The Importance of Customer Experience to your Brand

Customer experience has rapidly become a top priority for businesses. In 2014, a Gartner study predicted that by 2019, more than 50% of organisations will invest more money into customer experience.

Customers no longer base their loyalty on reasonable prices or product quality. Instead, they remain loyal to companies due to the experience and service they receive. Missing out on providing a great customer experience may put your business at risk.

How do you go about giving your customer’s the best experience with your products and services? First, you must understand the true meaning of customer experience.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience is just what its name suggests. It can be defined as the way your customer has experienced the goods and services offered by your business. Were they happy with your product? Did it give them the results they were seeking? These factors, along with many others, are very important to a customer’s experience.

In short, it is how a customer perceives your brand. It is more than just customer service, which is handled by a specialised team of individuals who deal with customer complaints. In contrast, everyone in the organisation is responsible for guaranteeing a good customer experience.

Customer service is reactive. But customer experience is proactive. As a business, you can take action to prevent dissatisfied customers before they even become customers. This is essential to building long-term customer relationships and loyalty.

Bad experience = Loss of customers

There are many ways that poor experience can lead to a loss of customers:

• Low-quality product or service: If your product or service doesn’t perform as promised, the customer most likely won’t buy from you again. This makes you lose customer trust, which could spread to potential buyers. The customer who had a bad experience will let others know that they don’t recommend your product.
• Negative reviews: Low-quality products and services will most likely lead to negative reviews. And negative reviews can lead to a bad reputation and in the end, the loss of customers and a decreased chance of gaining new ones. 93% of consumers read online reviews. An overwhelming 80% of customers won’t buy from companies with negative reviews. These are classic examples that underscore the importance of customer experience.
• Bad customer service: When a customer is dissatisfied with your product and your team doesn’t do a great job of soothing the customer’s frustrations (i.e. offering cheaper alternative product/service, issuing a refund, etc.), then you should probably brush up on your company’s customer service. Bad customer service is a sure way to lose customers and could hurt your chances of gaining new customers.

Offer great customer experience

It’s important to provide a positive customer experience. How can you achieve this you ask? The first step is to ensure that you have a team of passionate, caring people. It’s nearly impossible to provide good customer experience with apathetic employees who don’t really care about your customers and their satisfaction.

Below are other ways to boost customer experience:

• Make customers your top priority. This will make customers feel important and that they are the driving force of your company. They will feel cherished and that your company treats them right, leading them to come back for more of your products.
• Know who your customers are. You should understand customers’ needs and wants in order to better serve them.
• Gain insightful feedback from customers. Getting customer feedback will help your business improve in a variety of areas.

Do you want to deliver a great customer experience? Give us a chance. At Windsor Telecom, we specialise in offering personalised customer experience solutions to businesses through our call answering service, call handling technology and business telephone systems. We believe that improving customer experience involves being responsive and answering calls the first time, every time.