The ultimate goal of any company is to stay attractive to your customers and maximize their lifetime value. However, developments in the digital age make it increasingly difficult to stay on top.
Customers’ now enjoy limitless options and transparency, and their demands extend far beyond product and price. One important way to differentiate your business from the competition is to provide a more compelling and personalized experience that attracts customers and wins their loyalty.
However, while companies pour investments into customer-centric strategies, many are unsuccessful when it comes to anchoring them in the organization.
Why is customer experience important?
Customer experience is crucial for businesses as it directly impacts customer loyalty, overall customer experience, and competitive advantage. A well-defined CX strategy that focuses on customer centricity ensures that products or services meet customer needs and expectations in real time.
By providing good customer experiences, businesses can enhance customer engagement, strengthen customer relationships, and ultimately foster loyal customers. Positive customer experiences not only lead to higher customer satisfaction. They also contribute to a higher Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Engaging support teams and utilizing customer data effectively can help you tailor your products and services to meet customer preferences, making customers feel valued and appreciated. Ultimately, delivering a positive experience across all touchpoints can differentiate your business from competitors and drive long-term success.
Why do customer experience strategies flop?
One common issue is that that companies see “experience” as only a customer-facing issue. However, it's important not to forget that the customer experience is strongly interlinked with internal operations. Some focus their investments on flashy websites and apps for the customers. However, they ignore major potential for IT improvements behind the scenes.
Others work intensively on creating the perfect experience. However, they forget to tell their customers, or even their own sales teams! The extra value goes unnoticed simply because the company didn't include it in the value proposition.
In addition, you cannot roll out a customer experience strategy overnight. It needs to be sustainable for your business – and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. In the race to be first, companies often rush into strategies without taking the time to understand what they are actually aiming to achieve. And even when they do manage to realize their strategy, they have no means of quantifying its success.
Five steps for a successful customer experience strategy
Although most business leaders have customer-experience initiatives on their agenda, most fail in the execution phase. Here are five key points to remember to translate your customer experience strategies into success.
1. Build solid foundations
Customers expect logic, consistency, and speed in the buying process. Problems in these areas often arise internally. That’s why it’s important to first pinpoint the gaps in your system and then close them with the help of digital tools.
Integrated quotation management software can improve your responsiveness to customers. These automated systems provide instant quotes based on customer profiles, reduce mistakes on order confirmations, and can even generate discounts in line with your sales strategy. This ensures that you speak with one voice to your customers. Incorporate new mechanisms into your sales processes that help enhance the experience from the inside out!
2. Link the customer experience to value
You might be striving for an unbeatable customer experience. However, it will only mean something if you are able to communicate its value. What really matters to your customers? What do you need to fix?
If your customers strongly rely on a secure supply of your product to keep their business running, build strong partnerships with local distributors and offer a 24-hour availability guarantee. Then build your value proposition around this, equipping your sales team with transparent, detailed arguments and solid evidence to communicate how much these partnerships are worth. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes, identify their pain points, then provide your solution.
3. Enhance and tailor the experience
Now you have made the necessary internal improvements and established a link to value, new digital technologies can help you get even closer to your customers and tailor your experience to them.
- A loyalty app where customers collect and redeem points generates pull, increases retention, and boosts sales.
- Insights into shopping behavior reveal promotion and cross-selling opportunities.
- Recommendation engines give shoppers more confidence by suggesting products already purchased and approved by similar customers.
- Algorithms predict what customers are most likely to buy next based on past behavior, preferences, and values.
4. Track and strengthen performance
Going digital doesn’t just open up opportunities on the customer-facing side of your business. Best-in-class sales tools can also have a significant impact on salesforce performance. Reps who have immediate visibility of how a specific deal will influence their compensation are more likely to hit their sales targets. This is also a good time to introduce new and attractive incentives that discourage target deviation and reward top performance.
5. Rethink customer needs for a “true” relationship
The best customer experiences offer much more than just a product. They provide comprehensive and proven solutions that include ongoing support and service. Some even take over process management for an entire production step on the customer’s side.
Charging for technical advice and maintenance, introducing license fees for accompanying software, and providing regular analysis reports as part of a members-only subscription are just a handful of examples how to generate new revenue streams and move from a product to relationship business. Timing and customer appetite for ongoing support are important factors that influence how urgently you need to move to a "Relationship = Product + Service" business.
