Optimizing the customer experience to drive growth

Rising competition has resulted in customers demanding improved services and increased value. Companies that fail to keep their customers happy fail at customer retention and customer loyalty. Corporates are increasingly focusing on customer experience to keep their customers happy and satisfied. Companies that focus on customer experience can drive revenue 4 to 8% more than the rest of their industries. To ensure consistent growth, marketers need to optimize this experience to be more results oriented. 

Customers want to receive an experience that is exceptional and adds some value to their life. This shows the importance of optimizing the experience being provided to prospective customers across all touchpoints of the digital customer journey. This can be done by keeping the customer first. All strategies and campaigns should be planned by first thinking, “what is it that my customer needs?”. Once this question is answered, all marketing ventures will automatically be enhanced to guarantee customer delight. 

Here, the question arises, why is customer experience key for customer loyalty? Today’s savvy customers have gone above and beyond price and product considerations. Rather, customers are willing to pay exorbitant prices so long as they receive an outstanding experience from the brand. Earning a customer’s loyalty is not an easy task. Every brand is focusing on acquiring and retaining customers. The experience is the differentiating factor. Corporates that can go above and beyond their normal offerings will emerge as the winner. Hence, a superior experience is the key to winning the customer’s repeat business and ensuring rich engagements throughout the customer journey. 

As a result of the impediments facing marketers with regard to retaining customers, many businesses turn to customer experience management, which refers to optimizing customer interactions across all touchpoints of the customer journey, to ensure elevated customer engagement. The focus is on guaranteeing that the expectations of customers are exceeded. This helps in cementing customer loyalty and heralding customer journey transformation.

It is obvious how crucial customer experience is to organizational growth and development. Marketers need to concentrate on honing the customer strategy to be more optimized and growth oriented. How can the customer experience be optimized to drive growth? Companies need to first analyse their structured and unstructured data to understand where they are lacking with respect to providing a consistently superior experience to customers. Such valuable insights can help marketers create a strategy that is personalized and can delight customers across all the interactions they have with the company. Here are some expert tips which can help in optimizing the experience provided to customers:

Artificial Intelligence

One of the most effective ways of enhancing the experience being provided to customers involved leveraging the power of artificial intelligence. Companies that use virtual customer assistants, like chatbots, can accelerate customer interactions and bring about a rapid resolution time, which helps in customer journey transformation. What are the advantages of chatbots? Using a chatbot framework ensures that brands can stay connected with customers 24/7. As a result, any grievance can be addressed immediately. A low resolution time helps in guaranteeing customer delight. Additionally, artificial intelligence can also be used to herald in predictive personalization, thereby allowing chatbots to provide personalized resolutions to customer queries.

Social Media

When it comes to providing customers with an optimized experience, social media marketing should be a vital part of the customer strategy. Why is social media important? Social media platforms are a plethora of information when it comes to tracking and analysing customer behaviour. Companies that continuously monitor their social media channels can gain beneficial insights into their target customers’ responses to their marketing activities. Based on this, marketers can work on streamlining marketing activities and platforms to provide an omnichannel experience. Customers also take to social media to air their grievances. By implementing a chatbot on social media platforms, companies can immediately respond to these grievances before they have a negative impact on the brand reputation. 

Multiple Customer Support

The key to business growth is to stop treating customers like sales leads and to start treating them like human beings who are partners of the organization. Companies that consider solving customer grievances and queries a primary concern will always be leaders in their industry. An effective way of ensuring this is to provide customers with multiple options via which they can receive the support that they require. Just having a helpline from Monday to Friday, 10 AM to 5 PM is nowhere close to being enough. Companies must provide customers with 24/7 options to get fast and satisfactory responses. Apart from helplines, social media and emails should also be used to resolve customer queries. No matter which channel is used, the onus lies on the marketer to ensure that customer query resolution is fast, effective and adds some value.

Focus on customers

Providing a superior experience to customers does not necessarily have to be a complicated strategy. Brands that focus on their customers will automatically provide an enhanced experience to them. Before executing any strategy, brands need to invest extensive time in understanding the buyers and their requirements. Market research is one way in which marketers can get in-depth insights into their target markets. Companies should also strive to obtain customer feedback to help them understand what they are doing right and where they are going wrong. Other factors like optimizing the website to be mobile-friendly, removing irrelevant landing pages and web pages, incorporating exclusive offers, ensuring timely delivery and sharing valuable company information should also be taken care of.

Customer journey transformation is the need of every industry to guarantee customer retention. Providing an enhanced experience to customers should be the priority of every company to cement customer loyalty and drive organizational growth. At Talisma, our customer journey solutions can help brands stay connected and provide a superior experience. 

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