5 Ways to Improve the Customer Experience

Customer satisfaction is one of the pillars of a solid business. If you sell products or services, you must provide a positive experience for new and existing customers. As a business owner, you may probably know about the basics of having happy customers–making quality goods and services, delivering them promptly, and ensuring that clients receive continuous support after transactions.

However, there are still creative ways that you can do in improving your customer experience. More than ensuring quality in your offers, understanding the customer journey in different channels, especially digital marketing, can help. Below are some of the ideas you can utilize to meet the customer expectations and even exceed them as much as possible.

Creative Ways to Improve Customer Experience: Ideas for Small Businesses

Create a customer-centric atmosphere in your business

This first tip will remain an underlying philosophy that will guide your business decisions, both big and small. A business that focuses on the customer ensures that the clients’ needs are a top priority. By promoting a customer-first philosophy, you can produce positive effects on:

• The products or services you offer: Understanding the market and their immediate needs can help you refine your business’s products or services. For example, an e-commerce store offering a wide variety of retail items can niche and focus on a couple of products, thereby reducing wasted inventory and creating a less cluttered online database for the customers.
• Customer interactions: Whether you focus more on online marketing or traditional promotions, having a customer-centric philosophy can help you create a protocol for customer interactions. These include the language you use, how you respond to inquiries, and steps on following up with customers.
• Storefront environment or domain interface: Improving the storefront or domain environment is another essential element of delivering a great customer experience. If you have a physical storefront, a customer-focused approach means being mindful of the functions within your business space. As for e-commerce and online businesses, this means polishing your web interface to create positive customer experiences.

Plan a customer experience strategy

A customer experience strategy is a goal-setting process that you will plan and implement by understanding your client’s behaviors and motivations for choosing your business. When planning a strategy to improve customer experience, it can be helpful to include the following elements on each client’s journey:

• Pre-sale: These are actionable steps you can take to entice your customers even before a sale is made. It can include providing high-quality visuals, having a live chat feature on your website, and using easy-to-understand landing pages that showcase your offers comprehensively.
• On-sale: Thinking about the process of how customers buy products or services in your business will help you build strategies on-sale. A wide range of payment methods, an easy sign-in or checkout process, or implementing AI with product suggestions and reviews allows customers to arrive at the best decision when visiting your business.
• Post-sale: Positive experiences should go beyond customer support when there’s only an issue at hand. It is also ideal to have a post-sale strategy, which includes asking for feedback from customers, offering satisfaction guarantees when necessary, and having available assistance for problems that may arise.

Listing down the strategies you want to implement for the main stages of the customer journey will allow you to take action within a measurable timeline.

Using technology to your advantage

Technology is one of the great ways to increase customer satisfaction. If you own a website, you will find that many programs will help you deploy stellar service for your clients:

• Having an automated customer service line: A responsive and automatic line will allow you to answer basic questions such as business hours, product availability, or your scope of services. This can be done through live chat, email response systems, or phone calls. You can outsource such services or use integrated software within your website.
• Mobile responsiveness: An overwhelming majority of users now access websites and online storefronts using their mobile phones. Having a mobile-responsive website allows page elements to adjust to devices accordingly, allowing clients to browse easily and interact with your website as they need.
• Gathering analytics: A back-end strategy to cultivate customer relationships is through analytics. It is possible to gather insights on your business based on website visits, referrals from other sources, and engagement that you can observe in different platforms such as social media. Taking note of what customers respond to or what their issues commonly help you determine crucial decisions to improve client experience.

Communicate using your audience’s language

Communication is the lifeline of any business that wants to excel in customer service. Apart from keeping your communication lines open during potential issues and inquiries, another aspect to consider is the language and tone you use in content creation.

It is easy to assume that this is not part of improving the customer experience–nothing could be further from the truth. The more that you master the language and tone of your audience, the clearer your message will be.

To give you a perspective, here are 3 ways to stay healthy in business within the area of communications:

• Data from lead competitors: Take a look at the different channels your lead competitors communicate. Observe the language, tone, and how content is delivered. Chances are, you share the same audience, and you can list down ways to scaffold their communication strategy and improve upon the insights gathered.
• Public figures and influencers: Are there known personalities such as celebrities, public figures, or influencers within your niche? These people are the master communicators in your industry. Gather insights from their websites, social media, interviews, and other channels to help you understand how your client base resonates with these people.
• Customers are saying: Aside from competitors and lead figures, one must not forget customer language and feedback observations. Understanding your buyer persona, looking at examples of customers’ engagement in your platforms, and seeing how they interact with you can help you improve your communication strategy.

Focus on personalization

Another core principle in making customers feel important is through personalization. There are many ways to personalize your customer’s experiences in your business, and it can vary for each industry. What you would want to look into are opportunities in:

• Personalized products and services: Is there a way for customers to decide on items or services they deem an excellent fit for their needs? Perhaps you can integrate a survey, a list of options, or recommendations that will help them arrive at the best choice. AI services can also refine personalization based on user data through product or service recommendations.
• Personalized interface: Personalized user interface can also create positive experiences for your customers. Addressing your customers by their name, establishing a website interface based on their browsing and purchase behavior, or sending in personalized emails can get at the heart of your client’s needs.

Understanding Your Customers: A Key to Unlocking Positive Experiences

As you glean through the creative ways to improve the customer experience mentioned above, you would find that the vital step is gaining a comprehensive understanding of your client base. Businesses that focus on their clients ultimately thrive and being intentional about improving experiences, customer loyalty, and refining communication will undoubtedly take you towards growth.

Need a solid strategy to improve customer experience in your business? E-Marketing Associates has experts in business website design, marketing strategies, and content creation, and we make sure that your small business gets where it needs to be. Let us know how we can help.