As most business owners know, a key aspect to being successful and sustainable is to make sure your customers are always happy with your product or service. Research by American Express found that 60% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience. The real question is how you enhance the customer’s experience so that they will keep coming back? Giving your customer an enjoyable experience is crucial because it builds brand loyalty and leads to word-of-mouth referrals, which will both help increase revenue and potentially corresponding profits.
As a business, the first thing you should do is analyze who your customers are, understand what they want, and be transparent and straightforward with them. Honesty is the best policy, so be clear with your customers to build trust and form a relationship. The Journal of Consumer Research has found that more than 50% of an experience is based on emotion, as emotions shape the attitudes that drive decisions. Making consumers feel special is a great way to build an emotional relationship, so making personalized products or services to cater to them will help enhance their overall experience and their opinion of your company. There is plenty of emotions data available since people are always posting on social media how they feel and what’s going on in their lives.
Although it can be expensive, investing time into creating an emotional connection with your clients and forming a bond is worth it, and will prove to be beneficial over time for both the consumer and the business. The best way to know if your customers are truly satisfied is to simply ask them, such as sending a follow-up email to each one using a post-interaction survey. Appropriate questions to ask are “On a scale from 1-10, how likely are you to recommend this product/service to a friend or colleague? What is the primary reason for your score? Why? What can we do better?” Questions like this will help give you an idea of what new clients you can expect and what your current clients would like to see more of. Link the feedback from the surveys to specific team members to show your team the impact they are making to the business through engagement with their customers. Another useful tool is to gain feedback from employees. If you allow employees to share ideas on how to improve the customer experience, managers can gain a sense of how engaged employees are in their jobs.
In the social media age we live in, people tend to base their purchase decisions off reviews that their friends or family have provided them, so ensuring a positive experience for your customers could directly lead to potential new clients. If you are going to implement change within your company to improve the customer experience, you should measure the resulting ROI to see if the cost-benefit relationship was worth it. The problem is that ROI is not always easy to measure as it can be subjective and difficult to find a direct correlation. Since it may not be possible to determine an exact return on your investment, you can keep track of new clients to gain an idea if you are heading in the right direction. At the end of the day, if you want to give your customers the best experience possible you have to: understand why they are buying your product/service, build an emotional relationship with them, and make them understand that you genuinely value them. After following these steps all that is left is to monitor the results and adjust accordingly for future success.
This article was also featured in our newsletter Bottom Line Vol. 20