Customer experience is a massive buzzword today. There are more and more companies hiring a CXO (customer experience officer), or CCO (chief customer officer). It’s not just huge corporations, either; small startups are appointing CXOs as well, and you can see it in businesses across the B2B and B2C spectrum.
These new appointments reflect the realization that marketing and customer service are just two poles along the same continuum named customer experience. When you separate them, you do a disservice to the customer, interrupt the purchase journey, and create unnecessary and unhelpful silos between marketing and customer support teams.
Just to emphasize how crucial customer experience is to business success, recent research by PWC found that 73% of consumers say that CX plays an important role in their purchasing decisions.
Despite that, only 49% agree that they’ve encountered good CX from companies today. It’s clear that there’s a customer experience vacuum, and you’d better make sure your business fills it no matter how large your company, if you have a dedicated CXO, or a separate marketing team at all. Even bootstrapped businesses can find good CRM software that helps them give customers the attention and respect they deserve.
Customer Experience Is the Key to Customer Retention
Marketing isn’t just about acquisition. It follows the customer through the purchase experience to retention and beyond in order to retain them returning customers, and that’s where CX is crucial.
To build a cadre of loyal repeat shoppers, you need to ensure that the purchase itself is smooth and post-purchase interactions, like training, exchanges, and refunds, are all positive. You’ll continue sharing marketing communications with customers to bring them back to your store, encourage them to recommend your business to friends and family, and motivate them to leave you positive reviews on social media and review sites.
Unlock CX with Customer Data
Every aspect of marketing, including customer experience, rests heavily on gaining a deep understanding of your target market’s needs and preferences. It’s the only way that you’ll be able to create marketing content, ads, and a purchase journey that consumers will enjoy.
However, only 38% of US consumers think that the employees at brands they patronize do understand their needs. CRM software steps into the breach by helping you to track customer behavior, identify pain points and preferences, and record customer interactions, while built-in analytics tools enable you to spot patterns and trends within them.
Good Customer Experience Triumphs Over All
There’s no way to overstate the importance that consumers place on customer experience, in the form of fast, friendly, and consistent service. Today’s shoppers agree that a positive experience is more important than paying the lowest price, with the average consumer willing to pay up to 16% more for products and services that provide good CX.
In fact, if you’re hesitating whether to invest limited resources into ads or CX, go for CX; 65% of consumers agree that a positive brand experience has more influence over their purchasing decisions than top advertising. On the flip side, consumers hold brands to extremely high standards for brands. 51% will switch brands after just one or two bad experiences, and 46% will abandon your business if your employees aren’t knowledgeable enough.
Positive CX Is Marketing Jet Fuel
Good customer experience drives the flywheel of success for your business. To give just one example, you want more positive reviews, which make a big impact on potential new leads. But people are a lot more likely to write a complaint than a recommendation. To bring in more reviews without soliciting them (a big no-no), you need to make an overwhelmingly good impression that convinces someone to commit time and energy to writing a review or recommending you on social media.
Positive, human interactions on phone, email, or chat are the foundations of good CX. They are also the source of improved insights into customer pain points, emotions, and associations, which you can mine to shape the rest of your marketing to be more accurate.
SMBs Have an Advantage When it Comes to Customer Experience
SMBs might feel that CX is a fancy concept that they can’t support, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Consumers across the board agree that speed, convenience, helpful employees, and friendly service are the most important factors in positive CX, and you don’t need a big budget or expensive tools to deliver on that. You just need to train your employees to be friendly and caring. Happy employees generally deliver excellence in customer interactions, and small businesses are better able to provide nurturing, positive work environments where employees enjoy working.
Personalization is a central path to top CX, and one where small businesses can outperform corporations if they use their assets wisely. Personal attention is one of the differentiating factors that sets small businesses apart from giant corporations, because they tend to know clients personally and have a genuine human relationship with them. It’s one of the few advantages SMBs have at the outset, so don’t squander it by overlooking CX.
Every SMB Can Achieve Excellence in CX
Customer experience is what convinces consumers to either connect with or walk away from your SMB, so you can’t afford to ignore it. Even if your marketing team is tiny, the right tools, welcoming employees, data-fueled insights, and personalized exchanges can help you to deliver excellent customer experience that propels all your marketing efforts to success.