How to create a memorable customer experience

Written on 27 September, 2018 by Julia Hammond
Categories Marketing

When it comes to business, it’s not always your products or services that keep customers coming back, it’s their experience with a business. In celebration of Customer Experience Day on 2nd October, we’ve put together a few ways you can create a great experience that will have customers coming back:

  1. Monitor the conversations about your brand: understand what customers are saying/thinking.
  1. Engage in discussions across the business: embed great customer service as a company-wide value.
  1. Understand and improve: use customer feedback and create a team to create a continuous improvement program.

Let’s dive into these three components in greater detail:

Monitor the conversations around your brand

If customers have feedback about your business, they may not always revert to your social channels to share their opinion. In addition to monitoring your owned online channels, practice diligence in monitoring third-party review websites, like productreview.com.au. Track the number of comments about your products, customer service and delivery experience to gain valuable insight about where your business could improve. Every comment – positive or negative – is an opportunity to improve.

If you don’t find feedback on your social channels or third-party sites, consider sending out a survey to engage your database. Reach out to both existing customers and those who’ve decided to move on. It’ll ensure you have a clear picture of customer happiness throughout every step of their journey.

Engage in discussions across the business

Creating a good customer experience doesn’t just start and end with the customer service team. They are only one touch point in a customer’s journey. From sales, to account managers and delivery teams, it’s important to keep all parties across your goals to create a consistent experience for the customer.

Here’s what you can do to keep the business aligned with your customer service goals:

  • Set benchmarks and communicate this as a business initiative. Some companies use a Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures your customers’ loyalty to your brand.
  • Engage stakeholders from different teams to identify areas where customer experience can be improved.
  • Curate resources and examples of great customer experience to inspire new ideas across the business.

Understand and improve

If you’ve taken steps 1 and 2, it’s likely you’ve gathered a lot of data about your customers’ experience with your business. If you experience information overload, it’s best to identify the biggest pain points in the customer journey and then prioritise according to impact on your business. Here are a few ways Webcentral is working to improve our customer experience:

  • Creating cross-functional working groups to utilise talent and skillsets from across the organisation to attack customer pain points from all angles.
  • Streamlining internal processes to give our teams more time to work with you on increasing your business, and letting us get jobs done smarter and faster.
  • Taking an agile approach to change by trying and testing small improvements quickly, and adapting as required.

Creating an exceptional customer experience is a company-wide initiative and not one you can easily change overnight. Having a customer experience model, engaging in the right stakeholders and setting benchmarks is a great start.

About Customer Experience Day

Customer Experience Day (#CXDay2018) is organised worldwide by the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA). The CXPA supports the professional development of its members and advances the field by providing shared best practices and education, developing standards, offering networking opportunities, promoting the industry and creating a better understanding of the discipline of Customer Experience.

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