As time goes by, new ways for improving customer engagement grow at an exponential rate. Still, in spite of all these new methods for capturing the attention and affection of your intended customer pool, no one can deny the importance of a unique, reliable, and comprehensive customer experience.
According to a recent survey, customers are ready to spend as much as 17% more for a good customer experience, while companies that neglected this important strategy are losing $1.6 trillion on an annual basis. In total, customer-centric companies are 60% more competitive than their competitors.
But how to devise this great customer experience strategy that will enchant your audience?
Understand and create customer personas
This neat approach will help you to reverse-engineer the experience you want to deliver and fine-tune the touchpoints between you and your customers. Of course, to do that, you will need to have a great understanding of who makes your customer base. Once you do that, you will be able to use this pool to identify different customer profiles and sink into the practical issues they are facing when they are interacting with your brand. Stay away from superficial topics and focus on touches like accessibility, delivery, troubleshooting, etc.
Customize customer experience
People like to feel that the brands they are interacting with understand their needs. You can leverage this fact to your advantage by using every applicable situation to customize the customer experience. All previous interactions should be recorded and used for future communication. Emails you are sending should be personal, offers tailored around previous purchases and search habits. Furthermore, birthdays and even anniversaries of some previous interactions (e.g., first purchase) should be celebrated with discounts, small gifts, and so on.
Use third-party consulting services
Needless to say, such a level of commitment towards customers requires a tremendous amount of effort, which drastically increases the workload within your company. Putting all this pressure on your workers would bring your operations to a grinding halt. Fortunately, you always have an option of hiring third-party automotive customer experience consultants that will lend you a hand in terms of digital research, identifying CR weak spots, implementing the latest digital methodologies, etc. Performing all these tasks in-house requires expensive infrastructure and high learning curve, so it’s best to leave them to the pros.
Encourage customers to share their impressions
Engineering a good customer experience can’t be imagined without customer feedback. Gathering that valuable feedback, on the other hand, can often end up being a slow survey-based process not many people will be ready to engage in. That is why you should get out of the way to make sharing the impressions as streamlined and intuitive as possible. Here, you can learn some things from various social media platforms. Overhaul your website to include likes, quick comment sections, trending ladders, ratings, and similar tools that can give you a quick glance at what’s going on at any given moment.
Move customer relations offline
Up until now, all the customer experience strategies we were talking about were mostly concerned with the digital realm. If you want to move away from the competition, you should break this digital ceiling and move some of your engagement methods into the real world. How to do that? Send your loyal clients occasional appreciation letters, engage them in company events, celebrate important milestones together, and try to meet them face-to-face. No digital survey is capable of gathering that much feedback as simple human interaction.
We hope these few examples gave you an idea about the methods you can use to devise a rock-solid customer experience strategy that will always keep you on the same page with your client pool. The present-day business environment is competitive and relentless. You don’t have the privilege of failing at a task as important as this one.