users, clients or customers is so useful, because it allows you create marketing messages that feel more and more individualized to each group.
- Get to Know Your Clients: Just like great marketing can be improved through personalization, so can customer service. This is where a great piece of CRM or similar software can be so useful. Ideally, when your representatives take a call they should be able to great a customer by name with their past history with the company at their fingertips. This allows for fast, personalized, and effective client management. This type of software also is very useful for tracking the results and actions taken on calls that have required more than one contact to resolve.
- Don’t Wait for Them to Come to You: You don’t need to passively market through traditional channels and hope that your prospective customers see those messages. Instead, take the time to reach out to existing customers directly, whether that be through electronic, phone or even physical mail channels. Especially when targeted to their specific relationship with your company, this can help build a bond with a customer.
- Ask Your Customers Questions: Social media has given companies one of the best channels to exist throughout the history of business for soliciting feedback from customers, and yet it is still underutilized at times. Hold surveys, ask questions, and encourage customers to reach out to you directly to really understand how you can serve them better.