July 25, 2024
As competition among businesses continues to become more global, standing out will become more challenging for most enterprises. Against this backdrop, the only real way to differentiate your business in a sea of competitors with similar offers is to deliver an exceptional customer experience (CX).
Happy customers are more trusting, less likely to dwell on small price differences between you and your competitors, and are much more likely to keep coming back. Even better, they might also become advocates for your brand, lending their own trust and credibility so that you can draw new waves of future customers.
Keeping your customers happy is fairly easy if you have a small operation. If your business is a passion project, like many are, you and your core team probably understand your customers’ concerns as well as they do. But as your business starts to scale up, the things you used to do to earn loyalty may no longer be feasible. At this point, you’ll need to invest in modern customer experience management (CXM) practices.
Delivering good CX at scale is very different from doing it at a typical microbusiness level. You and your staff must start considering customer relationships as part of a wider, interconnected system that also includes all of your business’s touchpoints—places and situations where you and your customers interact in some way. Here are some important customer experience management best practices that you and all your employees must integrate if you want your business to continue earning customer loyalty in its next phase of growth:
Use your customer’s perspectives when defining your organisation’s aims. This vision should guide all strategic and operational decisions, ensuring that every action aligns with delivering exceptional customer experiences. In other words, creating great customer experiences must be part of your organisation’s mission and values, not just something for your marketing team to figure out on their own.
Illustrating your customers’ typical touchpoints on a comprehensive map provides insights into where your next CX enhancements can be made. Because customers’ wants and behaviours change, you and your staff should regularly review this map to ensure it remains relevant amidst changing customer expectations.
Truly listening to your customers earns their trust and improves their experience with your business. Though you do need to understand the more general customer experience, you must focus on the critical interactions, or "episodes," that significantly impact customer satisfaction. Learn from these episodes to better address customer pain points effectively and improve overall satisfaction.
Unless you’re looking out for them, you may not necessarily know if a key customer episode has happened. To better identify these events, encourage your staff to actively capture feedback that customers provide through surveys as well as through direct conversations.
Establish a CXM system to gather real-time customer feedback so that you have a steady stream of recent and actionable CX data. Utilise your system to drive continuous improvement in your process and to foster a culture of learning and adaptation within your organisation.
To maximise the benefits, it's critical to consider feedback loops in two interconnected layers: the inner loop and the outer loop. The inner loop is more focused on directly addressing feedback from individual customers, thus giving your business the opportunity to close the feedback loop as soon as possible. For example, if a customer were to raise a concern about their recent interaction with your business, your customer-facing personnel should endeavour to promptly resolve the issue.
On the other hand, the outer loop is about analysing broader trends and patterns across feedback data to drive systemic changes across your organisation. What this might involve can vary depending on your goals, from identifying recurring issues and refining operational processes to launching new initiatives based on aggregated customer feedback.
While the inner loop is concerned with individual customers, the outer loop ensures continuous improvement in your organisation's overall customer experience strategy. Seamlessly integrating both loops into your strategy will help ensure that immediate concerns are addressed while also fostering long-term adaptability and innovation.
Equip your staff with the necessary tools, training, and authority to make decisions that benefit the customer. An empowered workforce is more likely to deliver exemplary customer experiences.
Regular training sessions on customer engagement can provide your staff the skills to handle any customer scenario confidently. In particular, focus on communication and problem-solving skills to ensure that your team is well-equipped to earn your customers’ lasting confidence.
Continuous feedback loops enabled by a capable CXM platform will also empower your team. These systems can provide employees with always-relevant CX information, enabling them to engage more positively with customers.
It’s not enough to simply interact with customers every day. You and your team must actively study their behaviours and motives from every angle while aiming to rid yourselves of any biases. To do this, utilise data analytics to gain deeper insights into customer behaviours and preferences.
This approach requires you to identify, analyse, and act on key performance indicators (KPIs). Metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer retention rates can tell you how well different interactions affect your customer relationships with a high degree of certainty. Your staff should be familiar with these KPIs and understand how they can contribute to improving them. As your business grows, leveraging analytics data will keep CXM activities manageable and help you consistently uncover recurring themes, enabling you to better anticipate customer needs.
The responsibility for improving customer experiences should not just fall on your sales and marketing teams. To make customer experience management sustainable, everyone in your organisation must also understand customer pain points and be able to provide their unique perspective in resolving CX issues.
Prioritising customer experiences as the focus of all teams is a good start, but it’s not the only thing to consider. To offer more consistent and seamless experiences across all customer touchpoints,
collaboration across different departments must be encouraged. This will ensure consistency throughout your customers’ journeys and help reduce fragmented interactions that degrade the overall customer experience.
Familiarising all your staff with these best customer experience management practices can give you an edge against competitors where such concepts are only understood by sales and marketing teams, if at all. A better organisation-wide understanding of how different interactions shape CX, loyalty, and the bottom line can help your business act as one to secure fruitful relationships with customers, even as the business moves into its next stage of growth.
Most importantly, developing a focus on CX can help your business gain the agility it needs to quickly close the feedback loop. When your customers see that their feedback is being acted on, they feel valued and are more likely to share your business with others. Once you make these practices an integral part of your staff onboarding and training, your business will soon gain a rare competitive edge in delivering truly exceptional customer experiences.
