Episode 3
with Simone Douglas
In this episode of Confident Networker, Simone talks about the feedback loop for consistent improvement (User Friendly & Results driven). In this episode, Simone will be looking at how is our product or service working for our customers now they are part of the family ?
How do we assess that while maintaining our relationships and brand positioning?
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Chris Irving 0:10
Welcome to the confident networker podcast with your host Simone Douglas. In each insightful episode, Simone does a deep dive into the strategies, tactics and tools that will help you be a confident networker.
Simone Douglas 0:33
So we’re gonna kick off today’s show. By understanding that your customers require you to put yourself in their shoes, you need to take a hard look at the points at which your customers have contact with your business. These include meetings and visits, phone calls, correspondence, and deliveries. Do your premises look second rate tired or rundown? Are your frontline staff members unfriendly or do your phones ring and ring without being answered? All of these things can make a customer feel disappointed. The most common customer complaint is being kept waiting. If you’re slow to return calls or fill orders, then you’re in danger of losing customers. Above all customers want you to deliver what you have promised and surpass their expectations. If you remember a customer’s name and recall your last conversation with them, you will have brightened up their day, they will also tell their friends what a great service you provide. So today we’re going to analyze how customer satisfaction survey results impact on your business, the process for identifying rates and reasons for customer churn and ways to ask customers for product or feature requests. Then we’re going to take a good look at how and why you analyze customer support ticket trends. It’s easy to get distracted by all the noise in the business world at large but jump date is your chance to settle in and work on your business in ways that allow you to make the most of your opportunities today, tomorrow and forever. Today’s show is taking a look at how intimate you are with your customers and how your product and services are exactly used. Customer Success is when your customers achieve their desired outcome through their interactions with your business or organization. The process used to proactively ensure that desired outcome is achieved by your customers is what we call Customer Success management. We need to be aware that the desired outcome has two parts, required outcome and appropriate experience. The required outcome is what’s required. But how you get to that required outcome becomes the key differentiator for you. So this is something that you need to bear in mind. When your customers use your products or services what is their desired outcome. This is all about understanding why your customers buy from you, and will be looking at it through their actual experience not your perceived ones. This is why you as the business owner need to focus on understanding customer usage. According to research cited by McKinsey organizations that leverage customer behavior data to generate Behavioural Insights outperform their peers by 85% in sales growth, and more than 25% in gross margin. So what are our key issues for the owner perspective? First up What results do our customers expect our product or service or offering more provide to them? By definition customer expectations are any set of behaviors or actions that individuals anticipate when interacting with the company customer experience has fast become a top priority for businesses and 2021 will be no different. But why are so many companies focusing on the customer experience and what happens to companies that choose to ignore it. Customers no longer base their loyalty on price or product. Instead, they stay loyal with companies due to the experience they receive. If you can’t keep up with their increasing demands, your customers are going to leave you. cross device shopping via a wide range of channels has made it difficult for companies to maintain consistency, processes and technologies need to change in order to provide that consistent experience across all platforms. This is where your Omni channel buzzword of the century comes in. It wasn’t too long ago when every business claimed that the key to winning customers was the quality of the product or service they deliver. Now it’s often all down to CX or customer experience. A good customer experience means your customers spend more in fact 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. The more expensive the item the more they are willing to pay according to a research from PricewaterhouseCoopers for example, customers are willing to pay a price premium of up to 13% and as high as 18% for luxury and indulgent services simply by receiving a great experience. Cx also influences on the spot purchasing to 49% of buyers have made impulse purchases after receiving a more personalized experience. And a walker study found that at the end of 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. So Where does your business sit? We need to have a really good look at how do our customers actually use our product or service, the importance of multi channel servicing will continue to increase. Businesses interact with their customers across multiple channels, which can be through forms on their website, live chat, social media and more. Us customers might be positive and accept different service levels from different channels. They also expect that the communication remains consistent. So are you providing a consistent experience across all channels, both online and offline can be challenging, but the gold standard here is IKEA. If you visit any IKEA store around the world, you’ll get the same experience they invest heavily into customer experience. This year alone, they’ve opened more stores invested in home delivery networks launched a brand new app all to the benefit of their customer. And the payoff has been huge. Not only is IKEA one of the most beloved companies in the world, but their annual revenues have now reached more than $40 billion worldwide. So bearing that in mind and adding to this Adobe recently found that companies with the strongest omni channel customer engagement strategies enjoy a 10% year on year growth 10% increase in average order value and a 25% increase in closed rates. So it sounds like a no brainer to invest in customer experience. We need to get our head around how user friendly is our product or service and the processes we put our customers through mobile customer experience is a priority. So when it comes to providing a positive experience across different channels, mobile customer service is expected to soar. The reason is simple a bad mobile experience can do serious damage to your brand. For example, 57% of customers won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website on mobile. And if a website isn’t mobile friendly, 50% of customers will stop visiting it even if they like the business. So by not providing a positive mobile experience, you’re putting your business growth in jeopardy what happens then customer frustration leads to churn. So according to Kolsky 72% of customers will share a positive experience with six or more people where on the other hand, if a customer is not happy 13% will share their experience with 15 or more. Customers are willing to find the answers themselves. So we really need to get our heads around making that process friendly. Doesn’t matter where you are in business right now it’s definitely the time to take a solid look at exactly where you are and make some realistic decisions about where you want to go in 2021. One thing for sure, in order to deliver a positive experience you have to know your customers better than ever before. This means creating complex and complete customer profiles that help you understand and measure your customers behavior at every touchpoint and across multiple channels. If you make sure that interaction with your company is smooth, pleasant and continuously improving, you’ll drive brand loyalty. If not, you will give your competitors the best gift you can your customers. This is your first time listening Welcome to the world of seriously social sales and marketing where relationships we knew the sales. If you’re a returning listener, thanks for being part of my seriously social Global Business family. We’re going to take a short two minute break. And next up, we’re going to run through what it takes to do a good customer survey and analyze the results and I’ll be back with you shortly. Stay tuned.
So we’re on to the fun stuff what you need to do today, we first want to have a really good look at analyzing customer satisfaction survey results. So first up, you need to use the right tools to analyze your survey. To accurately analyze the results of a customer satisfaction survey, it’s essential to use effective survey tools. The software that you use must allow you to organize the data you have collected and display the results in a clear and readable way. It’s difficult to interpret results when they are disorganized and scattered across hard to read spreadsheets are spread out among a large number of documents. So generally speaking, I tend to use Survey Monkey for all of my surveys because it’s really simple and it can put all of the data into a dashboard for me that is simple to understand and make the most of. So once we’ve got your survey results, we need to be as objective as possible when analyzing the results of your survey. So when analyzing survey results, it’s extremely important to be objective because a common error is seeking to confirm your initial thoughts on the subject when looking at the survey results themselves. So you need to evaluate your survey results from a decision making perspective. This seems pretty straightforward, but it’s worth repeating. The goal of a client survey is to gain a more in depth understanding of your clients or prospects not a more in depth understanding of what you think of the experience. But this customer knowledge should not be theoretical or abstract. It’s only valuable if it is followed by action and helps with the decision. making processes. Analyzing survey results is not the last step of the survey process. Summarizing and reporting on your results must be done with future actions in mind. Evaluating the various different results of the survey should be done in a way that is partly but of course, not exclusively based on your decision making criteria. If your results aren’t precise enough, or if you feel that important pieces of data are missing, it’s generally better to refine your results via a new survey rather than beginning to make decisions based on incomplete data. At the same time to avoid any delays, it is essential to set aside enough time in the beginning to create your initial survey. Before sending the survey to participants, it’s important to clearly define the goal of your survey and choose the right questions. Then you want to compare your survey results with some objective indicators. To ensure that your survey is as useful as possible for making decisions, you’ll need to compare its results with your company’s other data and indicators. The most accurate results can often be seen after overlapping various different types of data. It is therefore always necessary to look at the bigger picture and analyze the results of any survey alongside objective data and indicators such as sales, Google Analytics data, results of previous surveys, customer message tickets, and anything else that you can pull together that gives you a holistic view of your customer user experience. Then we need to move on to the identifying rate and reasons for customer churn, we’ve all been sold a product that we didn’t really want or need as the one being sold to. It doesn’t feel good, yet companies do it to people all the time. Businesses either pretend like it never happened or rationalize it by saying it’s revenue we wouldn’t have earned otherwise. It’s important that your marketing and sales teams are attracting prospects and closing opportunities which can actually benefit from your product or service. If you’re closing customers that won’t be successful on your platform or using your services. This is usually done by high pressure sales tactics, you’re going to damage your business’s brand perception, which we spent a lot of time talking about this season so far. Additionally, it still takes time and money to close and support a bad fit client. The money and time is better spent bringing in a client that you can help. So to fix this problem. If you have it in your business, there needs to be consistent communication between customer success, sales and marketing teams. When the patterns start to emerge that customers are being sold on the wrong product offering. It’s often important that the leadership of each team diagnosis the issue, these conversations can get heated if not done tactfully. So be sure to be as objective as possible and get to the root of the problem and not attack the people in the other teams personally. Often, the result is altering your company’s standards for qualifying a lead, ensuring the lead has the needs that you can solve. Or perhaps you might discover that slight tweaks to the onboarding or product or service can make this segment of customers successful. Either way, it’s important that you come to a consensus on not selling to customers who can’t make successful this is a recipe for disaster. So make sure you hold your customer success teams accountable to proactive check ins you might uncover some dissatisfaction that wasn’t bad enough for the customer to cause a stink. But over time leads to churn. This is where Net Promoter Score surveys are really, really good. If you have people sitting in the neutral or the detractors section of the NPS, then it’s a great opportunity for these customer success teams are the person within your organization that is tasked with that role to really reach out and turn those customers around. reducing churn is incredibly important to any organization. Even companies with the stickiest products of all time, have teams dedicated to churn reduction. It’s important that you not only reducing churn by improving your product or service offering, but also identifying discrete reasons for churn and addressing them over time. What this does is it reduces your churn rate and increases your business’s profitability, which is what we’re all here to do. The other thing that we need to look at is asking customers for product or feature request. To start it’s worth highlighting that not all feature requests are the same. They can be broken out into three different types unresolved problems with an existing feature so the customers experienced a technical issue and is unsure how to make progress. In these cases, you can use the request as a jumping off point for deeper conversation about what exactly they’re trying to achieve. You can ask for specific examples and details about the issues they’re running into an act as a consultant on helping them achieve a given result in your product or service. Feature improvements is the next type of request that you get the customer is not sure on how to achieve a certain result with your product or service. Think about whether or not you can solve the customer’s problem without any product being built at all, quite often, what looks like a functionality gap might actually be something that has already been addressed by a product team just in a different way than what your customer would like, which is fairly common. And then we get brand new feature requests. So the customer is asking for something that’s not yet supported in your product, the trickiest conversations to handle when something is really not supported in your product. So before you respond, ask yourself, Does this request fit into your roadmap and strategy for how you’d like to develop your product? Once you’ve gathered feature request data from customers along with their relative importance, you need to find a way to prioritize this suggestions. potential factors, you want to include our customer lifecycle, so you might want to respond to the customers who contact you in the first days after signing up as they’re at the highest risk of churning, then look at high value users are the customer are they the customers paying you the most money, you want to pay particular attention to their feedback, especially if this group plays a crucial role in your long term growth, difficulty of implementing the proposed improvement, so some feature improvements might be relatively straightforward to implement and provide 10 times the value to the customers. On the flip side, some improvements look simple but require months of complex engineering or completely reimagining the way that your business delivers its service. The other big one to consider is volume of feedback. So logging the number of times each individual product improvement or service improvement has been suggested, can help you make a case for bringing a particular feature request to your product team. We also while we’re looking at that want to analyze customer support ticket trends. By doing this, you’re going to see the development gaps and can proactively manage any issues as they’re coming up. And then once we’ve done all of these things, we need to plan to spend time putting lessons learned and aha moments into practice. Remember that nothing changes if you don’t set aside time to make it happen. So once you’ve worked out what you need to do, start putting the timelines and deliverables on your action plan. Get clear on what you want your customers to feel. What actions do you want them to take? What pain points you’re there to solve for them? And where are you falling down on that customer experience journey, we know that it matters and we know that it increases your profitability, so we need to make sure that we’re getting it right. Also, based on all of this feedback, it will help drive your strategic plan for the following couple of years. So getting that consistent customer feedback means that we actually have clarity around where we’re going, what we’re doing, where we need to invest our resources to make the most out of our sales and marketing dollar spins, and also how we retain our clients to get the most out of it. So we’re going to take a short two minute break. And when we return, we’ll bring it all together and look at why any of the things we’ve covered so far matter what the direct impact can be to your bottom line and how we make the most of being in customer centric organization.
Unknown Speaker 18:04
As we’ve said,
Simone Douglas 18:05
a remarkable customer experience is critical to the sustained growth of any business. A positive customer experience promotes loyalty helps you retain customers, and encourages brand advocacy, not receiving enough value from a product or service can be a leading cause of churn. High levels of customer satisfaction with pleasurable experiences are strong predictors of customer and client retention, loyalty and product repurchase data. The answer is why a customer or client enjoyed their experience helps the company recreate these experiences in the future for other customers. Effective businesses focus on creating and reinforcing pleasurable experiences so that they might retain existing customers and add new customers. So the first thing that we need to look at when it comes to customer experience is what customer experience survey methodologies are available and which ones should you be using. So one of the most common ones that you will often see is that NPS or net promoter score is probably the most popular measure of customer affinity towards your company. So created and trademarked by Bain and Company NPS is a quick survey that typically asks one question, how likely are you to recommend insert business name here to a friend? So with a Likert scale from zero to 10, zero meaning not very likely, absolutely not to 10 being absolute raving fan. So you want to routinely send out your Net Promoter Score surveys, probably once a quarter to your customers to get some clarity around? Who is a promoter who is sitting in neutral so that you can start having follow up conversations and also who’s in the detractor stage because they’re likely to be churning directly. The next type that you can use is a customer effort score or a CES survey. This metric measures how hard it was for a customer to be able to complete the tasks that prompted the interaction. So this survey question could look like how easy was it to deal with our company today. The survey and measurement system can be used for post interaction surveys with customer service or support teams. And then we have the CSAT, or the customer satisfaction survey. This is a commonly used measure for product and services to rate how happy customers and consumers are with what they purchased. Typical survey question to collect this feedback looks like how would you rate your overall satisfaction with the goods or services that you received and then offers a Likert scale question type between one and five, five being highly satisfied and one being highly unsatisfied? So those are three different types of survey questions you can use. Then we want to look at the do’s and don’ts for survey design. Depending on what customer metrics you intend to use, it will determine what type of survey questions you need to ask your customers. You want to make sure that you do ask for overall company rating first, this satisfaction survey question gives you a great initial insight and allows you to compare to industry and internal benchmarks over time. Also make sure that you allow for open text feedback and open tax question will allow you to collect those open ended responses from your respondents. So you can gain more detail about your customers experiences and you might uncover new insights that you didn’t expect. Please make sure that your surveys are optimized for mobile. Many consumers are now completing their surveys on mobile devices or with mobile apps. So your survey must be optimized for mobile devices. It’s too complicated for mobile respondents survey participation will decrease. Then we move on to the don’ts. Don’t ask double barreled questions. These questions touch on more than one issue but only allow for one response. They’re confusing for the respondent and you’ll get skewed data because you don’t know which question the respondent is actually answering. Make sure you also don’t make the survey too long. The majority of customer satisfaction surveys should be less than 10 questions people don’t finish long surveys and they resent you asking them to. Also don’t use internal or industry jargon, your customers must be able to clearly understand each question without hesitation and using internal or industry jargon is confusing to the respondents. So those are the basics of the do’s and the don’ts. When and where should you send your customer satisfaction surveys to your customers, you have to remember that timing surveys is extremely important. It’s the same when you ask for recommendations. The experience should be fresh in your respondents mind so you get the most honest answers. For example, let’s look at an airline industry example. Customer satisfaction surveys can be sent at every touchpoint in the process. After the customer books their flight, you can ask for feedback after the initial purchase because you want to understand if the person was satisfied with their checkout or purchase experience send an email with a link to an online survey after the customer purchases their flight to find out how satisfied they were with the booking process. Because consumers want easy transaction so you want to look for ease of use in your data. You can send it out after the actual flat post purchase evaluations reflect the satisfaction of the individual customer at the time of delivery or shortly thereafter. This can be a transactional net promoter score or customer satisfaction survey and sent by email after a customer service encounter. So if the customer initiates contact with the customer service team, Sae s survey or customer experience survey should be sent immediately after the issue was resolved. Six months after using the product or service, you can measure the long term customer loyalty and relational net promoter scores or customer satisfaction surveys. And that will allow you to see if your customers are still loyal to your brand. We also need to then once we’ve got all of this data that we’ve spent all this time collecting, we want to know how to turn these customer satisfaction survey results into action. measuring customer satisfaction is important. But what you do with the data is essential if your customers take the time to fill out a survey. It’s important they know you’re serious about making their experience better. Close the Loop and respond quickly after receiving negative feedback from your customers. This is a chance to keep your customer loyal. 70% of consumers said they would be more likely to do business with an organization again, if their complaint was handled well the first time, analyze for trends, understand what metrics you’re looking to improve and see if there are patterns on these specific items. For example, if 30% of your respondents say the customer service wait time was too long, you know you need to improve in that area. You also want to make sure that it’s a company wide effort every department or member of the team needs to be on board to keep the customer satisfied. If customers complain about a product feature, the product department must be willing to receive the data and to fix it Get a workaround. If customers complain about the service customer service representatives need to understand how to fix the issues better. Make sure the right people have the right visibility with role based customer experience dashboards and analytics, because that’s going to be critical to what it is that you’re trying to achieve. Likewise, you’re going to want to spend some time analyzing where there are gaps in your data. Sometimes it’s time to re survey a key group of clients or customers in order to find out exactly what it is that you’re missing, and to make the most of the opportunities to improve. So as you’re sitting down and going through your data, you want to actually create a list of actions that need to be taken and set some clear timelines around that. So over time, what you do is you build up a really holistic sense of what your customer journey looks like, and the customer experience because all of these things have a really direct impact on your bottom line. So as you go through this process, ask yourself the question, Are you a customer experience focused organization, if you really are if that’s where you’re benching yourself, and it really is where you want to be positioning yourself for 2021? Then take this opportunity to identify where all the pitfalls are in those processes. How can you resolve the multiple processes or hoops that you make your customers jump through in order to have the issues resolved? How quickly do you respond to customers when they are in direct contact with you about issues to do with product usability or interface? Have you created dashboards that allow them to find their own information, so our customers more and more, doing things to make their lives easier, simpler and better. And often, they don’t want to talk to a real human being in that process. So we need to meet our customers where they’re at. This is where you see artificial intelligence really coming to the fore. Because as you build out chat bots that can handle most of these day to day customer queries, it’s going to solve a lot of those problems for you. So on that note, we want to actually take a short two minute break directly. And when we return, we’re going to cover off on what you need to do to action the key elements contained within these topics, and why they matter in your quest for an epic 2021. You’ve been listening to seriously social, the humanistic approach to sales and marketing. And as we continue to move on in the next segment, we’re actually going to run through what it is that you need to do today. So when it comes to analyzing customer satisfaction survey results, we’re gonna run through identifying rate and reasons for customer churn, asking customers for product or feature requests, and what that looks like and what we need to consider. And then analyzing Customer Support Ticket trends, then we’re going to run through how you make the most of all of those things and put together a clear action plan that makes you a customer centric organization. So previously, we’ve covered off on what it looks like to have your six word story and to make sure that it’s in line with your values. And now we’re going to double check that with your customer feedback, and I’ll be back after the break.
Okay, so we have covered as usual and epic amount of content and need to tie it all together. So let’s take a look at your key actions for this week. Remember the questions that we need to be able to answer? What result do our customers expect our product service offering to provide a good customer experience can be achieved if you do a couple of things, make listening to customers a top priority across the business and consistently reinforce the fact that listening to customers is a top priority. Use customer feedback to develop an in depth understanding of your customers implement a system to help you collect feedback, analyze it and act on it regularly. So this means identifying and creating processes around when you send out surveys, how often you send out surveys and how often you review the data that is being created by those surveys. All of this is going to give you information you don’t currently have about the experience that your customers go through when they using your product service or engaging with your business. So once we’ve actually implemented that system, we need to reduce friction and solve your customers specific problems and unique challenges. So we need to take action at that point. Where is it that we are disappointing our customers or our potential customers? Where is it that we are making their lives more difficult than it needs to be? This is a really important question that in a sales and marketing aspect and to do with our customers we need to evaluate on a regular basis because often we will put things in place that are deemed to be efficient, but are really not effective. And this is always the challenge. So whilst it might be easy for me to send my customer a three page email with all of the information that they need, it’s probably not particularly effective, because let’s be honest, who here really reads three page emails these days are a soundbite society. So we need to actually package information for our customers in small bite sized snacks. Okay, we also need to think about how our customers actually use our product or service. Remember that Brett a bad customer experience is primarily caused by things like long wait times, employees who don’t understand our customers needs unresolved issues or questions. So I’ve gone to all the effort of telling you that I’m not happy about something or that I don’t understand something, and you still haven’t solved my problem, that’s pretty much guarantee that you’re going to lose a customer. Another one of my favorite ones is too much automation, or not enough of a human touch. So again, this falls into this efficient versus effective kind of basket. So we’re very big on relationship based selling, or I’m very big on relationship based selling. But I’m also very big on a humanistic approach to sales and marketing and customer experience. And the reason for this is because time and time again, that is what is what has set me apart in business and in life. And it’s the way that you create those long term relationships over time that will have you be successful. So you need to empower your teams to health check how much automation is too much automation. The other one that will often upset customers is service that is not personalized. So you know, some really prime examples of this are often things like when your database isn’t correct, and you’ve got your first name and last name back to front because of a keying error. And so it says Hi, last name instead of Hi, first name. So I would get Hi Douglas instead of Hi, Simone seems like something relatively simple, but those are the kinds of things that people get quite upset about. Rude or angry employees are always going to bring you unstuck as well. And if you need any more ideas, just think about the last time you were frustrated as a customer, it’s quite likely that one or more of the precursor issues that I’ve just discussed were the cause. Ultimately, though, what counts as poor customer experiences in your business is going to be unique, and you’ll only learn about it by opening the door to customer feedback. So working to minimize the impact of factors that cause a bad experience for them will mean that you get more dollars in the bank, which is really what we’re there for. Now we need to look at how user friendly is our product or service and the processes we put our customers through. So I’m going to tell you a little bit of a story about what 2021 looks like without customer experience strategies in place. If you are in event planning or you’re a tradeshow organizer, you risk pushing your visitors away with the now outmoded 2019 experience of paper badges and long checking lines. Now say you’re a retailer luxury or not in 2021. Without a real investment in digital technology, you still have a fragmented omni channel shopping experience. Or maybe you are an airport, your passengers are more lost than ever. They’re confused about their travel experiences they pass through your facilities and there’s too much fragmentation. Let’s get to the root of this, not only from the perspective of 2021 Customer Experience trends in 2019 78% of customers prefer to use different channels depending on their context. Responding to this preference seamlessly and consistently is no easy task for any brand. So how do you deliver on what customers need and want in 2021. To start organizations must have a context in which to build seamless journeys. This is what we’re aiming for is that sense of seamlessness as I go through all of the different channels, where I can find you and engage with you. We have to play effectively where our customers are playing. Customer Experience strategy provides that necessary context. In fact, customer experience strategy is the first step to business’s survival in 2021, especially for large organizations and iconic brands. The 2021 customer pays attention to you as a business and as a brand. They look to see how empathetic you really are. Today Luxury Hotel and Spa guests asking employees how they’ve been treated by their employer, you are being evaluated on the human scale, more now than ever before. As a result, your value proposition is evaluated on how you do your business. This is why an investment in corporate culture makes sense in 2021. If you don’t have a corporate culture, you’re going to need to create one. If you do have a corporate culture that no one is practicing then need to revisit and pull the team back together, determine if failure to practice culture is because it’s no longer relevant or if it’s because you’ve not made the necessary investment to operationalize your belief system in the field. According to Salesforce research, 71% of customers believe businesses that have shown more care and empathy this year, have gained more loyalty during the time period. So there is more money to be made in having a heart. It just may take you longer to cash out, but it’s certainly worth it for you and for your customers. And absolutely, that has been my experience in all of my businesses. So the fact that we have been able to demonstrate throughout COVID-19 throughout lock downs and business upheavals, we’ve been able to demonstrate to all of our customers that we care, not just about them, not just about money in the bank, but that we care about our teams, that they are all part of our community, and that we have a commitment to their customer user experience, has seen us ride the wave and all of my businesses are up 25% year on year. Now that’s not because we’re I’m the most clever person on the block. And it’s certainly not because we have either the best product or maybe not the best service I like to think that we do. But the differentiator absolutely is the customer experience and is the customer experience that will make the difference. So how do you measure up, go away and test against the basics that we’ve covered today. And lastly, a final word on customers today, remind yourself that they expect excellent experiences made up of frictionless customer journeys and extreme convenience. When more and more companies offer this experience and competition gets fierce customers also become more accustomed to it. Consider this example, when every website requires that you click through 10 pages to get to the page that you want. It’s annoying, but it’s also normal. Some of you will remember the days of waiting several minutes for a photo to upload on the web. Line by line. Sure, it wasn’t fun. But it’s what you expected. You didn’t get mad about it, or at least not often. So when one website narrows that task down to only going through two pages to get to the one you want. You’re blown away. It’s exciting, it leaves an impression on you, you probably visit that site again. But what happens when all websites start to do that, then it becomes normal. Suddenly, the websites that haven’t been adapted are getting left behind. Users become furious that they still have to wade through 10 pages. This is how expectations shift it’s about what becomes the new normal. However, there’s also another element to it, customers can become angry at businesses that don’t adapt because they view it as intentionally frustrating. This doesn’t happen immediately, but it happens at a higher rate the longer time goes on, and the more the competing businesses adopt new technologies. At some point customers start to perceive it as you’re not prioritizing their experience rather than putting it down to other factors. So customer experience also known as CX is your customer’s holistic perception of their experience with your business or brand. CX is the result of every interaction a customer has with your business from navigating the website talking to customer service and receiving the product or service they bought from me. Everything you do impacts your customer’s perception and their decision to keep coming back or not. So a great customer experience is your key to success. All business models can benefit from improving the customer experience, whether it’s subscription businesses, increasing their retention and reducing churn e commerce marketplaces, increasing repeat customer and reducing returns and service industries can gain recommendations and reduce complaints. In fact, I challenge you to think of a type of business that doesn’t benefit from providing great customer service. Remember, at stage three, we’re cementing our customer and referral relationships and making the most of our business moving forward. Next week show the bread and butter cream and dream customers how to recognize them and what they mean to your business. Understanding how the customers are buying and their pods have traveled to your door who are my best accounts or business family members, and why our cost of acquisition in comparison to top line sales is a critical factor.
Chris Irving 39:13
Thank you for listening to the confident networker. You can find more episodes and information at bnian.com.au/podcast.
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