Walt Disney once said, "Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do."
Simply put, your users and their experience with your product and company are what will propel your business to success. Stiff competition in today’s world means that it isn’t enough for you to offer a great product at lower prices. Engaging your customers to build a loyal user base will help you increase retention rates and encourage recommendations. Word-of-mouth is one of the oldest and strongest marketing tactics you can employ to get your business out there.
Investing a customer experience strategy eventually pays for itself as it has huge returns in the form of new customers and improved product offering (thanks to customer feedback).
Now, we hear you ask, how can you create a successful customer experience strategy?
1. Study customer/buyer personas
The first step is always to identify who your customers are and which buyer personas they fit into. At Brucira, when we design products, we begin by building different buyer personas that might interact with the product and ensure we create different roadmaps to convert them into a user. This allows us to create experiences that appeal to specific user personas. Mapping out the customer’s journey is also an integral aspect of ensuring the customer enjoys interacting with your product. The goal is to enrich their experience at every single touchpoint, creating a favourable impression.
2. Invest in customer support
Without dedicated process of collecting customer feedback, you miss out on lot of data that can help you turn visitors into paying customers. Users are often willing to share the improvements and additions they’d like in a product or service. Similarly, any issue or grievance they encounter while using the product or browsing should be immediately fixed to prevent poor user experience. To address that products need to introduce in-app feedback, regular surveys, and product evaluations.
3. Improve product accessibility
Make it easy for prospective users to find, access, and use our product. Prioritize user-friendliness in your design and ensure that your user interface doesn’t compromise on user experience in any manner. Start by targeting your audience on the channels they frequently use and by offering valuable, useful content. To update your products and business model, research customer expectations and study competitor offerings to see what they’re doing to improve their customer experience strategy.
4. Solve pain points
Instead of focusing on making profits, focus on solving customer pain points because the former follows the latter. Addressing friction in your user interface and taking customer feedback into account to offer a seamless user experience inspires customer loyalty and makes them feel heard.
5. Form a connection
Gaining your users’ trust is a crucial step in creating a successful customer experience. By treating your users as humans, i.e. by incorporating human-centric design, you can encourage to interact with your business through multiple channels. This leaves a lasting impression, and such users are much more likely to advocate for your business. Once again, you should focus on enriching the customer’s journey at every single touchpoint and use them to form a deep and lasting connecting, one that will make the customer want to return to your brand for all their needs.
Improve, improve, improve.
The beauty of a great customer experience strategy is that it is constantly improving. Keep on eye on marketing trends and how your customer expectations & interactions are changing. This will help you innovatively address different problems while impressing your existing customer base. Pay attention to the minor details and seize the smallest opportunities to provide your customers with the best experience when interacting with your product/business.
The success of a customer experience strategy positively impacts the financial performance of the product or service. It would be foolish to miss the opportunity to bring in more users and use their feedback & suggestions to improve your product. Creating a long-lasting connection can have many favourable effects — it helps you stand out among competitors, inspires your customers to recommend your product, and keeps them coming back for more.
According to PWC, almost one-fifth (17%) of US consumers will use a single bad experience to write off a brand or company. And more than half (59%) will walk away after multiple negative experiences, even if they love the company/product.
So, don’t ignore customer experience when it comes to building a product or business.
Check out ruttl, a website feedback tool for web design projects that allows you to collect visual feedback. The tips shared above are what we use every single day for our customer experience strategy. From identifying customer use-cases to adding an in-app feedback feature, we know that customer is king.
