Know your Customers
How well do you know your customers?
Why do they return and keep purchasing from you?
What do they like the most about your products and services?
Are they happy with what they get? Are they satisfied? Are they recommending you to their friends and on social media?
Those are all very valid questions that you should be able to respond to instantly if you know your customer base.
Additionally, you must know how many people are leaving you and why they do so. Is the quality of your products what is putting them off? Or is it the service you provide? Or your communications? Or your post-sales experience?
Analysis and Actions
Very often, basic analysis of your data and customer behaviours will give you a straightforward to-do list and quick wins for you to apply to the whole Customer Experience you are offering. Ultimately, your business can be boosted by improving your Customer Experience. Think about these quick examples:
- Complaint handling process. Make sure you are strictly adhering to legal requirements, but go above and beyond by simplifying the process and making it more effective. More importantly, make sure you have your lessons learnt and have a process in place to apply those improvements that are being discovered. This way, you are turning negativity into a positive outcome! Consider complaints as a cost-free research of your main pain points, and then action an improvement plan on them.
- Surveying. You will have heard of NPS®, Customer Satisfaction and Key Drivers, but surveying customers goes beyond that. Following some basic good practices to avoid customer fatigue through over-surveying, you can uncover some facts that you didn’t know about your own company. If you are prepared to hear brutally honest comments from your customers and learn from both positive and negative opinions you will be in a very good position to evolve your business.
Customer Journey mapping and Persona classification
Are all your customers buying your products and services for the same reason? Are they offered with the same Customer Experience path? If you have different answers to those two questions you will find yourself in a contradiction. Customers with different motivations should be classified as their own ‘persona’ or cohort, and then a subsequent Customer Journey should be mapped to make sure their needs are covered and their motivations met at every step of their journey.
Listen to your staff
Your employees are key to retaining customers and bring new ones. If they are happy, they will make your customers happy. So you want to know what they think about your culture, your values your ways of doing things. Similarly to customer surveys, you can run periodic questionnaires and interviews to find out how they feel. You will find a lot of value in doing that properly. Beyond surveying, you can establish a 360º strategy to make sure you really listen to your staff. You really want to hear their ideas and suggestions from their own perspective, but also they can fill you with extremely valuable insights from the customer’s perspective. It’s all connected! Taking care of your Employee Experience will surely have an impact on your Customer Experience.