Businesses today invest heavily in sales and marketing initiatives and enjoy great success. However, such an approach inevitably falls short of adding long-lasting value. They neglect an essential factor for sustainable business growth – customer experience.
A good customer experience will not just create new revenue sources and customer base but also increase recurring income through repeat orders. Quite understandably, a happy customer leads to a business model that is more profitable.
Your CX will leave a mark in customers’ minds and the competitive landscape creating brand loyalty. But it’s not so easy, there are some that people fall to. In light of this, knowing what triggers a drop in customer expectations is crucial.
It is not just decent customer service you provide, but a holistic experience they get from their first interaction with your brand through their entire journey. It includes various aspects like personalization, omnichannel support, encouraging feedback, and effective communication.
Some of the benefits of a good customer experience are:
✅ Customer loyalty: You foster a loyal community of customers by streamlining their experience across the buyer’s journey.
✅ Brand image: If treated right, your customers will end up becoming your brand advocates spreading the valuable word of mouth.
✅ Improved engagement: Through a personalized approach, you can cultivate a meaningful and long-term bond with your user.
✅ Unflinching support: Once you win over your customer with a good customer experience, he/she will stand for you through thick and thin.
✅ Cost-effective approach: Retaining a customer or generating repeat orders is an expensive task, but it is very affordable with a good customer experience strategy.
Despite its importance, companies often make mistakes with respect to customer experience that has the potential to spell disaster. To help you avoid making the same errors as most of them, we have listed the top 7 customer experience mistakes that brands make. (There’s a bonus waiting for you at the end)
Mistake 1️⃣: Not listening to your customer
Customer feedback and reviews present you with golden opportunities to improve your brand offering and build a loyal community. However, many brands fail to collect, analyze and act on such valuable insights directly from their customers.
Customers of any business model – B2B, B2C, and D2C – undertake thorough research before purchasing a product or service. This includes going through the reviews on social media platforms, marketplaces, and review sites like G2, Capterra, etc. These websites allow you to respond to feedback, which is a chance to display your commitment to customer experience. But more often than not, brands ignore negative reviews, which could drastically affect your market positioning and image.
It would help if you defined a practical and comprehensive strategy to handle customer feedback. Dedicating a chunk of your communications plan to social listening and customer feedback management can add significant value to your brand. Brands employ various kinds of initiatives to drive feedback and manage crises like ‘we apologize for the bad experience’ offer and ‘thank you for your feedback’ credit points.
Mistake 2️⃣: Not being available where your customers are
The advent of the internet and advanced technologies has blurred the distinction businesses could make between professional and casual channels. Earlier, businesses allowed communication only through phone calls or emails. Now, things have changed massively. It is important for brands to provide a seamless omnichannel experience regardless of their industry. This means you need to be accessible across social media platforms, email, chat services, etc.,
It doesn’t come as a surprise that many businesses choose to limit their communication channels to specific platforms. Such an approach is bound to hurt their brand in the long run, if not sooner. Moreover, brands often neglect their social media presence and stick to archaic ticketing approaches to engage with customers even in these social-centric times.
Customers of this fast-paced world are not willing to wait for email replies and call holds. They expect a quick and well-organized resolution to their queries. You cannot predict a channel your customers will pick to reach out to you. It could be through an email or a phone call or through any of the social media profiles. A multichannel approach is an ideal way to keep in touch with your customers.
Mistake 3️⃣: Not focusing on your design choices
There is a no bigger turn-off for a customer than a bad design. Your social media post, marketing collateral, or even the website play your brand’s ambassadors. If they don’t present the best design or appeal to your customers, your brand marketing approach will fall flat on its face. Having a strong design policy is critical when building your website or an app. You offer a horrific customer experience by building a tough-to-navigate website/app. Also, things like picture quality, fonts, and colors and placing crucial information in the right places play a pivotal role.
Remember that your website and application are the most important touchpoints for customers. They need to be intuitive and customer-friendly. Extending a similar design approach to your social media posts and another marketing collateral speaks volumes about your brand.
Mistake 4️⃣: Not utilizing customer data for better service
Brands accumulate volumes of customer data that can transform their business offerings along with customer experience. Many businesses, though fail or lack the expertise to effectively utilize data.
Offering the best customer experience involves continuous monitoring and constant review of all the available, relevant customer data. All the information or customer data you collect needs to go through a thorough analytical pipeline to draw actionable insights from it. You can assess your brand performance, track metrics to see what is broken, and implement strategies to scale tactics that are working.
One major benefit you can get out of real-time data is personalization. Many smart brands build a holistic recommendation and customization ecosystem based on the customer data they collect. It helps them with the best product/service recommendations to a particular user, conversion rates, and predicting customer challenges.
Mistake 5️⃣: Not using an extroverted communication approach
Brands should be extroverts. It means they need to engage with their customers regularly and go out of their way to maintain their interest in the brand. The easiest way to do that is to be available on social media 24/7 and post regularly to show your active participation in the customer’s daily feed.
As discussed earlier, customers want instant answers to their queries. More so on social media platforms as they are built for real-time conversations. One major mistake businesses make in their attempt for instant communication is building half-baked and automated response templates. Customers are smart enough to know if they’re talking to a bot or a real human.
Although some brands do value the importance of a strong social media plan, their execution fails to show positive results. This is primarily due to a single-agenda approach to brand marketing. Promoting your brand can be done in multiple ways and not just have one-way communication. Add interactive posts, surveys, and polls to your social media strategy, along with creating informative and relevant content.
Mistake 6️⃣: Not understanding who your customers are
Though this mistake can be clubbed into the real-time data management challenge, we believe it needs to be addressed separately. Any brand starts its product/service journey by creating an ideal customer profile. This works great, but only till a certain point. Even if you can bucket your customers into traditional demographics, there will be preferences that they all differ on.
If you closely study your customer data, you can see the differences in customer expectations and needs. Communicating with all your customers in the same tone, choosing the same platform to engage them, or designing the same offers might not work. Their interests in terms of spending habits, outreach channels, and messaging are bound to differ.
You can crack the code by simply sending enough time working on the data and deriving business value out of it.
Mistake 7️⃣: Not treating your employees like your customers
Everything that we’ve talked about, from social listening to data management, is taken care of by your employees. If you neglect their well-being, it will certainly affect your customer experience. It works like a chain reaction – the value you show your employees is extended to your customers.
Your employees are the customer-facing brand ambassadors. They constantly interact with them, come up with engagement strategies, execute insight-driven personalization, and more. Be sure to show your appreciation for their work and acknowledge your amazing team.
(BONUS) Mistake 8️⃣: Not unifying your brand and product
Most companies separate or define a clear distinction between their product/services and their brand. This is a terrible approach. Every time a customer interacts with your product, you have the opportunity to link your brand story with it and vice versa.
Customers today don’t just buy a product. They purchase the idea and experience around that product. A classic example of that is Apple products. Integrating your brand messaging into your product is a great way to attract customers to your brand vision.
Conclusion
According to customer service statistics average of 61% of customers give up on a favorite brand after just one bad customer experience. The definition of great service varies from customer to customer, so personalization is crucial to your business’s strategy. Customer experience isn’t a one-time project. It needs continuous work with newer tactics to delight them.
Customers won’t remain loyal to a company that contacts them on random channels, sends marketing offers that do not match their interests, and speaks with everyone in the same voice. Ensure that the experience each individual receives is tailored to their needs. It may seem impossible to satisfy all customers. Even though it may be difficult to consistently create excellent experiences, knowing where to start and which mistakes to avoid can enable your company to thrive over the long term.
With the ever-changing technological landscapes, you will always have a new channel to extend your support to or innovate your services to match the customer preferences. It is important to build an ecosystem that constantly works to improve customer satisfaction. To provide a unified and tailored cx learn about Konnect Insights – a market leader in omnichannel customer experience management suite.
Tags: branding, Marketing, Social Listening, Social Media, Social Media Marketing