When customers have endless options at their fingertips, businesses need to go the extra mile to stand out from their competition. And one of the most effective ways to do this is by providing outstanding customer experiences. When you create experiences like that, customer satisfaction will increase and your business will grow along with it.
Now, what makes an experience so incredibly good that a customer would describe it as outstanding? This can be many different things for different companies. But there are some strategies any business should put in place to boost business with outstanding customer journeys.
This one makes so much sense we can’t believe that so many companies still don’t do it. You can only deliver great customer experiences if your organization puts the customer in the center of everything it does. As a CMO or business leader, you need to instill a customer-centric mindset within your team. Every marketing or sales decision you take should revolve around your customer’s needs and how you can fulfill these. Encourage empathy and understanding of your target audience.
There are several things you can do to get to that customer-centric mindset:
Data isn’t just a tool for number crunching. it’s a compass that guides you to your customers’ preferences. And with the tools available today, gathering the right data should not be a problem.
Gather data is important. But the hardest part is leveraging the insights from your data and analytics to create perzonalized customer experiences. Ideally, you have all your data in a CRM platform, integrated with all channels that generate data for you. With the insights you get, you can tailor your offers, campaigns, communication and recommendations. With enough data, you can create highly personalized experiences that delight your customers. This will strengthen your relationship with them and increase loyalty.
Customer experience is not only marketing’s experience. It should be a company-wide effort. Customers have contact with other people in your company as well, like the receptionist, the delivery driver, billing, and so on.
Creating a consistently outstanding customer experience is only possible by collaboration with other departments. Marketing and sales often talk about sales and marketing alignment (or smarketing). That’s already a very good first step. But you should also involve customer services and other departments, and create a similar alignment with them. A cohesive experience, from marketing touchpoints to post-purchase interactions, creates a holistic brand perception that resonates with customers.
Customers today engage with brands across various touchpoints. These can be websites, apps, social media, physical stores, phone, etc. It’s essential to ensure a seamless omnichannel or multichannel experience. Having a bunch of separate point solutions is just not going to do the trick.
Modern tools often have ways to integrate and help you centralize data but also streamline communications across platforms. You need to evaluate for your business if it makes sense to centralize some features into one central platform. Much of this can also be automated. This will help tremendously with:
This will help you create much better customer experiences, with higher satisfaction and engagement as a result.
Often people are afraid of customer feedback, thinking that it’s going to be all negative and it will make them feel bad. But customer feedback can be a true goldmine. Even if all of it is negative, which it is not.
The first reason to actively seek customer feedback, is because it makes the customer feel he or she is actually being heard. They feel like their opinion matters to you, and that goes a long way towards creating better experiences. The second reason is that customer will often not take the iniative themselves to tell you their opinion. They may think it’s not relevant or important enough. But for you 1 piece of feedback could make a big difference.
We get it: investing in marketing can be a bit scary. But it doesn’t have to be: this ROI calculator gives you a clear idea about what ROI you can expect from your marketing efforts.
