First impressions count. This well-known phrase doesn’t work that well for building a relationship with your customers. In this case, every impression counts.
It is built upon many factors, from website content and page load time to payment, shipping, and unboxing products or using services. So, almost everything you do can affect your customers’ attitude, and, at the end of the day, the success of your business.
Buying from corporations will become ever more automated. One way small business owners can differentiate themselves is by providing live phone support.
That isn’t as challenging as you might believe because you can use a Contact Center as a Service (CcaaS). With it, you can offer automated messages but also route calls to the right person wherever they may be.
All that may be a bit alarming; there are so many things that matter (and hence can go wrong), it must be quite tough to provide a satisfying CX. The goal of this article is to prove that idea wrong by suggesting a number of simple tips for improving your service.
Why Does CX Matter?
It’s a pretty familiar idea that better customer experience is beneficial for your business, but sometimes it’s far from obvious to what extent CX is important. For instance, a Microsoft report showed that 96% of consumers say customer service is an important factor in their choice of a brand. Also, a recent report by Uploadcare highlights that 85% of business owners list “improving customer experience” as the top-rated driver for commercial success.
Indeed, it’s quite difficult to imagine a business model that doesn’t benefit from improving the customer experience:
- Subscription businesses can increase retention
- E-commerce can boost loyalty and reduce returns
- Service industries can strengthen their reputation
But how exactly can one reach these benefits? Let’s get straight to the CX improvement tips.
Tip 1. Find Out What Your Customers Tell What They Want
Luckily, there’s no need for complex analytics to figure out what your customers value most. The same Microsoft report linked above revealed that 52% of people around the globe believe that businesses should act upon user feedback. So just asking for feedback and listening to the responses is already a good start on making a good impression.
Customer Review
This can take various forms, from live chat to full-scale customer surveys, but even the smallest step towards getting customer opinions can bring valuable insights. You can go further and implement a system to help you collect feedback, analyze it, and act on it regularly. This way, you will be able to solve your customers’ specific problems and unique challenges, as well as prevent widespread complications.
Tip 2. Speed Up Web Performance
In 2019, Google reported that more than half of users feel frustrated if they have to wait for the page to load, and each second of delay increases the probability of bounce, plus cuts down on the conversion rate. So, you can never pay too much attention to the speed of your website or application.
Among the main factors that can slow down your platform, you will definitely find content delivery.
For instance, if your website is rich in multimedia, visitors are very likely to face high loading times, because large files take a long time to transfer over the web, especially if you use the traditional model with a single server for hosting. What can you do about it?
Use a Content Delivery Network
Use a content delivery network, or CDN, to reduce the speed by using the best-located server from the whole network to cut the distance your content must travel to the user. Smaller distance means higher speed, and a distributed server system provides a stable and secure workflow for your website or app.
Focus on Image Optimization
Cutting down on content size doesn’t necessarily mean quality loss. New image optimization technologies use next-generation formats and smart compression to reduce image size and data footprint by more than 60%, saving the quality at the same time. Responsive images and lazy loading methods can boost your performance even more by, respectively, loading the images that are best suited for the screen, and rendering only the images scrolled to on the page.
As Uploadcare reports, these technologies can speed up page load times up to 20%, leading to fewer bounces and more page views, two obvious signs of an improvement in customer experience.
Tip 3. Get Ready For Future Consumers Now
A 2018 Gartner study predicted that in 2020, roughly 85% of brand interactions will happen without any human intervention. Chatbots and virtual assistants are now actively replacing traditional salespeople. So, even though keeping a human touch in your service is important, voice-activated technologies, virtual reality (VR), self-service tools, and other modern technology solutions should not be neglected.
Tip 4. Make Management More Customer-Centered
Focusing on sales volume and revenue seems quite natural for any business, but too often it means engaging in short-term behavior rather than long-lasting customer relations.
Great customer experience is based on a corporate culture that celebrates quality service.
It could be implemented in employee onboarding or the everyday routine, where everyone is tasked with customer support duty and gets additional benefits for it. Regardless of the route you choose, aligning employee experience with customer experience works well in strengthening your brand.
Wrapping Up
Customer experience is one of the main drivers for your business; it has a great impact on your success regardless of the field you work in. Even though improving it might seem like a puzzling task at first, listening to your customers’ feedback can show you the best way towards this goal.
Following through on the tips in this article will be helpful on your journey, because the final prize, customer loyalty, and business growth, is definitely worth the effort.
