The importance of a good customer experience:
A lot of people will say business is in an idea. A great plan to fix something that was missing or incomplete. But really, a lot of the time it’s you and many others competing for the same fix. You share the same space and fight for the same customers.
So how do you get ahead? What, apart from the fact that you’re the best, can you do to get the edge on the rest?
The answer is simple, make your customers want to come back to you. Not need, need is what any of your competitors also offer : Want!
This starts and ends with a good user and customer experience.
4. Build a loyal customer base
A good experience for a customer or user isn’t a given. Often times your business doesn’t please a customer in all aspects. This is a renowned fact for departments like customer service or direct sales. But it’s an everyday reality for services like debt collectors or oil companies.
What your business needs to understand is that yes, you have an idea, but that sole contribution isn’t enough to garner and retain larger and larger amounts of loyal customers.
A business-to-customer relation, is very much like a normal person-to-person relationship. If someone repeatedly says they love you, even though they let you dine alone every night, that is not the same as proving they love you by showing their face once in a while.
And sure, if you have a grand plan and no competition, users and customers will be forced to use your products and services to fill their need. But, as soon as the next thing comes out, even if they cost more or are only slightly marginally better, they will leave you without a moment’s notice.
And that is the power of a good customer experience.
If your services are useful, that’s basically their job, but if they are supportive, engaging, attentive and user-friendly as well… Well that’s how you get loyal customers. And those will stick with you regardless of how many shades of Rose Gold you come up with, or how many times you move buttons around the screen.
3. Get ahead of the competition the right way
Those criteria I mentioned, supportive, engaging, attentive and user-friendly, those are simple rules to follow.
Your support team should be supportive, that is literally their name. They should aim to help you to the detriment of their product’s current integrity. If something is buggy, that’s called a bug, not a user-fault.
Your sales agents should be engaging, not blood-thirsty pirates. We’ve already established your product or service fuels a need, you need to make the people want it over others, not feel threatened to take it via pushy sales tactics.
Your feedback agents should be attentive. Without feedback you’re going off of your CEO and Founder’s original plan, which yes, was quite insightful, but they are not walking crystal balls (although I’m sure they’d like to think so); you need the feedback.
And finally, your product or service, and the subsidiaries of those, should be user-friendly. That means your flagship and budget option, that means your trial and free options, that means your support teams and helplines: everything.
Do this, and you will leave your competition in the dirt. A reputation built on a lack of support to customers or a poor interface is almost impossible to erase. One built on good relations with customer and a good user experience, well that is how you stand out.
2. Grow your business
If you’re a small team, coach all your members to do this right. If you are a giant business, do the same. The goal here is to remember that your business knows how to sell and deploy, but what you need, is to take the customer experience to heart. And keep this motto with you forever.
And the process doesn’t take much, it can simply be the way emails are written and handled, the way your agents disarm instant coldness from a user or customer with understanding and genuine chirpiness. Even to the tiniest details on your business card. When I said grow your business I didn’t just mean assets and worth, I meant grow your business’ soul.
Doing this you can grow your follower base, leave competitors behind, and expand your different departments and services with good policies linked to customer and user relations.
Even it means that your product or services will cost a little more, people will flock if they know they will be helped quickly and that you actually care to listen.
This will mean greater revenues and greater growth, which in turn can then go to better everything else (for those who really don’t get why a soul matters).
For any business this should never be forgotten : the user or customer is the business.
1. Glass houses:
Here at OneDesk we do business by this motto, our product is meant to streamline your business workflow and simplify the processes by which you handle feedback and customers. I recommend you look up how our product works on our website, and if you want to learn more simply book a demo with us.
Photo Credit: “Lemonade Anyone?” / Larry W. / CC BY