Managing the experience of your customer is crucial for the success of your brand or business. Good experiences can enhance a customer’s spend, loyalty, advocacy and, ultimately, help reduce the cost of new acquisitions.
We also know that it can be complex and time consuming to do and often gets put in the “I want to but…”, the “I’ll get to that later…” or the “we should take a look at that…” pile.
Managing your customer’s experience is too important to ignore. So if you find yourself thinking it’s too hard, our advice is to take a step-by-step approach.
Start simple, keep the thinking high level and be action orientated.
Here are our top five tips:
- Understand your customer
Identify who your customer is by considering characteristics such as age, geographical location, income, marital status and hobbies and interests. Walk in their shoes. Ask them questions. The more you take your customers’ needs into consideration, the better experience you can create for them. This applies not just to business owners and managers but all levels of staff as well.
- Develop a customer experience map
In one page, map out your customer’s experience.
Consider the steps your customer takes, how and where they interact with you and any highs or lows they would experience. Overlay this with objectives and internal processes and all of a sudden you may start to spot a few areas for improvement.
Click here to download Rigani’s Customer Experience Map Template
- Be consistent
Each engagement with your business and your staff contributes to a customer’s overall experience. Consistency is key. Set your overall approach, monitor implementation and ask for feedback. This applies to external touch points as well as internal touch points.
- Train your staff to deliver
There is nothing more disappointing to a customer than to be let down after having high expectations. If you are going to ‘talk the talk’ then you must ‘walk the walk’. Your staff are one of your biggest assets so ensure your staff are trained in all processes and understand the behaviours you expect.
- Get personal
A small gesture sometimes goes a long way and it’s important to customise your customer’s experiences where you can. Sending a birthday card or a thank you note, asking how their kids are in a meeting, knowing their coffee order or going to their home or office are all quick and easy ideas you can implement tomorrow.