Jack Miller
In order to take your company to the next level and stand out from among the competition, it is necessary to champion customer success. This means building a business that offers the absolute best customer experience possible.
What is CX?
The “Customer Experience” (CX) buzz phrase is everywhere these days, but it really just means how customers perceive their interactions with a company. According to the Sales Force blog:
“Customer experience incorporates the quality, quantity, and perceived value of all experiences a customer has with you and your company over the duration of your relationship. “
Customer experience is the key to retaining repeat customers, or generating brand loyalty, which is actually more profitable to a business than acquiring new customers. Because every business is different and therefore the needs and concerns of its customer base is unalike, every business needs to employ unique methods to best cater to their customer base.
I once encountered an e-commerce company that had a good marketing scheme were good, nice product, and the shopping experience was easy and pleasant. However, once I got to the checkout, I noticed an incredibly big oversight: there was only one payment method! On top of it all, it wasn’t even a major credit card company, but was payment via PayPal.
Regardless of how popular this option is becoming, not everyone has it and therefore they automatically lose any possible consumer without a PayPal account. Furthermore, aside from generating incredibly high levels of cart abandonment, they have guaranteed that a significant amount of web traffic will never again visit the site.
It’s best to ensure that your company website is easy to navigate or like in the example above, that you include a no-hassle checkout process. It’s beneficial to be relevant to the times and offer a wide array of differing payment methods to your customers, such as paysafecard, which uses a one-time PIN that can be bought at supermarkets and convenience stores. Paysafecard is currently being used with major players like Spotify and MasterCard’s prepaid option.
How to Evaluate CX
The secret to being able to better understand the wants and needs of your customer base, is to utilize CRM analytics software and incorporate that data into your business development and marketing approaches.
Analytics software might sound complicated, but it is really just a tool that produces data surrounding all of the activity on your site and around your brand: it produces what you have probably heard referred to as ‘big data’.
Ultimately, though, your data is important to track because it gives you all of the answers that you
seek. By seeing who is engaging with your brand, you get insight into your customer base and see who makes it through to purchase and re-purchase vs. those who don’t. This can give you insight into your product and the effectiveness of your presentation and marketing tactics. Even seeing where possible customers drop off can help you understand why and help you improve your business effort significantly in these weak areas.
Purposeful Communication
Tracking how people react to your product and brand while on your site is one thing, but tracking what people are saying about your brand is equally important. Often customers will abandon their cart without you ever really knowing why. If, however, they voice their experience with your company or products in some way, then you have insight into the why, which can help you improve your product, process, and business.
Something like a social CRM tool can help you track discussion over social media platforms and forums and not only be able to listen to what your current or potential customers are saying, but also to be able to respond to them. You are better able to control the conversation and maintain or preserve your brand identity. An Email customer experience survey to those who have made purchases is also a significant source of insight into what is working and what might work better as well.
In the end, success in B2C sales in this day and age is no longer achieved through smooth-talking, slick sales personnel; it is achieved through personable business professionals who take time to listen and react to their customer base.