Research shows that companies that focus on customer service have higher customer satisfaction rates, which leads to lower turnovers and higher profits, thus making the customer experience important for businesses. For example, in terms of brand loyalty, a high priority on customer service is placed by 96% of customers.

How to Better Optimize Your Company’s Customer Experience

But just what is customer experience, and how do you prioritize it? Let’s take a look.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience is the sum of all interactions and experiences a customer has with your business, from their initial contact with you, up to becoming a loyal, happy patron.

Therefore, you need to invest in superior customer experiences if you want them to become long-time supporters of your brand, thus enabling you to outperform your competitors.

Is Customer Experience the Same as Customer Service?

Customer experience differs from customer service in that it is not just a single encounter with a brand but involves the feelings and emotions throughout the entire buying process.

For example, if you book a reservation by phone and the representative making the reservation for you is helpful and friendly, that’s quality customer service. However, if your reservation includes desert on the house, that’s a great customer experience.

Steps on How to Better Optimize Your Company’s Customer Experience

Understand Who Your Customers Are

To really understand your customer’s needs and wants, you must be able to emphasize and connect with the situations they face, which can be done using behavior analytics or by segmenting your customers and creating customer personas.

This way, your customer support team can recognize and understand them better for a more customer-centered experience that creates repeat business.

Develop a Clear Customer Experience Objective

However, the first step should be to have a clear customer-focused vision that you can communicate with your company.

Therefore, begin by putting a set of statements in place that serve as guiding principles to help drive the behavior of your workplace.

And be sure that all employees know them verbatim and that they are also imposed in all areas of training.

Connect on an Emotional Level With Your Customers

Customers become loyal and are more likely to share your product or service with others when they have an emotional connection to your brand and remember how they feel when they utilize your offerings.

In fact, research shows that companies that optimize their emotional connection with customers experience more than an 80% increase in sales compared to their competitors.

Capture Customer Feedback in Real-Time

To know if you are delivering an excellent customer experience, simply ask customers via real-time feedback, such as with live chat tools. You can then use the feedback to create a quality framework for your team to act upon.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the steps to better optimize your company’s customer experience. Of course, you should also act upon employee feedback, such as via an annual survey process.

You should also measure the ROI from delivering a great customer experience to learn what works.

And company’s, such as Verint, help make it all easy to do using their management and customer engagement platform.

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