The market is overcrowded, eCommerce competition is extremely high, supply has long exceeded demand, and clients have become more discriminating. To build brand loyalty, you need to improve the customer experience for primary and secondary sales.
The Importance of Customer Experience
Customer experience today is practically a real-time dialogue taking place on the Internet. Widgets, instant messengers, social networks, a callback function, and other types of communication have become firmly established in the seller-buyer relationship.
Customer Experience (CX) is not just answers to questions, it is an essential part of the work of the entire team. In the past, buyers were building their relationship with a brand based on the quality of the purchased product or its price. Today, they also pay attention to how sales representatives communicate with them.
A person becomes a loyal customer if the brand demonstrates a high level of customer service, going beyond the traditional service. If customer service personnel or sales assistants can anticipate customer questions and their needs, facilitate cross-selling, then the company has a distinct advantage over its competitors.
Business owners know that retaining customers who have already trusted you is much cheaper than finding new ones. According to statistics, it will take 6-7 times more money to find buyers.
Two-thirds of customers leave a website because of dissatisfaction with the provided service. Therefore, one of the main tasks of CX is to maintain a positive image of the company.
8 Working Tools to Improve Customer Experience
Provide High-Quality Communication
The first thing that needs to be done for closer communication with clients is to establish direct contact with them. A variety of modern technologies allow you to do this with ease and convenience:
- e-mail;
- live chat;
- ticket system;
- messengers;
- social networks, and more.
The consumer should always have a choice of which type of communication to use. Your task is to inform them about these opportunities and provide access to all communication channels.
Include all managers in the processing of requests to speed up the sending of responses. The buyer does not like to wait, such situations cause irritation and a negative attitude towards the company as a whole. Loss of time by the client will affect targeted traffic and cause a wave of unpleasant reviews on social networks. The need for a quick response to a question asked in real-time does not justify ignoring questions sent by mail or in messenger.
Learn to Listen to Customers
Encourage your employees to listen to customers and ask them questions about problematic situations. The more they know about each customer, the more successful the company will become, and with it the customers.
Well-delivered customer service can be a source of new ideas and products. In some successfully developing projects, the customer support team at each meeting of top managers voices the opinion and feedback of their wards about the company’s product.
Personalize Your Services and Products
Artificial intelligence, despite the knowledge inherent in it, has a limited set of questions and answers, so it is unlikely to be chosen by a person as an interlocutor. Show your customers that you are not a robot, that you can and should be talked to. Thus, you will help buyers realize their importance and need for the company.
Know Your Company’s Products
When the support team, sales managers study their company’s product in detail, it will be easier to provide a timely solution to the customer’s problem. Be sure to include training staff in your knowledge of the company’s core product in your processes. Training and exams will not interfere with this.
Inform Customers about Product and Order Status Updates
Do you want to understand how to improve customer service? Integrate a CRM system that will be of invaluable help in improving your customer service. Among its many tools, there is one very important one – integration with SMS-mailing services. You can set up automatic notifications to customers about the status of their order at the moment.
This service will also have a positive effect on the quality of service. Inside CRM, you can configure four main stages of sending notifications:
- The order has been accepted for work. The client received the information that he correctly placed the order and the company has already started processing it.
- A message with the date and time of delivery. The person can schedule the receipt of the goods.
- SMS on the day of delivery with the courier’s contact details and exact time.
- Message after purchase. It must express gratitude to the client for contacting you. Plus, add a promotional code with a discount for your next purchase and you can be sure that the buyer will definitely use it.
Collect Feedback
- ask buyers questions that require a detailed answer;
- find out if there are any wishes or objections, how satisfied the customer is with the service and the product itself;
- be sure to ask if the consumer has any questions, whether they managed to figure everything out;
- offer to rate the company’s service on a ten-point scale;
- regularly calculate the loyalty index and the likelihood of positive recommendations.
Educate Buyers
Sometimes customers of an online store also need additional knowledge, like its employees. By educating the target audience, the company will be able to communicate more effectively about the product, and people will not have ridiculous or biased requirements.
New knowledge is gained through a two-way dialogue and the publication of useful materials:
- articles;
- recommendations;
- reviews of new products;
- information about the features of the product/service;
- links to e-books and expert content on the Web.
The practice of actively educating customers is one of the most effective sales techniques. Training helps to raise the company to a new level and ensures the loyalty of the target audience. This is especially important for the B2B segment.
Work as a Team
Teamwork is always more effective than alone. Customer service is exactly the kind of activity when it is necessary to act together as a team, and not just the customer service department.
When almost the entire team participates in customer service, providing all possible assistance to the support service, it is easier to explain how to improve customer service, which is not yet up to the mark.
Bottom Line
A company interested in an influx of customers will constantly improve the level of service, thereby achieving the trust and loyalty of future customers. Well-delivered customer service will make the online store inaccessible to competitors and will significantly increase the percentage of converting leads into sales.
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