One of the greatest dangers any service organization faces is thinking that they’re providing their customers a great customer experience when in reality they’re not. It’s not that organization’s set out to provide a bad customer experience. The problem lies in the twists and turns, ups and downs of the journey itself. It’s easy to get lost along the path of a great customer experience.

So how do we ensure that our steps along the path to a great customer experience are taking us in the right direction? What are the markers along the way that will keep us pointed in the right direction?

1. Know the Customer Experience Expectations of Customers

Ask your self the following questions:

• What do my ideal customers want to receive by working with me?
• How is my personality, purpose, and talent unique? Are my customers experiencing this?
• Am I focusing on my personal strengths to provide the benefits my customers want?

Your customer experience team members should be in a position to handle them well with certain products and that too inside a timely fashion. For this, you may prepare the list of expected customer queries, take in lessons from past conversations with customers and also take advice inside customers.

2. Enhance Customer Experience with Responsiveness

People value their time. People hate waiting. Most of the customers don’t need to wait if we just apply ourselves a bit more at anticipating customers needs, then being ready to help. One of my new years predictions for customer experience trends is the development of a customer experience with hyper-responsive customer service. Be familiar with customer needs. Know the customer process inside and out.

Train your people on what customers need to do, and then how to do it best. Your customer service teams shouldn’t just be script readers, they should be customer experience experts. Experts in anything your customer needs.

3. Provide a Customer Experience with Comfort & Excitement

First time customers ought to be given a warm, welcome conversation. The key is creating that inviting, welcoming atmosphere immediately. Your customer’s putting themselves out there by giving you a try. Don’t give them the cold shoulder with a generic auto-reply email, or even worse, nothing at all.

What can you do as soon as that first customer sale is made so the customer feels like they mattered to you? Can you make a personal connection with them right then? It doesn’t need to always be in person. Consider the following email after a sale:

BORING: “Thank you for your order. Your order is now being processed.”

ROCKIN‘: “Yahoo! Success! Thanks for your order. We’re ecstatic that you chose us. We’re busy getting everything ready here and will be sending that along to you in just a few minutes.”

A bit over the top maybe? Sure. But you get the point. Why be robotic and bland, when customers are yearning for excitement and meaning? Make your customer experience stand out.

4. Prove Customer Experience with Customer Retention

The ultimate goal of providing a very good customer experience is to retain the customers for a long, long time. This really is achieved by communicating with existing customers through emails and newsletters and informing them about what’s new and how they can continue getting value from what you have to offer. Ongoing communications IS part of the customer experience.

Immagine a lavish, stylish store front, but with run-down, dilapidated insides. That’s the state of the customer experience with too many businesses today. We spend, spend, spend to get people in, then give them junk once they’ve made that first sale.

5. Perfect the Customer Experience with the Customer

Feedback of the customers stands out as the greatest way to discover about their experience of the services and support offered by your call centre. For this, you possibly can encourage the customers to participate in surveys and suggest improvements.

Getting and using feedback is part of the customer experience. Be willing to listen, do something about what was said, and MOST IMPORTANT…show customers that you’ve done something about what was said.

A Great Customer Experience is Making Smiles

Customer experience is the ultimate goal of service organizations. You want your customers to think of your brand or your service and have a smile come to their face. The complete customer experience involves a combined efforts of various pieces of your organization. Customer service, marketing, product development, and IT (for Internet-based organizations) will all play an important part in the overall customer perception of your brand and service.

What do you think? Have you experienced challenges as you’ve worked to develop a great customer experience for your ideal customers?

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