How many customers can you afford to lose?
If you deliver a poor customer experience, chances are you are losing customers and struggling to get new ones. If you want more information about poor service specifically, take a look at the post ’12 ways poor customer experience affects your bottom line’.
Customer experience (CX) for sustainable growth
Before they are your customer:
Your customer experience starts when a potential customer first learns about you. Some customers will come to your brand and click ‘buy now’ on a whim. But many more are researching the market to make the right choice. If their experience is poor, or they read negative reviews they are unlikely to move to the next stage.
As potential customers travel through your sales funnel these moments grow more important. If you are in B2B, don’t assume buyers are happy to have a ‘sales’ conversation. All evidence suggests B2B buyers bring their personal shopping and customer experience expectations to work.
After they are your customer:
Now you have made the sale, can you relax? No, you need to step up your game, as dissatisfied customers are much more vocal than satisfied customers.
That’s why businesses get in touch. They are making sure you are happy, revving you up to post a positive review or buy more. You need to be doing the same.
Make sure your customer service team understands your customers, acts with empathy and delivers a compelling customer experience. They must drive issues to conclusion and pass on the information needed to improve your products, services and customer experience.
In short, from sales to the end of relationship, a compelling customer experience will help you sell more and increase prices.
Customer experience (CX) for cost reduction
If your customer experience is poor, then you spend time addresses issues. You may even have a whole team of people doing nothing else. This cost is necessary, and perhaps it boosts sales. But, if your customer experience is great, your customer service team can become part of your income-generating operations. The same people can onboard, deliver or develop new products and services. So you can recruit and satisfy more customers.
You can also eliminate other costs. For example, if you sell products, you can minimise returns, reducing the cost of logistics, distributor charges, handling and disposal. Or when you develop new products or services, using the voice of the customer can help you both decrease the number of in-service modifications and lengthen life cycles.
As an additional benefit, you will spend less money selling to happy customers than recruiting new ones.
More about customer experience
What is customer experience?
Customer experience management
What makes a compelling customer experience
Book your free consultation and learn how you can keep up with rising customer expectations.
After our confidential, 30-minute consultation, you will…
- See a path to using customer feedback to drive product, service and operational improvements
- Feel confident you and your team can continuously improve
- Be keen to get ahead of your competitors by using customer ideas to innovate