How your Customer Experience Can Increase your Productivity and Bottom Line

Customer experience is the bread and butter of every business. It’s what every business, whether small or large, should focus on to enable it to move to the next level. Most businesses are struggling to drive more sales and rake in more profits. This never happens without having a strategic customer encounter. Having a strategic customer encounter is what differentiates serious businesses from, well, the rest.

When a business treats customer encounters as a productivity hack, everything else runs smoothly. There’s more customer engagement, customer retention, more referrals, more sales, and more profits. What do you make of these? A good customer encounter breeds a business’s productivity and bottom line. When customers are happy with your business, the chances are, they’ll come more often to do business with you and bring their friends – referrals – to you.

Conversely, when they receive poor customer service, their chances of returning for repeat business with you are dismal. They’ll even talk negatively about your business with their family and friends.

So, how do you streamline your business to ensure you offer everything that makes your customers happy?

Begin by Improving Customer Encounter

What is Customer Experience?

It refers to how your customers relate to your brand. It is every step a customer makes during the whole process of relating with your business. It starts with buying the first product or service, their perception of the product, and making them come back for more purchases.

Customer relations is a lifelong process that starts from the initial stages and runs through a customer’s engagement with a business from stores to customer service agents to conversational IVR.

It boils down to how you relate to your organization’s customers and how they perceive your brand. It starts with the first encounter, whether face to face or through your website or social media sites. Then it goes further to how you presented your brand, how you treated them, and the after-sale services you offered.

Never overlook the comments and reviews from customers because they provide essential feedback to help improve on demerits and take your business to another level. Your most significant concern should be to align with the needs of customers and prospects.

Build on the strengths and be innovative to beat the competition and stand out in the virtual market. When customers perceive your brand as the solution to a problem they have, they feel good about your business.

They trust you and will come back more often to buy from you. They’ll also feel confident recommending your brand to other people, which will eventually increase your net earnings. Let’s now look into how you can improve customer relations in your business.

• Respond to your customers’ queries in record time.
• Send them appreciation messages for remaining loyal to your business.
• Follow up to find out whether they are satisfied with what you offer.

To wrap it up, what you need to improve customer encounters is offering quality customer services. But there’s a fine line between customer encounters and customer service.

Customer service means how you relate with your customers before, during, and after buying your product or service. When you relate with them well, they feel good and trust you, thus improving their experience with your business.

Why Should You Improve Customer Encounter?

There’s a cutthroat competition where businesses are doing all they can to outdo each other. For example, some businesses use their autodialer to offer proactive customer support.

Your business needs to have the edge over the rest to remain on top of the game. Besides marketing, which can be expensive, enhancing customer relations can lead to more sales and profits. Below is a list of statistics to prove that customers’ research drives in more sales than any other form of marketing.

• Loyal customers will spend 17% more with one business if they have a good experience.
• 86% of customers will spend more in a business for a better experience.
• Businesses lose $1.6 trillion every year due to poor customer services.
• A third of the customers will leave a business they’ve been loyal to after one bad experience.
• 95% of customers are willing to recommend their favourite brands to other people.

According to a customer encounter study, 74% of senior executives believe that customers will remain loyal to a brand only when they have a positive experience. This means that businesses have to invest more in expanding customer services if they want more customer retention.

A business can embark on hunting for new customers to increase its bottom line. But more often than not, this approach is too costly and time-consuming. More researches have shown that current customers are more likely to drive in more sales than when looking for new customers. You don’t have to make hard selling or hire salespeople to present your products or services to potential customers.

Enhancing customer relations begins with restructuring your business to always respond to your customers’ needs first. Customers seek value for their money. They’ll feel cheated if your business fails to give what they have paid for. And what does that mean? They are not going to come back again. That will force you to search for new customers, which often isn’t easy.

First, you need to have a team of employees that’s responsive to your customers’ needs. Your employees should jump into action right away to solve any problem a customer faces along the way. But having such a team doesn’t always happen by chance. There’s much to it than it meets the eye. Some of the strategies you can take to increase employees’ efficiency include:

Offer training and promotions.

Encourage effective communication.

Providing them with technologically advanced tools

Set attainable goals.

Celebrate successes.

Without a doubt, your employees play a more significant role in enhancing customer encounters. If your team of employees is happy while working, they’ll offer good services and make your customers happy. Happy customers will stick around, buy more, and your profits will go up.

So, do you want to know how customer satisfaction metrics can increase your productivity and net profits? There’s a whole bucket load of benefits you’ll get from improving your customers’ experience.

Benefits of Improving Customer Encounter

1. Customers will willingly spend more on your business

What feels better than seeing customers spending more money purchasing your goods or services? And what’s more, is that these customers seem to enjoy the whole purchasing process. When you treat your customers well, they will see that you’re offering value for their money. So, to get more and more value, they’ll opt to spend more money buying products or services in your business. It means that they will pay more for the positive experience they are to gain. On the contrary, when customers fail to see the value you’re offering for their money, they’ll spend less with you and fail to return for repeat business.

2. They will recommend your business to others

When current customers trust your brand and are happy with what you offer, they are more likely to spread the word about your business to other people. Here, you’ll gain more referral customers without going out to market your business.

However, you can incentivize your loyal customers to help you bring in more customers. What’s better than when a customer knows there are perks lined up for him when he brings a new customer? These customers will be willing to bring in more customers for a reason. They trust your business will not frustrate them. They’ll be doing the right thing to direct their family and friends to you since you’re the best solution to their problems.

3. You’ll turn your customers into repeat customers

Repeat customers bring in more profits. They’ll be happy with your products and services and perceive you as their solution to one of their problems. Repeat customers are also called loyal customers. Maintaining loyal customers is easier and cheaper than looking for new ones. Your loyal customers will spend 10x more than their initial purchase in your business. On the other hand, looking for new customers to convert them to loyal customers will cost you 7x more. Loyalty programs come in handy to capture and retain your consistent customers while attracting prospects.

Your focus should be on retaining your current customers more than looking for new ones. This is where customer service comes in. The best-in-class businesses use outbound call centres to provide ongoing support on using your product and follow up to find out whether they are experiencing problems.

4. When you launch new products, customers are more likely to try them out

Since technology is constantly evolving, there’ll always be new products in the market to beat the old-fashioned ones. To ensure your business has a competitive edge, you need to keep looking at what’s new in the market and bring it into your business. What if your business is the first one to launch the product or service? The truth is, customers are always sceptical when it comes to trying new products or services. They need to see a track record of how that product has performed in the market. If not so, they want to hear what other customers say about the product or their experience with the item on sale.

When customers have a satisfactory experience with your business, they’ll be more willing to try the product. And this is for a good reason. They trust you to offer quality products and services. They have tested you for a good time and have no doubts about your business.

5. Establish a smooth working relationship

Public relations shape the scope and altitude of any business. Customers need a business where operations are seamless and/or with fewer hiccups. Productivity in business calls for both parties to play their roles reasonably. On your part, you and your team of employees should relate well to ensure business operations run smoothly. When customers come, they’ll find a streamlined business that’s ready to serve their needs. They’ll consequently buy your products or services and promise to come back. Business etiquette and timely response to customers’ queries are crucial. Customers always contrast service delivery by different firms, especially the turnaround.

When your customers are satisfied with your business, there are fewer complaints and quarrels. It means they’ll be happier buying from you and come back for more. More sales mean more profits. On the other hand, when they come in and find everything faulty, they’ll go away to look for better alternatives.

6. Your customers will forgive you when you make a mistake

There are times when your system will fail, or you’ll fail to deliver products to your customers on time. Such things are bound to happen in any business, only that they don’t happen more often. A goal-oriented business should detect problems before they arise and come up with a solution in record time; that’s one of the main aims of sophisticated.

If all that fails, you still stand a chance to retain your customers. The thing is, your business has been offering quality services and gives them priority. They can count so many times you served them well or solved their problems amicably. When you err, the chances are that they will understand, forgive and continue doing business with you. Therefore, give the best at all times.

7. Customers will write positive reviews about your products or services

Most customers rely on online reviews to make purchasing decisions. Customers can leave positive reviews and testimonials on your websites. They’ll talk about how their experience was, using a product from your business, and why others should try it.

This marketing strategy won’t cost you anything and will lead more customers to your business. But you can monetize this approach by incentivizing your customers to leave reviews on your websites. If there are other sites for reviewing products, you can pay freelance writers to write reviews for your business and products. If done right, your business will rank on the first page of Google, giving you more clicks, visiting your website, and more sales.

Final Thoughts

Customer encounter is what keeps the wheel of successful brands running. It is what you and your team of employees should strive to achieve by establishing a streamlined working environment that serves the needs of its customers. When your customers are happy, they tend to make more sales, come back for more purchases and refer other people to your brand. The thing is, they see your business as a solution to a problem they have, and as long as your business is there, they’ll keep coming for help. When all this happens, you’re the one to reap the benefits. You will increase your productivity and the bottom line of your business.