Customer experience is the journey a user undertakes when using or trying to use your product. The brand promise, on the other hand, is the promise you made to your potential clients when you pitched your product.
Customers come to your business, expecting you to fulfill that promise, and they judge the fulfillment of this promise by their experiences with your business.
For this reason, you need to ensure that you do your best to satisfy your customers, that you fulfill the promise that drew them to you in the first place. This brings us to a well-known buzzword, customer satisfaction.
What is Customer Satisfaction?
Simply put, customer satisfaction is the measure of how satisfied a customer is with your product, service, or experience. A customer’s satisfaction determines whether they return to your business or not. Customer satisfaction can be measured by the churn rate and retention rate.
Churn Rate
Churn, on the one hand, is the measure of how many customers stop buying your product or service. Your business cannot sustainably grow if it has a high churn rate.
This is because acquiring a new customer is between 5 and 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one, which means a churning business will soon have no money left to spend on acquiring new customers.
Retention Rate
In contrast, to churn, a high retention rate saves you the hustle and expense of acquiring new customers.
Returning customers have been known to spend up to two thirds more than new customers, which allows you to spend more on enhancing customer experience, which in turn draws in more new customers and helps retain them.
Why is Customer Satisfaction the Measure of a Good Customer Experience?
Satisfied customers keep coming back for more. However, they can only be satisfied if your business offers a seamless experience. The best and most accurate way to get a feel for the smoothness (or the lack of it) of your customer experience is by getting a glimpse into your customer’s emotions.
Issuing surveys is the best way of getting a customer’s emotional responses. It is important to send these surveys as soon as you can and make the questions as customer-centric as possible.
For instance, instead of asking ‘how smooth is our checkout system? ‘consider asking ‘what did you enjoy most during the checkout process?’.
How Can You Improve Customer Experience?
There is no tried and true strategy for improving customer experience. However, here are a few tips that’ll set you up for success.
Improve Your Customer Service
When running on a low budget, customer service is usually not a priority for most businesses. This, however, should not be the case. Your customer service team is the face of your brand, and if a customer doesn’t feel appreciated, they’ll leave, never to come back.
Fortunately, there’s an easy fix for this. You either can have your staff take part-time customer service online training or if you don’t have a customer service department, outsource one.
Improve Your Feedback and Support Tools
Make it easier for the customers to complain because if they don’t complain to you, they’ll complain to their family, friends, co-workers, and on their social media, which will hurt your brand.
Make Your Online Platforms as Intuitive as Possible
If your business has a web, mobile, or desktop application, make it as easy to use as possible. Intuitive, easy to use platforms have a tendency to get addictive, so your users will take every opportunity they can to use the app.
You can even go the extra mile and collect suggestions from your users on how to further improve the interface.
The Bottom Line
Consumers will always weigh your brand’s promise against their own experiences. Fail to align your promise to their experiences, and you lose them. Do it well, and your customers will, over time, prove to be your most effective marketers.
