3 Ways to build a great customer experience strategy

Today’s competitive landscape makes it harder for businesses to be found, and to stand out from the competition.

In 2020, over 88% of consumers read reviews to determine the quality of a business’s customer experience, and 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience, according to American Express.

In a world where consumers are empowered like never before, brands no longer get to control their reputation - instead, customers get to share their experiences with others.

As customer experience is rapidly becoming a high-impact differentiator, it’s becoming clearer that customer-centricity is a great tool to ensure your business is future-proof. Indeed, today, 76% of people say they view customer experience as the true test of how much a company values them. Oracle research also found that 74% of senior executives believe that customer experience impacts the willingness of a customer to become a loyal brand advocate.

Delivering great customer experiences means you’re more likely to increase customer satisfaction, reduce consumer doubt, and boost conversions in the long run. In this article, we’ve shared 3 tips to enhance your customer experience, and we discuss why a customer-centric strategy is the best marketing tool your business could use in 2020.

1. Pay more attention to your customers

Paying more attention to your customers’ needs and wants has become one of today’s best tools in order to amplify any marketing efforts and ensure your company is future-proof.

In such a competitive landscape, listening can empower any business to learn from their own customers. Today, the best-performing companies have strong, quality data, which leads to actionable insights, to back up their overall business strategy.

Collecting and analysing good data will help you get fresh insights, which will help you improve and will grow you bottom line in the long run.

Indeed, collecting customer insights is a great way for any business to continue to keep learning and growing. Consumer insights can help you gain a deeper understanding of how your audience thinks and feels. That's why listening to customers should improve the effectiveness of how a company communicates, which is likely to change future consumer behaviour, and therefore increase sales.

You might be thinking: “I’m a market leader, there’s no need for me to do this.” Well, we believe that whether or not you are the market leader in your industry, looking at how consumers talk about your products and/or services can reveal a lot about their needs, and what you should be changing and implementing to better your own business.

A Trustpilot study found that 88% of businesses that use Trustpilot say it is important for them to be "able to track, monitor and analyse the ratings and reviews".

Trustpilot's Review Insights tool allows you to learn what customers expect from different parts of the business. It also highlights topics within your reviews, and identifies customer sentiment for each of them.

This data will also help you identify different patterns and trends. Machine learning handles all of the heavy lifting of pulling insights from your customers’ feedback, which means you can spend more time solving your issues rather than looking for them.

By collecting customer feedback and insights, you can improve any areas of development within your business, such as customer service, shipping, delivery, product quality, and even your overall customer journey.

2. Enhance the customer journey

You’ve collected enough feedback to understand that your customer journey isn’t totally seamless. Now what?

Creating a perfect customer journey is what every company aspires to, but it’s not that easy - so how can you achieve this successfully?

In a world where 84% of millennials do not trust advertisements anymore, and where engaging with consumers takes more time than ever before, it’s getting harder for businesses to create a seamless, trustworthy customer journey. The lack of trust in businesses and advertising means a lot of big companies have had to stop selling hard, and have become more ‘human’ brands. Today’s consumers want to be listened to - and heard.

Your actionable insights will help you figure out which areas of your journey should change, and which areas already work well.

Is your checking out process too long?

Have you thought about showcasing other customers’ feedback at different touchpoints of the journey?

What about your product pages, are they user-friendly? Are you displaying enough information?

Shoppers go through a considerable amount of research before making a decision and buying from a company. Listening to what existing customers have to say will help you improve the customer journey, which is likely to increase customer satisfaction, and therefore boost conversions.

3. Deliver better customer service

76% of consumers say they view customer service as the true test of how much a company values them, which means overlooking customer service simply isn’t an option anymore. We understand that’s easier said than done, but growing competition and lack of trust in businesses means today's companies have to work harder to create great experiences.

Every company likes to think their own customer service is top notch, so how do you really define successful customer service?

Delivering great customer service means investing more of your time into your own customers and their expectations, and therefore understanding your audience’s needs. Delivering great service boosts customer confidence and ensures customer loyalty. Indeed, successful companies (think Apple!) put their customers at the heart of everything they do.

Today, consumers are more empowered than ever before, making customer-centric companies who care about customer experience and service the kind of companies people want to engage with.

Trustpilot review data shows that 1-star and 5-star reviews most commonly mention ‘customer service’, meaning a lot of companies either do it right, or extremely wrong.

A HubSpot research study also found that 88% of customers now have higher expectations than they did before, and almost half of businesses who say they are customer-centric don’t actually do much about it. Indeed, 42% of companies don’t survey or collect customer feedback, and only 19% of brands have a customer advocacy program.

Customers’ needs can change rapidly, and businesses should constantly be looking for new ways to adapt.

That's why companies who are always looking to meet and exceed expectations are more likely to deliver great service and outstanding customer experiences. HubSpot found that 74% of companies say they are measured on customer satisfaction, but only 58% of them actually survey customers.

Can great customer service really be achieved without collecting any insights from existing customers? To build a great customer experience strategy, don’t be afraid to embrace the feedback, good and bad.

Once you have the data, start thinking about how you can keep learning and improving regularly. Then, put together your plan of action. Our Trustpilot data also showed that over 92% of customers said they wouldn’t even consider buying from a 1 or 2-star rated company.

If you're looking for a sign to start building great customer experiences, this is it!

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