With so many businesses now just a Google away from millions of prospects, how can your particular offers be found? If a prospect does find you, why should they trust you? And if they take a chance on you, why might they stay with you?
At Trustpilot, we think reputation is the answer. A positive reputation leads to glowing customer reviews. And reputation is built on surprising and memorable customer experiences that make customers feel valued — and excited to talk about your brand.
How are you planning to overhaul your customer experience strategy for 2020? It’s time to keep every customer you possibly can for the long-term. Use these three building blocks of a customer experience-centered marketing plan.
1. Learn Much More About Your Customers
Every great relationship grows when at least one party listens to the needs of the other party and then fulfills those needs. And almost every business can listen to their customers more, finding out what they’re enjoying and complaining about.
Imagine if you did more of what customers were saying they loved and you solved what they were saying bothered them. How many more customers would you retain? How many more positive reviews on Trustpilot or other third-party sites could you earn?
Gather feedback and reviews from your prospects and customers on a regular schedule — say, once per month or per week. You can use:
- An analytics dashboard in a review site like Trustpilot, letting the AI pull out key phrases
- Customer comments on your social media pages
- Transcripts or notes from your customer service agents
- Results of surveys you send to customers
Search for actionable ideas on how to upgrade your:
- Product design
- Quality control
- Customer service
- Shipping process
- Delivery methods
- Overall customer journey
- And other areas
2. Take Action to Improve the Customer Journey
Get insights using tip #1 above. Then, you can update aspects of your business to make a customer’s whole journey smoother.
There should be as few bumps in the road as possible for them. They should barely notice that a buying process is there, since it’s so easy and natural. A few examples of changes and improvements include:
- The speed of the check out process
- The ease of the user interface on your product pages
- The quality of explanations in your product description copy
- The number of customer reviews posted on your various web pages
Pick a change, and schedule a few steps to implement it. Remember, a better customer journey can help you keep a customer longer, which can increase your profitability and lead to customer advocates who promote your brand for you.
3. Focus on Customer Service
If there are a lot of changes you could make, how do you prioritize? We recently analyzed the one- and five-star reviews on Trustpilot and found a surprise: “Customer service” was mentioned as an extreme negative or positive more often than any other phrase.
If you only have time for one improvement, make it customer service. Prospects are looking for human connections. They need us to be decent, kind, patient, personable, and trustworthy.
But many companies that claim to have stellar customer service don’t actually work on it. How can you avoid that mistake? By getting into the habit of using these tactics continually throughout 2020:
- Gather customer feedback more often, so you can adapt to changing customer needs.
- Schedule brainstorming sessions to analyze that feedback for insights.
- Define what customers expect, then deliver more than that.
- Plan specific, measurable, time-bound actions to improve the customer journey.
- Encourage your customers to write reviews for you and create other content.
Actively seek out feedback. Negative feedback might not always sound good or feel good, but it just means you have some exciting improvements you can make. Use negative feedback the right way, and you can build a customer journey you’re proud of.
