Customer Experience, Not Convenience, is the Key to Success
Convenience doesn’t always equal a good experience from the customers’ perspective. Australian businesses have been jumping on the bandwagon of convenience, introducing self-service terminals, online-only shopping, and automated phone lines to their stores in a bid to keep up with the competition.
Convenience is all well and good, we’ve all been in a hurry to run in and out of the shops, but customer experience is suffering!
Here’s how it is: at the end of the day, your competitor might sell the exact same thing, but they don’t have the same customer experience as you. It’s customer experience, online and offline, that keeps customers coming back and sets you apart from the competition. This experience needs to be designed, developed, tested, and refined as time goes on.
Customer experience is key to developing a good brand and a great reputation with your consumers! Forrester’s CX Index (Customer Experience Index) released survey results that show that the quality of CX in Australia has fallen.
We’ve dropped the ball! With an increase in competition in all areas of business, the expectation for good customer experience has increased, but the time and money businesses have has decreased. Not exactly the best of situations here!
More and more, it is the online world where businesses see a lot of activity. Keeping customers happy in the digital shop is just as important as it is to have happy customers in the physical storefront.
So, as a starting point, how can you improve your customers’ online experience?
First thing’s first: make sure that the customer journey, no matter if they come from your social media, paid advertising campaigns, or a good ol’ Google search, is clear and easy. This means a well-designed website that’s simple to navigate and easy on the eye. You probably already know this, but a working website should have no nasty 404 redirects; as soon as the customer sees one, they will get confused and leave your site.
What else can you do asides design simple navigation? Your content needs to be friendly and informative. Don’t make the customer work for necessary information, have it all upfront and easily accessible. Customers don’t want to spend extra time searching for your return policies, delivery rates, or store location.
Taking these measures to create a quality experience for your customer and building a rapport with them generates customer loyalty, strengthening your connection to the community around your business and improving your reputation.
Customers will remember good experiences just as well as they will remember poor ones – but usually, only the latter will be tattled to their social circles.
Want to know more about creating quality customer experiences in the real world and keeping your business’s rep golden? Check out our previous blog “Keeping Things Real: Face-to-Face Marketing Isn’t Dead”!
