Customer experience is how a customer interacts with and feels about your brand. When a customer has a positive experience, it means that you gave them a positive interaction, and with enough of these interactions, you can create a loyal customer who will be happy with your services. Convesely, enough bad experiences could cause a customer to never return, even if you have a good product.
Customer experience can make or break your company. To invest in good customer experiences, you need to find ways that keep customers happy and engaged now and turn them into loyal customers in the future.
One initial thought is that you can improve your customer experience just by adding more people on your payroll. Having more employees allows you to create more personalized experiences and more people to track customer pain points. But what if you do not have the resources for one more hire? Here are four ways to improve your customer experience without adding more people to your payroll.
Make the Right Hire
Adding the right employee is not just adding another body to the floor. You are investing resources, your momentum and the future of your company as well. When a hire goes wrong, it is not just a disappointment; it has long-term consequences, including damage to your brand and reputation. This is why it is important to evaluate and manage the risk of bad hires in your organization.
You can improve your hiring practices by adding pre-hire sales assessments. These include psychometric and sales acumen tests that evaluate qualified candidates before you even onboard them. This allows you to not only evaluate the new hire’s competence, but also how they fit with your other employees. Hiring managers should also include sales acumen and situational judgment tests before the hiring phase to ensure that you have strong employees on their first day at work. This also protects you from candidates who interview well but do not fit with your organization.
Improve Leadership Skills
Another place to improve customer experience is through how you evaluate and manage your leaders. One tried and tested method is promoting your employees based on their success. You reward them for their accomplishments, and you can bolster your customer experience by retaining the valuable members in your company.
But sometimes, the skills that made you successful won’t be the ones that will make you a good leader. In sports, great athletes such as Wayne Gretzky and Ted Williams did not achieve the same success managing players as they were players. The skills required to be a superstar athlete, such as athletic prowess, are not the ones needed to be successful managers. More often than not, the great coaches had to work harder on their skills just to get playing time.
The same is true in your business, and you could be making a mistake by not properly assessing what is needed for leadership in your company. This could have dire effects on the customer experience you provide, as it may disrupt the performance of managers in their positions and the other employees with your customers.
To ensure that you have good leaders in your company, here are managerial traits you should consider:
- Employee Development: Do they have an interest in coaching, mentoring, and holding others accountable? This is essential for developing your team.
- Motivation: Can they be a model for others to follow? They must be able to motivate others, whether it’s through their actions or words.
- Clarity: Do they have a vision of what they need to accomplish? Bringing clarity can enhance team productivity and cohesion.
- Conflict Assertiveness: Are they assertive? As a manager, they will need assertive communication skills to tackle minor issues before they become harder problems to resolve.
And if you have employees that you think could make good leaders, make sure you take time to nurture these traits, as they will help improve customer experience and reduce employee turnover.
Experience-Centered Marketing
Most organizations have different siloed channels aimed at attracting customers, none of which center around the customer experience. Things like paid media, better email subject lines and high organic search rankings are valuable aspects of marketing, but customers do not experience these as separate channels. Rather, they take in all of these experiences together when they interact with your products and services.
Your company can benefit from optimizing your marketing towards customer experience. Instead of asking how to improve your SEO or email performance, examine why they should trust your brand when considering other options. Furthermore, several companies have integrated strategies like this with great success. This includes a tent rental company that optimized their marketing by centering customer experience.
This does not mean that you have to reorganize your entire marketing department, but what this means is that you should have interconnected channels that reflect your customer’s needs. So when you evaluate your SEO performance or aim at improving social media metrics, do not treat them as standalone campaigns. Your customer experience can improve vastly by having a unified message that aligns with your customer experience goals.
Experience-Centered Narratives
An important part of any business is the story it tells about itself. Your company’s story can increase your visibility, confidence and authenticity. One way to improve your customer experience is by including it in your company’s story.
Several successful businesses have aligned customer experience with the company’s narrative. They do this by clearly outlining customer experience as part of their success. This provides clarity about the company’s vision and ensures that every customer interaction is aimed at making a good experience for them. In doing this, it aligns the company’s values with serving the customer’s needs from the beginning and guides all actions toward the customer experience as well as the product.
Why Customer Experience Matters
When customers have a positive experience, it can improve customer retention and acquisition, increase sales, strengthen loyalty and help differentiate you from your competitors. This also allows you to evaluate how your company is organized, and this gives you the chance to optimize certain aspects of your organization for the customer journey.
