Sookio is here to clear up any confusion:
Seventy-five per cent of organisations increased their customer experience (CX) investment since 2018. This isn’t a surprise at all, considering a quarter of customers have been swayed to use a company because their friend or family member recommended it.
Why does CX matter?
Let’s step away and refresh our memory – customer experience is all about how your customer perceives their interactions with your company. As a high-performing business, you want to keep the customer happy so that your reputation precedes you.
Whatever your client says about you, whether online or down the pub, is CX being shared. Bigger brands recognise the importance of CX and are at a higher risk of their brand perception being damaged by negative comments originating from a bad experience of their customers.
What about smaller businesses?
A large company with good sized following on social media can easily get their reputation damaged, sure. But what about smaller and medium businesses?
Growing an SME is nothing like working in a conglomerate. Focusing on the actual product and pushing for sales becomes your primary focus, often forgetting about the “why” – customer experience. If your customer journey is not efficient enough, your prospect might not even get to the product itself – no matter how good it is.
So instead of trying to find ways to do more, change the focus. Try a different route. Get feedback from your existing customers and invest in improving their experience. Whether that means new technology or different distribution of your resources, the result might well be increase in revenue.
More sales without investing in sales? I’d buy that for a dollar!
Where should I start?
Start from within. Retaining your customers really is in the same basket as retaining your employees, so in house is the place to start.
They say that if you’ve got great employee experience (or EX if you will, a slightly unfortunate abbreviation we here enjoy), you’ll nail your CX as well. After all, your employees shape the customer experience. Everyone has their own take on how the business should work. But the more perspectives you get, the more of an informed decision you can make about what to improve.
Starbucks is a cracking example of drawing your CX from EX. Pair excellent employee benefits with well thought through communications and a nice touch of referring to your employees as partners and voilà! Starbucks staff feel valued and taken good care of.
A giant coffee conglomeration isn’t the only one practicing that rule. Cambscuisine, a successful group of restaurants across Cambridgeshire, also believes that looking after your people well is the key to growth – whether you’re a start-up, SME or an international franchise.
Once you nail the EX, step onto the next level. Deliveroo believes the devil’s in the detail; from registration to completing an order, they identify key touchpoints and tailor the experience to be quick and easy. They seem to effortlessly meet customer expectations and they do so by clearly defining it first. Once you know what the standard is, it’s easier to keep it up.
Find out more about how to nail customer experience on the Sookio blog.