7 Tips for Providing Exceptional Customer Experiences

If your company isn’t taking the customer experience seriously, you should be.

Research shows, by 2020, the customer will manage 85% of his or her experience with an enterprise without interacting with a human.  Add to that statistic the fact that, within just a few years, the majority (89%) of companies will compete mainly on customer experience and the imperative is clear:

Customer experience must be made a priority.

Last year, we wrote a post outlining actionable tips for improving customer satisfaction, resulting in an improved customer experience and increased customer loyalty.

Today, we’ve further refined this list to bring you 7 tips, from a variety of CX leaders and online resources, for how your company can provide your customers with exceptional experiences.  Enjoy!

1) Use Technology to Convert Feedback into Actionable Insights

“Businesses have numerous tools at their disposal to convert VoC data into insights that help employees do their jobs (speech analytics, digital dashboard/visualization tools for reporting customer activities, real-time reporting and alerting).

The use of customer experience analytics helps VoC practitioners take large sets of historical and recent data and analyze them to reveal trends, identify correlations, and conduct root-cause analysis.  For example, a business using business intelligence tools would be able to identify customers that are most likely to share positive feedback about their interactions with the brand.  This information would then be used to target other buyers with similar attributes through marketing campaigns designed to drive earned-media results.”

(Source: Aberdeen Group)

2) Don’t Be Too Efficient

“Getting the job done quickly is a common priority. However, spending a few extra minutes to ensure your customer is fully satisfied will be worth it in the end by attracting customer referrals. People want to feel special.  Showing them extra attention will result in a positive experience, positive word of mouth and earned mindshare for your company overall.

The opposite is also true: If customers feel rushed with no real, special attention they will walk away with a negative experience and probably won’t come back.”

(Source: Entrepreneur)

3) Get Input From Your Customers

“Customers want to feel their opinions are being heard. Listen to what they’re saying on social media and take action on their suggestions. Actively encourage input by conducting surveys about all aspects of the customer experience, including your customer service, so customers have an opportunity to provide feedback that will help you improve.”

(Source: Small Biz Trends)

4) Be Led by the Customer’s Needs, Not the Technology’s Possibilities

“Arguably the biggest error technology innovators make is to be seduced by a technology’s potential rather than being led by a customer’s actual needs. The farther away you are from the customer, the harder it is to evaluate the impact a technology innovation will have on a real-world customer experience.

This is the trap of push innovation. Push innovation starts with a technology’s potential and works its way backward to how it might be applied to a user environment. This can lead to putting the technology before the user need.”

(Source: Gartner)

5) Create Experiences with “Real People” Not “Brands” or “Companies”

“People want to deal with other people, not brands or companies. There’s nothing less personal than getting an email from a ‘brand’ with no personalization. It just doesn’t pack a punch. We seek human to human engagement.

I recommend you try to make sure that every engagement with a customer is a personalized experience. It’s an opportunity to build a strong relationship with a customer. A relationship that extends beyond expectations and one that will lead to a memorable experience.”

(Source: Client Heartbeat)

6) Regularly Refresh Your Brand Promises

“Rather than waiting for the painful recognition that your organization has lost its way, examine your brand promise at least once every two years. Even if nothing changes, the process of reaffirming your brand can be powerful. Make sure that your brand promises are recognizable, believable, compelling, and well-understood by both customers and employees.”

(Source: DMNews)

7) Provide a Consistent Customer Experience Across Channels

“Efficiently collecting and analyzing data via multiple channels can be challenging, especially with customers expecting quick, efficient responses to their concerns.

With a multi-channel speech analytics system in place, call center managers and supervisors can analyze every agent-to-customer interaction – regardless of the channel. Because it’s not uncommon for customers to use multiple channels to resolve a single issue, multi-channel analytics also analyzes linked interactions across channels, which creates a complete picture of the customer experience journey.”

(Source: CallMiner)

Final Thoughts

With the customer experience continuing to increase in importance, companies would be remiss if they failed to prioritize providing quality interactions between agents and customers.

We hope the above list of tips from industry experts has given you insight into some of the best practices your organization can use to offer customers a positive experience.