Over the past few years, everyone working in the channel has heard management going on about improving the “customer experience”. As a result, there’s a good chance your business has moved heaven and earth in your efforts to make your customer experience as good as you can.
And you should, because customers are the lifeblood of any business, and their experience of you and the solutions you offer are the key to attracting and retaining them.
In the process, you’ve also likely discovered the paradox of “Fixing a customer’s problem turns them into a longtime customer, but you can’t fix problems you don’t know about”, as outlined in books like Total Quality Management that were popular in the 80s and 90s. The problem with that, of course, is that customers whose problems you are unaware of, are at risk of having someone else swoop in and save the day.
To find out if your customer experience measures up to what the modern customer expects, Channel Futures contributors Khali Henderson and Casey Freymuth suggest taking the following 5 steps to figure that out:
- Stop fooling yourself: Don’t assume your customers agree with internal assessments that say you’re delivering better propositions than your competition.
- Learn your customers’ needs: Talk to your customers as much and as often as you can to learn what’s really important to them.
- Don’t ignore touchpoints: Examine every step of your customers’ journey with you, and polish any touchpoints that might not be up to snuff. Just one off-putting touchpoint can leave a customer feeling cold, even if the rest are top-notch.
- Build relationships: Put effort into building relationships with your customers.
- Simplify the user experience wherever possible: Make it as easy as possible for your customers to resolve the problems they are coming to you for help on. Strive for fewer steps, less paperwork, and less bureaucracy everywhere you can within your own business to make things easier for your customers.
These are highlights from the original article that appeared on Channel Futures. Read the full article here, where the authors go into more detail on each of the above five points.
[Source: Channel Futures]
[Image: CC BY-SA 3.0]
