Perfecting customer experience is something that involves a lot of trial and error. Yes, you can read all the resources available to you, but each business is unique and there are bound to be mistakes made when trying to find the right combination of efforts. It’s pertinent to ensure that in making these mistakes, you are able to learn from them and evolve with a stronger plan of action, and obviously to avoid these mistakes where possible.
Here are our top five customer experience mistakes to avoid.
1. Don’t ignore the results of current customer experience efforts
It’s all fine and well ensuring a streamlined customer experience from start to finish, but are you analysing and monitoring the information and data you receive as a result? It’s not a “build it and they will come” solution, but rather an ongoing love affair that requires your attention and devotion. Conducting monthly research into your current customer experience models and how they are delivering for your clientele is an important aspect of ensuring that all bases are covered.
From polite call centre advice to after-sales attention and support, or effective management in relation to a complaint. Too often we see businesses taking the stance of appearing to be helpful and attentive, but not actually being in touch with their customers as human beings. Without those customers, the business does not exist, so it’s essential that you understand where their opinions and feelings of the business lie and how you can improve on any negative associations.
2. Don’t confuse experience with satisfaction
Satisfaction counts for a number of points and ultimately you want every customer to be satisfied. But does that mean they had a positive customer experience with your business? Not necessarily. Focusing on end-results is a common theme, but it prevents you from seeing what touch point interaction and customer actions lead up to the final result. Perhaps it took three phone calls and a host of emails to satisfy a dispute before the customer actually walked away happy.
Why were those phone calls and emails necessary and how could they be prevented? By making sure that each step of the process is aligned to what the customers requires and appreciates, a business can save so much in man-hours and also ensure that satisfaction is actually a result of a streamlined and positive customer experience.
3. Don’t leave the rest of the business out when devising your customer experience plans
When implementing customer experience strategies, it’s imperative that you include the entire business in your plans and overall goals. Offering training on how to deal with customers effectively and professionally is essential to your success and will ensure that your employees have bought into the business and brand in order to deliver on customer expectations. If ever there are issue that arise where employees are involved, it’s important that they are acted on immediately (and tactfully) and that the rest of the team can also learn from the mistakes of their team members.
4. Don’t treat all customers in the same way
Mass targeting for one customer group is only going to dilute your customer experience efforts. When investigating further into your target markets, there will be loads of data to support a number of different demographics. While there will be similar correlations between them all, ultimately there will also be specifics that relate to each group.
Marketing to your strongest supporters and biggest advocates is important. But the rest of your customer groups are just as important, if not more so. Your biggest brand advocates are already in favour of the way you do things and are possibly completely satisfied and fulfilled with your customer experience and deliverables. It’s the rest of the customer groups that need additional focus to determine what is missing from their customer journeys – experiential elements that you can complete in some way.
Using your existing data on varying customer groups can help you gain insight into each customer group’s experience, and help you identify what areas need attention and where you can improve.
5. Hand over to technology alone, at your peril
There are thousands of CRM tools available out there and most of them do what they promise to do. But relying on your CRM system alone to ensure a positive customer experience and complete satisfaction will more than likely not get you the results you want.
Each CRM tool is built to be flexible and has the ability to offer bespoke solutions for different businesses. If you consider the number of industries and business niches that each CRM tool can cater to, it’s obvious that it cannot be a “one size fits all” kind of solution. This doesn’t mean that a CRM solution won’t work for you, but just that it needs to be aligned with your personal strategies.
Adding your personal touch where possible is essential, as is ensuring that the human element is not ignored. Customers who deal with machines and auto-generated messages are not going to feel the love like customers who receive personalised messaging and human interaction. Yes, use your CRM tool to automate a lot of the menial processes and administration, but add your personal flair where you can to remind your customers that you (the humans that run the business) are always there.
Customer experience is an investment that can add so much more potential to your business. Find out how we can help you elevate your standing by setting customer experience strategies in motion.
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