Customer Experience Strategy!

We all need to make purchases. We all need to buy stuff or interact with different services. Some things are critically essential to our everyday lives, but the lion’s share is discretionary. We have choices and we have options. Based on this simple formula, why do so many businesses offer such poor customer service, with many more failing to even develop or consider a customer experience strategy?

We cannot begin to tell you how important customer experience (CX) is in building a loyal customer base!

Do you have a customer experience strategy? The majority of Customer Experience in Canada is severely lacking. It significantly lags Europe, UK, the US, and Asia in this area. How many times do you walk into stores, and you are not even greeted or acknowledged? Or you look for a staff member and when you eventually find someone, they are fixated on their phone or busy making a TikTok video balancing on milk crates. Why do so many businesses forget about the point of customer interaction, the point the customer decides if they are going to make a purchase or not? Even if someone has determined they will make a purchase, by amplifying the customer experience, your customers will buy more and will be back sooner!

Conditioned to Accept Substandard

Do Canadians feel they don’t deserve good customer service or good customer experience, is this why businesses have not developed customer experience strategies? Have we been conditioned with such low expectations that subpar and meager, become the standard? Are we just too polite to say this is not satisfactory and this is not acceptable? Should we not tell businesses we deserve to be treated better and your exploitation of us has gone on long enough? It must stop!

The silver lining to this, is smaller brands are now realizing they can rapidly differentiate themselves from their competitors and create a competitive advantage just by focusing on customer experience.

Covid gave Everybody an Excuse

The new 21-century universal excuse update to “my dog ate my homework”. Covid-19 changed everything. I am not naive regarding the genuine global and economic impact. That having been said, it now has become the ‘catch-all’ for short-term planning along with inefficient and ineffective business models and strategies. Don’t get me wrong, some issues and shortages pertaining to the pandemic are legitimate. However, there are certainly more cases that are using it as a guise to justify the poor customer experience and a lack of a customer experience strategy.

The Pandemic also exasperated an already fragile global supply chain. Product shortages and irregular demand has made it nearly impossible for some businesses to respond, and result in others having to severely alter their product or service proposition.

Free Time

The pandemic also gave everyone massive amounts of time. Free time most individuals had never experienced before. Some dabbled in the stock market, some learned a new language. Everyone had the opportunity to evaluate who and how they purchase goods and services. Ecommerce boomed. Businesses found new customers across borders and new opportunities. This has meant people’s standards have increased along with their expectations. The businesses that can adapt and keep up with these requirements are going to do well, the businesses which exceed expectations are going to thrive!

During the pandemic, businesses found new customer across borders and new opportunities.

Houston we have a Problem

In 2008, business got scared! The result was many businesses started hoarding money, they stopped investing in large capital expenditure projects and more importantly, they stopped investing in people. Wages and benefits stagnated, and in contrast inflation and prices soared.  The only winners in the last 13 years have been share-owners. Profit and shareholder return was put ahead of everything else.

The pandemic brought new problems; workers made an exodus from certain industries. Front-line staff started receiving hostile interactions with shoppers and anti-maskers. The gloves were off, and staff voted with their feet. This has resulted in staff shortages, poor conditions, and even worse customer experience than what we were receiving post-pandemic. And we thought CX couldn’t get any worse!

New Era

Price used to be the most important factor in conjunction with quality. Time and convenience also, played a role, specifically depending on individuals’ life stage. Post-Pandemic, everything changed, “safety” now plays a new role.

This new era of social media now means small and medium businesses can compete with the larger companies, who have been resting on their laurels for way too long! We cannot begin to tell you how important customer experience strategy is in building a loyal customer base!

New Customer Costs 5-20X More

Gaining a new customer costs 5-20X more than retaining an existing customer. Five to twenty times more! So why then do so many white-collar executives sit in their ivory towers, oblivious to the reality which their so-called important customers are experiencing. Do they not understand the fundamentals of business? Or do they just not care? It is so much cheaper and so much easier to retain a customer versus finding a new one.

Local / Global trends

When thinking about customer experience, a good starting point is to review your landscape. What are my competitors doing? Who are the standout brands in my space? Who are the standout brands period? How are they creating “customer experience”, and how could we leverage the leanings? It is also, important not to just look locally or internationally. If you only compare yourself to your street, you will only ever be as good as your street. Think bigger! Are similar companies doing something which we could fast adapt in South Korea, Switzerland, or Sweden? Canada has, unfortunately, lagged internationally within CX for decades, so we must look further afield for the great concepts and ideas.

Outdated or Limited Tools

Customer service and experience are constantly evolving. When will big companies realize complex telephone systems, where you are unable to connect to the right individual or department, frustrates the caller? When will businesses realize putting a call center in another country is detrimental to their brand and its overall reputation? Things are slowly changing with the adoption of call-back time slots, but currently, should your customer ever hear “we are experiencing longer than normal hold times”.

We have heard how customers contact businesses by phone and email and never get a response. They are not always ignored, but that is becoming the case more and more. The reason, it is easier to ignore these more traditional one-dimensional communication methods.

Customers need a way to interact with you, and younger generations have never used the actual telephone as their primary means of communication. It is social media and all social media. This is where they radiate and this is where you need to be in order to foster and build your relationship.

Some technologies by design have limitations. For example, text messages are a great way to connect with your customers and text has an incredible high read rate of 99% with 97% read in under 15 minutes. It is, however, not secure and was never designed to be secure, this is a major factor for sectors like the banking industry, dealing with fraud.

Customer Response Models

Some businesses don’t have or have insufficient strategies for their customer response model. That tweet explaining someone’s poor customer experience can blow up at any moment. Not responding to the Instagram message or taking too long can have severely detrimental consequences.

Every business should have a comprehensive guide that details how they will interact and deal with customers. Standard responses and timing can all be pre-determined.

It always surprises us to find how many businesses don’t have a crisis plan. It is much more damaging to try and determine these on the fly. Businesses should be thinking about fixing the roof when it is sunny, not when it is pouring rain.

Defined Personas

It is imperative for you to fully understand your audience and customers. This allows you to group and target individuals with similar traits and motivations with either social media or advertising tactics. We can even take this a level further and customize the messaging depending on where they are in the buying funnel.

Appreciation & Personalization

Leveraging personas. When we feel appreciated, when we feel important, we spend more, and we advocate more, it is a very simple and timeless equation. Customer Experience gives you a reason to connect to your customers. It gives you a way of making them feel as if they are not just a number or part of an unforgettable transaction, they become part of a relationship.

Social media and a customer experience strategy, provide us with vehicles to personalize and segment the audience to better hone and target either the message or incentive. Traditionally everything was just thrown against the wall to see if it sticks. Smart businesses no longer apply these out-of-date principles, instead, they define their audience and fully manage & control the interaction.

Social Media is King!

Customer Experience is not all bad, and that is where the difference lies. If we have a “good customer experience”, the transaction between giving something to get something, becomes more rewarding, and your desire to repeat the experience or process increases.  A great experience means you are more likely to repeat and tell friends. This used to be how great businesses were formed and sustained. Social Media just amplified the game. If you fail to provide a great experience, and you fail to interact with your customers, the likelihood of you having a successful business dwindles every day.

Social Media just amplified the game!

Ambassadors

Satisfied customers become your ambassadors, they promote your product or service. Subpar and inferior just doesn’t cut it anymore. Your satisfied customers are now connected to a sophisticated network of friends, peers, and strangers. It used to be the case that an unsatisfied customer would tell up to eight of their friends. Fast-forward to today, if you don’t respond accordingly, and you have a connected customer base. Your business can be severely impacted or removed from planet earth in minutes. Individuals are now connected to 100s, 1,000s, or even 10,0000s of followers, all of whom might decide to boycott your product or service. Cancel culture is real!

Evaluate & Optimize

Customer Experience deserves more consideration, especially within the Canadian marketplace. Every aspect of CX should be considered and evaluated within your business. The same level of scrutiny should be present as would be applicable for either your social media or website strategy.

Test & Learn

Test & learns should be ongoing in every area of your business. Metrics should be defined and measured to determine what changes are most appropriate and which changes will have the biggest impact on your business. We design CX test & learns which can be implemented and monitored to determine their effectiveness. Subsequently, these are either fast adapted or rolled out if they are proven to have a positive impact on the overall experience.

Listening to Customers

Customers are speaking, are you listening! Your customer no longer must call you or email you during business hours to connect. Social media ensures two-way conversation is available 24 hours a day 365 days of the year. Listening to your audience and having the correct response is critical. That having been said, don’t let customers determine your business strategy, their job is to enjoy & be delighted!

Every successful business understands Customer Experience is where it begins, not where it ends!