Getting customers to love your business is not as easy as posting some cool Instagram photos and advertising special discounts. Your customers are looking to have an experience with your brand and the more pleasurable and consistent you can make these experiences, the more sales you will make—and the more your customers will adore you.
An exceptional customer experience is key to increasing customer loyalty and making them love your brand. According to an Oracle report, 74% of executives agree that customers' experiences impact their willingness to be loyal advocates. The survey also found that six in 10 of these executives strongly believe that customers will switch brands due to poor experiences. Respondents also indicated they stand to lose up to 21% of annual revenue due to a failure to offer a positive brand-relevant customer experience.
How to Create an Exceptional Customer Experience
What are the steps to cultivating these positive experiences and making your customers fall in love with your brand?
The first step to is to get your team on the same page as it relates to your overall vision. What are your core values? What are the principles that drive your organization’s behavior towards your customers? Create a set of statements that define your overall vision and disseminate it to the people who service your customers. Everyone should be on the same page and embody your core principles so it comes across to customers. Before you send any text promotions or launch any marketing campaigns, consult your values and make sure they are aligned.
Get to Know Your Customers—Deeply
Once you create your core principles, the next step is to understand your customers at a level that creates empathy and connection. Your customer connections must mean more than simply reciting principles printed in a company manual. You must feel them deeply in order to make an impact in your customers’ lives and create truly memorable experiences. Doing this requires an intimate knowledge of what makes your customers tick, what they desire, what problems they have and what their deepest pain points are. This will require deeper research than simply developing a customer persona of basic demographics (age, gender, income, etc.). Here are some strategies:
- Talk to your customer service team and find out what questions your customers ask regularly. This will help you understand their problems more.
- Talk to your sales team to find out the same information.
- Talk to your customers directly! Sometimes it’s best to start conversations with your customers. Maybe this is a brief conversation on the sales floor. Or send a voice broadcast survey to poll your customers and find out what would make them happy and please them more.
- Monitor social and online conversations to find out what people are saying to their friends and peers. These informal conversations can reveal a lot as it relates to what your customers really want and desire.
- Have your customer support agents ask customers how you can make their experience better
Put It Into Action
Once you know exactly what your customers desire, it’s time to give it to them! At every touch point your customer has with your business, identify how you are connecting and servicing them. If you realize any shortcomings or ways in which you are not 100% satisfying and delighting your customers, start changing your strategies and implement your findings from your customer research. As you improve, continue to get feedback directly from your customers so you can enhance their experiences with your brand over time and adjust your campaigns.
If you would like to find out about cost- and time-saving tools you can use for text promotions and customer surveys, sign up for a free account here. CallFire provides mass communication tools that can assist you with text promotions, voice broadcast surveys and customer engagement. Use these tools to create more positive customer experiences so you can grow your business' bottom line over time.