The rapid growth of the experience culture in recent years means that an increasing number of consumers now care as much, if not more, about the quality of their day-to-day interactions with the companies that govern their lives as they do about the material possessions in their homes.
The companies best placed to succeed in the future are those which provide an enhanced level of customer experience that boosts levels of both loyalty and satisfaction. If you want your own business to remain competitive, you need to closely examine and, if necessary, reinvent the experience your customers have during their interactions to improve the results of your business overall.
Start at the top
The CEO of a company sets the tone for the entire enterprise. If you want to reinvent the customer experience, the driving force behind such a change must come from the very top.
Part of the reason for this that customer experience is almost always directly related to employee experience. A workforce with positive attitudes and high morale will create a far better impression in their day-to-day interactions with customers than employees who harbor negative feelings towards their bosses.
Make it personal
Traditional forms of marketing and advertising take as broad an approach as possible in order to ensure the broadest possible appeal. Today’s consumer demands a far greater level of personalization and are showing increasing intolerance for content and material that is irrelevant to them.
The vast amount of data that can now be gathered and analyzed about customer behavior make the task of leveraging an understanding of the preferences of individual companies easier than ever. Technology such as machine learning and artificial intelligence can all be used to bring a variety of strategies together to that will result in increased conversions.
For example, the Omnia product suite, available from Weaveability, runs within an organizations existing SAP landscape requiring zero integration. Omnia benefits from utilizing existing SAP processes which enables it deliver positive benefits in multiple business areas. Therefore, your customers benefit from a consistent real-time experience regardless of which channel they use to connect with your business. The result is increased customer satisfaction and engagement, both of which can have a positive effect on your bottom line.
Look outside your industry
There was a time when consumers were content to compare like with like. Weekly shopping would take place in a particular supermarket because they preferred it to another, but the factors they used to make such a choice would not spill over into other areas of their lives.
Today, with more commerce being conducted through digital channels and a combination of channels, this is no longer true. Consumers will now judge the offerings of a company against both its competitors and all the other service providers they interact with. Your company will be judged in terms of its ability to provide customer satisfaction against every other enterprise out there.
This means that if you want to find the best possible ways to make your customers happy, you need to look outside your own industry and take inspiration from elsewhere. For example, one dentist provided a whole new experience for her customers by redesigning her surgery to create a more comforting, familiar environment, more reminiscent of an upmarket sundries store than a traditional dental clinic.