The competition for customers in 2022 has never been fiercer. As the market becomes more crowded, customer experience has become a top priority for businesses that wish to thrive.
A recent study by Walker predicted that customer experience would, by 2020, surpass product and price as the most valued brand differentiator. The fact is that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.
Yet, most consumers are disappointed with their customer experience. According to The 2017 State of Personalization Report, 71% of customers express some level of frustration due to an impersonal customer experience.
When customers are unhappy, they switch. This was confirmed when RightNow released a survey that revealed 82% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company as a result of a negative experience. In this competitive market, you cannot afford to lose your hard-earned customers.
Customers are no longer loyal because you have a great product or a great price point. Instead, they stay loyal to brands and companies when they receive a positive and personalised customer experience. If you cannot keep up with customers’ increasing demands, you will lose them.
This begs the question, how do you enrich your customer experience in 2022?
Let’s find out.
Customer Experience (CX) can be defined as the overall impression your customers have of your brand. Every time they interact with your brand, they form an opinion.
Is your website easy to navigate? Are your staff friendly and efficient? Do you have offer personalised communication and offers? Are customer queries dealt with quickly and effectively?
All these experiences build up to create an impression of your brand. Depending on these experiences, your customer may think your brand is amazing or they may start shopping around for an alternative.
So, what makes a good customer experience?
Today, customers expect companies to understand their unique tastes and preferences. They expect to be treated as individuals rather than as faceless buyers or personas.
A personalised experience helps customers feel valued and more connected to your brand. When brands can meet their customer’s expectations, they generate happy and loyal customers.
Customers do not like to be kept waiting. Customers reported, “Having to wait for a response from a company” as the number one frustration they had when engaging with a business.
These days, customers expect speedy responses and solutions. Whether they have a query, are seeking information or want to make a purchase, speed is a crucial component of a positive customer experience.
Lowering the average response time should be a top priority for every sales and customer service team.
Successful brands know their customers want easily accessible, accurate information. When customers are informed, they can make educated purchasing decisions.
Brands should prioritise making it easy for customers to access answers to their questions. A brand that can effectively and efficiently answer customer questions will enjoy more sales and happier customers.
In these volatile economic conditions, consumers are more thoughtful about how they spend their money. However, research shows that great customer experience not only influences where they choose to buy but also how much they choose to spend.
When a company offers great customer experience they can boost customer loyalty, improve customer retention and ultimately, boost conversions, sales and revenue!
Focus on providing a great customer experience and you will to enjoy significant benefits:
Can any business really afford to say no to more revenue?
Providing added value to customers through an enriched customer experience can boost sales, conversions and ultimately, revenue.
How does a good customer experience boost revenue?
a. Happy customers spend more
Customers are inclined to pay more for the same products and services if they know they will also receive a great customer experience. Deloitte reports that customers are willing to spend 140% more after a positive experience than customers who report negative experiences.
b. Impressed once-off buyers will become repeat customers
A great customer experience will help convert once-off buyers into repeat customers. By focusing on impressing once-off buyers you will increase your sales pipeline and grow your customer base.
c. Loyal customers beat new leads
It costs money to find new leads. Instead, brands should focus on keeping current customers happy and engaged – a happy existing customer is more likely to buy than a new lead.
It is easy to see why offering a premium customer experience will boost your revenue.
In fact, companies that offer a superior customer experience can bring in almost six times more revenue than competitors that offer a sub-standard customer experience.
Companies that provide extra value through a top-class customer experience are rewarded with long-term loyalty from customers.
Long-term loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases.
87% of customers who reported having a great experience said they will make another purchase. Compare that to only 18% of customers who had a poor experience. This is a significantly higher chance of repeated sales.
Reducing customer churn enables growth and provides stability.
Positive or negative, customers are going to share their experience with their friends, family, colleagues and networks.
Salesforce Research revealed that two-thirds of customers share their bad experiences with others. The last thing you want is unhappy customers telling people to avoid your brand.
Conversely, happy customers tell an average of 9 people about a positive experience. That means for every 1 happy customer, you have 9 more potential customers, without spending a cent.
Don’t lose customers before they have even interacted with you. Make every customer a brand ambassador by simply offering a great customer experience.
Using emails is one of the best ways (if not the best way) to generate a positive customer experience for your customers.
Let’s break down the best practices to enrich your customer experience:
If you are sending the same email to every customer, what are the chances are your customer feels understood?
The key to sending personalised emails that leave a lasting impression is segmentation.
On average, segmented email campaigns see 14.37% more opens and 64.78% more clicks compared to non-segmented campaigns.
Every customer is unique and will respond to different kinds of messages and offers. Brands should create customer segments based on various criteria, such as location, preferences, email engagement, and transaction history.
Email segmentation enables companies to send personalised content. This enhances your customer experience while boosting open and click-through rates.
No one likes to be addressed as “Dear Customer”. Addressing customers by their first name is a small step that can help generate trust and boost engagement.
Statistics show that personalised emails can deliver 6x higher transaction rates.
As a brand trying to build a connection with a human being, it is important to talk like a human being. The goal of your email messages is to communicate your brand’s unique value or offer in a way that sparks an emotional connection.
Take note of your language, personalise offers and tell stories that people can engage with.
This is how you build trust and enrich your communication.
Most consumers will check your website before reaching out to you.
Live chat offers a great opportunity to engage website visitors while they are on your site. Customers can easily contact you and receive instant answers to queries.
According to Econsultancy, live chat has the highest satisfaction levels of any customer service channel. 73% of consumers reported a positive experience with live chat versus 61% for email and 44% for phone.
Using live chat technology enables you to provide immediate, real-time responses to routine customer inquiries as well as around-the-clock customer support.
With live chat capabilities you can deliver a top-class customer experience even while you are sleeping.
Customers want to know they are important to you. What better way to show them you are open to listening than by sending email surveys?
Sending email surveys is a great channel for gathering qualitative, actionable feedback. It will help you understand the most common problems faced by your customers, build trust, discover opportunities for growth and obviously, improve your products and services.
By listening to your customers and gathering feedback you can benchmark your current customer satisfaction rate as well as your Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Once you know how happy your customers are and how likely they are to refer your brand, you are better equipped to make the necessary changes to see improvements in those areas.
A brand that listens to its customers and is open to improving is more likely to reap the benefits of a great customer experience.
If you want your customers to have a warm fuzzy feeling towards your brand, then you need to make them feel special and valued.
If you have done the work of segmenting your audience, then it will be simple to send happy birthday emails or special offers unique to each customer.
This kind of personalised experience is bound to get tongues wagging and people bragging about your brand. There is no better marketing channel than positive word-of-mouth.
Invest in your customers and they will invest in you.
If you are serious about upping your customer experience game, then we recommend using a top-class technology tool. Email analytics for customer service can provide you with the secret weapon you need to get ahead of your competitors.
How can customer service email software help you enrich your customer experience? Let’s take a look:
It can be hard to assess if your customer service response time is up to scratch if you have no visibility. Customer support software can provide valuable customer service analytics.
Measure email customer service response times, set custom SLAs against industry benchmarks and receive alerts when an email is approaching an SLA deadline.
A tool like timetoreply allows your team to work towards clearly defined customer experience goals.
If you plan on building a customer-centric business, it is vital you have accurate insights into your team’s customer service email performance.
With timetoreply you can track metrics such as average response times, peak hours for incoming emails, individual and shared mailbox response times, and average time to successfully resolve a customer service request.
The more data you have access to, the easier it is to identify areas for improvement.
The last thing you want is for your team to be wasting valuable time on tedious, low-value tasks.
Using specialised customer service email software can free up your teams to focus on tasks that hold the most value for the customer as well as for the business.
With timetoreply, you can measure the customer response email productivity of your entire team.
Set goals and measure outcomes of your customer experience strategy to ensure you meet the ever-higher demands of the modern-day customer.
Enhance your customer experience by using timetoreply. This powerful, easy-to-use solution works with any email platform.
With our user-friendly dashboard and powerful customer service email analytics, timetoreply offers companies a detailed overview of average customer service email response times, email volumes, peak hours, and overall productivity.
This plug-and-play solution offers quick activation across individual or shared mailboxes to generate valuable insights into your customer service teams’ email performance.
Since customer experience is the key to success, can you really afford not to enrich your customer experience with email analytics software?
Try timetoreply for a free 15-day trial to see how the power of email analytics can transform your customer experience.