How to Improve your Business Operations with Customer Experience

If you’ve been in business for some time, you already know that offering a great product is not enough to survive.

It is true that the products or services you offer indeed have a huge impact on the future success of your business.

But you can’t rely on product quality alone to attract, engage, and retain your customers. In today’s eruptive business environment, delivering high-level customer experiences is a critical competitive capability. 

Product quality is no longer the main reason consumers do business with certain brands. By today’s standards, it’s much more important to deliver a valuable overall experience to your customers.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience, also known as CX refers to the sum of every touchpoint, engagement, thought, or feeling that occurs or is exchanged between the customer and your brand — as experienced from the customer’s perspective.

Gratifying customer experience is the secret to long-term customer loyalty. The key benefits of a good customer experience are:

• Increased customer loyalty and retention.
• Higher customer lifetime value.
• Better brand equity.
• Reduced service and marketing costs.

Consulting firm McKinsey has found that for every 10% increase in customer satisfaction, a company can increase revenues by up to 3%.

Another research by the Temkin Group found that companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within 3 years of investing in customer experience.

SaaS companies, in particular, can expect to increase revenue by $1 billion.

That’s right.

Improving your customer experience processes has the potential to double your revenue within 3 years.

But the big question is, how do you improve customer experience? 

Before we go into that, let’s quickly look at good customer experiences examples. 

AirBnB’s personalized user experience: AirBnB provides a great example of personalized customer experiences by recognizing the two different types of customers in their industry — those looking to rent out their place and those looking for a place to stay. Airbnb has also made a simple search experience for both audiences on the same platform.

Netflix & Youtube: Undoubtedly, one of the best customer experience examples that leverage the power of artificial intelligence comes from Youtube and Netflix. These tech giants use AI, Data Science, and Machine Learning to make personalizations of movie or video recommendations.

Starbucks’ Gamified Loyalty Program: The company’s awesome gamified loyalty system allows you to collect stars when purchasing your favorite drinks, and get exciting rewards in return.

The Starbucks Reward Loyalty Program currently has more than 16 million members. This drives 40% of the total sales of the company.

MTN’s reward program: The telecommunication giant uses several ways to retain its customers through customer experience. One of such ways is their reward program. It is a loyalty point-based system designed to reward its customers with points every time they use the network. The accumulated points are redeemed for rewards like airtime, data packages, and discounts from selected third-party vendors. 

This makes them a giant in Africa when it comes to telecommunication and mobile money.

To transform the experience for your customers, I have compiled the following things that top companies do to improve their competitive position.

Personalization

Customers are usually excited when they receive simple and personalized services from businesses. At the beginning of this post, we looked at how top companies like Airbnb uses personalized customer experience to improve their business processes. 

Another company that takes personalized customer experience or marketing to another level is Coca-Cola.

Remember that famous “Share a Coke” campaign some years back?

Putting names on Coke bottles was a successful move for the soft drink company. In the U.S. for example, it resulted in increased sales volume and reversed an 11-year consumption decline.

The campaign ran in over 80 markets over seven years, featuring popular names in countries. The rest is history.

To deliver personalized experiences, your brand must make sure they know their customers’ interests, needs, and engagement preferences. 

You must also know which are the best channels to reach out to customers and what is the right message for every audience group. 

By putting together this information, your brand can deliver highly personalized experiences that improve engagement and maximize conversions.

Customer surveys

The importance of listening to your customers cannot be overemphasized.

It is impossible to be customer-centric if you don’t pay attention to what your customers are saying.

Understanding your customers better maybe a surprisingly easy and inexpensive thing to do. 

Giant companies such as Dell, Apple, Google, and Uber use surveys to improve their customer experience.

According to reports, the average business hears only from 4% of its dissatisfied customers, while all unhappy customers spread the word of their bad experience far and wide. As a result, companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service.

One of the best ways to save your company from this mess is using surveys.

There are smart survey options that enable you to create custom questions for your customers and specifically target them to get useful information on why they use your product or services and what you can do better.

Qualtrics is one of the top tools to manage your brand surveys. They have helped big companies. Even top universities such as the University of Florida uses Qualtrics to collect surveys for research purposes.

You can also use tactics such as brand monitoring and social listening to help you identify comments your target audience has made about your brand, your competitors, and your industry as a whole.

Your website’s analytic reports can help you identify where engagement is highest, and where your visitors encounter friction. This will give you an idea of where you might need to focus when digging deeper.

Technology

Technology is the adhesive that binds together all the 2 strategies mentioned above. The points described above are strategic in creating a successful customer experience and using the right technology, every business can meet its customer experience goals.

One of the best ways to use technology to enhance customer experience is an automated front desk system.

If your business constantly attracts office walk-ins (visitors), then a visitor management system is ideal for you.

This solution automates and enhances the complete experience of your visitors at the reception or front desk.

Currently, WebberMill has this solution for you. We call it Tewaa Front-Desk Suite.

Our Front Desk software is a detailed and efficient cloud-based Visitor Management solution that can be self-service operated via Kiosk and Tablet at your reception.

The system streamlines front desk processes, managing the full visitor lifecycle end-to-end.

When planning for and welcoming visitors to your office, our Front Desk Suite provides unrivaled functionality including self-service check-in, document delivery management, notifying hosts of visitor arrivals, and checking out. 

Almost all visitor management solutions on the market today come stacked with a host of integrations and features to address visitor needs. However, only a select few features generally associated with a brand, differentiate them from the rest of the competition.

Some of the benefits of the Tewaa Front-Desk SUite are;

• Enhanced Visitor Experience
• Improve organizational Workflows
• Modernize Reception
• Centralized Visitor Insights and Reports
• Reduce Administrative Burdens
• Create Powerful First Impressions
• Streamline Visitor Check-In Processes
• Facilitate High Volumes of Check-Ins
• Reduce Visitor Waiting Times
• Improve Event Processing
• High Volume Visitor Facilitation
• Notify Hosts of Visitor Arrival Instantly.

Conclusion

The bottom line is, no one wants to do business with a company that treats you poorly.

And how you feel after an interaction with a business has a huge impact on your future purchase decisions. 

A good interaction keeps you happy and satisfied, while a poor interaction could lead to you stop doing business with that company.

Therefore, if you want your customers to have a positive experience, you have to invest in it by following the processes above.