Customer Experience A Key Driver Of Customer Choice, Data Shows

Customer experience has been an important topic in recent years, and with a good reason. When customers feel valued and enjoy the experience your brand offers, they will often come back for more.

Better customer experience leads to higher customer engagement, as many studies show. Loyal and engaged customers not only tend to purchase more frequently and spend more every year, they are very likely to recommend your brand to their acquaintances too.

If you run a startup, part of your business strategy should focus on investing in your customer experience as a key component of your brand early on. Why? The reasons speak for themselves. Here’s everything you need to know about building a stellar CX for your startup.

The Impression Your Brand Leaves On Customers

Customer experience is the impression your business or brand leaves on customers throughout their buying journey. In short, it tells everything about the relationship someone has with a brand. It helps customers form an opinion on your business and even decide whether they return or not.

Users reviews, surveys, product ads are just a few of many touchpoints that determine the customer experience. The modern consumer is not only interested in how a product or service performs, but also how the people behind the business make them feel when they’re trying to solve a problem.

Customer Experience – A Top-of-Mind Priority for Startups

Early-stage businesses need to grow fast and big. But this often takes a lot of resources and time to achieve. For startups with a limited budget or without resources for expansion, delivering quality customer experiences can be a gateway to accelerated growth. CX is the gist of growth in any business, no matter the size.

Recent findings hint that 19% of customers only give a brand one chance of failing before they stop supporting it. This proves that it only takes one negative incident with a customer for a brand to be abandoned by a customer regardless of how long they have been loyal to the brand.

What’s more, satisfied customers say they’re willing to pay more for a service or product that delivers a stellar customer experience. And obviously, this makes CX the main differentiator, more powerful than pricing or quality.

Improved CX can reduce customer acquisition costs

You don’t have to be an expert to understand that acquiring new customers costs at least five times more than keeping the customers you have already. To grow your customer potential, it might be good to invest in inbound marketing, advertising, and other similar endeavors that require the time and know-how of marketing specialists such as DPDK or similar companies.

While early-stage businesses thrive on improving their customer potential to grow brand awareness, they should also focus their efforts on retaining existing customers. And as you already know, an excellent CX is the key to ensuring your business hold onto a loyal customer base, therefore reducing the cost of acquiring new ones. Even the figures indicate that an increase in customer retention by as little as 5% can positively impact profits by 95%. This proves how important customer experience is to a startup’s bottom line.

Build free marketing and brand loyalty

When people are satisfied with the experience your brand offers, they are twice likely to recommend it to others. Brands eager to improve their online presence can benefit from this popularity to further expand their customer base, bottom line, and business.

Businesses should focus more on creating brand loyalty, visibility and experiencing sustained growth. Delivering an outstanding CX is a critical step in helping your business achieve these goals.

Embrace personalization

When it comes to customer experience, there’s no one-size-fits-all. The modern buyer wants to know that their needs and expectations are being met throughout the customer experience. Not for nothing, 86% of them say that personalization now has some effect on their purchase decisions.

Things like email marketing and automated chatbots that provide customer service agents with access over the course of customer interaction allow businesses a myriad of opportunities to make the CX personal.

This may also include offering audiences unique deals based on their past purchases, incentivizing follow-up purchases with targeted discounts, and anything else that typically finds customers wherever they are in a relationship with your brand.

Consider customer self-service solutions

Who doesn’t like being anonymous when buying anything online? When customers need help or information, you would think they’d much rather attempt to find solutions themselves first before reaching out to a customer service professional for further support. But that’s not the case anymore.

Dynamic FAQs and automated customer service chatbots, for instance, can help people answer more than 70% of their (most frequently asked) inquiries quickly and easily. These automated tools have the added benefit of reducing the number of requests from customers, which then provides customer service professionals with the time and space to focus on more critical customer issues.

Proactive customer support

Customer self-service solutions go well beyond the traditional “problem-solution” customer service model. For example, when these AI-driven solutions are included throughout your website, they may be able to serve visitors and customers with contextually relevant results that can answer their questions before they even know they have a question.

Before you go…

With 9 out of 19 brands competing mainly on customer experience, it’s the business that takes customer experience seriously that will stand out from the crowd and win over loyal audiences.

In order to deliver positive customer experiences, you have to know your audience better than ever before. That means building a complete customer profile that will help understand your audience’s needs and wants at every touchpoint, and across multiple channels.