By Chris Robinson, CEO Yonder Digital Group…
As creatures of habit, established customers will come back to your business unless you give them a reason not to. In fact research shows that 92% of consumers will increase their business with a company if their queries are handled quickly and effectively. Therefore, good communication should be at the top of your business’ priority list in order to be able to offer great customer experience. Yonder Digital Group interviewed 2,000 UK consumers and 81% of them said bad communication and poor customer experience will cause them to take their business elsewhere.
To invest in your customer service means securing the benefit of the so called Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): the net profit a customer will provide over the course of their relationship with a business. CLV is crucial to your business’ success, in fact it is considered by 86% of CEOs and owners as a priority and 98% of marketers believe that CLV is a critical component to their marketing strategy .
Even though over 60% of companies are aware of the importance of customer experience – defining it as the best tactic for increasing customer lifetime value and loyalty – meeting consumer expectations still seems to be an issue for most. Research focusing on the quality of customer communication across a range of industries, shows that when asked whether companies are easy to contact and if they provide quick and effective solutions to customers’ queries, the answer is often “no” .
Since poor customer service and scarce communication seem to be some of the main reasons for losing customers, businesses need to focus on building a strong and long lasting relationship with their customers, which needs to originate from a well thought-out customer experience strategy. Here are our top tips to achieve this:
- Listen to your customers: research has shown that 70% of businesses delivering great customer experience make use of their customer feedback to further improve their strategy . Analysing your customers’ trends is now easier than ever, thanks to advanced technology tools that provide your business with useful data such as purchasing patterns and consumer behaviour analysis to name a few.
- Make good use of consumer data: once you have gathered all the relevant information, you can then pinpoint a variety of consumer trends depending on what answers your business needs to find. For example, you can understand how customers respond to latest innovations and identify their reactions to different inputs. Thanks to this in depth analysis businesses can successfully develop new and bespoke strategies, specific to their consumers’ needs and preferences.
- Don’t make your customers wait: Customers are increasingly demanding to be able to get in touch with a company when and as they need. Providing customers with a variety of options to get in touch is a sure fire way to make your customers increase their business with your company. To make sure your customer service representatives will be able to offer quick and efficient answers to customer problems, automated online chatbots, telephone services and email are just a few of the multi-channel options that you can implement, giving your customers the chance to rapidly and easily reach your business through their favourite method of communication.
What consumers want is to feel important and taking care of your customers’ satisfaction and treating them as an indispensable entity will help you reach your business goals.