Customer experience is key, and it shows.

Companies that deliver the best customer experience outperform those that don’t by 80 percent. 84 percent of companies that actively work to improve their customer experience through ai and analytics record better revenues than companies that don’t put efforts in this direction.

As a business owner, these numbers tell you one thing: if you aren’t offering an exceptional customer experience, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. The consumer of today has several options and they won’t hesitate to switch to another company that offers a better experience.

Here comes the big question: what’s preventing you from revolutionizing your customer experience?

If you’re anything like most small business owners, you lack proper know-how. This is why, in this article, we’re sharing a handful of strategies you can use to improve customer experience.

Serve customers through omnichannel solutions

To make it simple and cost-effective for you and fruitful for your customers to interact, adopt cloud-based technologies that are economical while maximizing results.

Leaders in the industry are revolutionizing the CX with Amazon connect technology providing access to a wide range of services to get your message out there. From email, voice, video and chat applications like Skype and Zoom to social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, there’s a platform for everyone.

So whether you need to keep your customers informed about latest product releases or just need a way to quickly respond to customer queries, it is an ideal solution.

Understand Your Current Level of Customer Experience

Given a customer experience scale of 1 to 5, where would your say your company lies?

You could think it’s 5 given all the effort you’re putting into improving the quality of customer experience, but you’d never know unless you ask the customer. Your customers will give you an accurate perception of what they experience when they’re buying goods and services from your business.

There are a couple of ways to gather this information from your customers, including asking them one on one if your business is a brick-and-mortar store and running digital surveys.

If the responses you get point to a low score, it’s pretty clear your level of customer experience is wanting. Count yourself lucky for getting those responses in the first place. Most customers wouldn’t even bother to respond to a survey from a company that offers poor customer experience.

Once you know where you stand, you can then start to devise ways to improve their experience. If the experience is poor, you have a lot to do, possibly including making drastic changes to some of your operations. But if you have a, say 4/5, a few tweaks here and there can do the trick.

Overhaul the In-Store Experience

Like 2020, there are all indications that 2021 won’t be a great year for physical retail businesses because of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as vaccines hit the shelves, more and more people are getting out to shop in their favorite stores.

While this is an opportunity for you to ramp up your sales, it also means you have to design a customer experience strategy around the realities of today. The coronavirus will be here for a while, which means customers are looking for shops that offer the safest shopping experience.

First, keep your store super clean and well-sanitized. If possible, hire a local commercial cleaning firm to do the job.

Second, ensure there is social distancing. You can do this by placing floor stickers that indicate how far apart the shoppers should be.

Third, try to offer a contactless payment system.

Of course, re-organizing your store with COVID-19 in mind isn’t the only thing that’s going to help you offer the best customer experience. It’s a good start, but you also need to take care of other crucial aspects of in-store shopping, such as ensuring your sales reps and cashiers are always friendly and helpful to customers.

Ensure the Online Experience Is Spot-On

If you never had a proper reason to take your business online, 2020 must have taught you an important lesson. With most physical retail businesses struggling, online stores are thriving, all because the pandemic has forced people to shop online.

There are millions of opportunities that come with running an online business, but your website experience can break or make your business.

Offering quality customer experience online isn’t just about having a site that works. It’s more about having an outstanding site: a site that loads its pages in under 3 seconds, is responsive or mobile-friendly, and is easy to navigate.

When buying stuff online, a customer doesn’t want an exhausting check-out process. They want to check out in a single click. Two at most. If your ecommerce site needs a buyer to complete multiple steps before their order can be finalized, you’re doing yourself a big disservice.

There’s a lot that goes into creating a site that offers the best customer experience. On your own, you will hardly be able to pull it off. It’s advisable to outsource the task to a digital agency.

But it’s not just about any agency that will cut it. You need an agency that’s familiar with your systems. For example, if you’re using Sitecore products to manage your ecommerce website, you need an agency that lives and breathes Sitecore.

Ensure Your Products/Services Work as Advertised

Sometimes consumers can be a patient, forgiving lot.

They can, for instance, live with your business’s poor customer services, as long as you’re selling them a superior product or service. If you’re offering a home internet service, for example, a customer can stick with you just because the service delivers the advertised speeds, even if your call center never picks up their calls.

As such, don’t just focus on the other aspects of the customer experience. Focus on ensuring your product/services meets and even exceeds customer expectations. But if your products are terrible or inferior to the competition, it won’t matter how many bushes you shake, customers will just keep fleeing.

Time to Revolutionize Customer Experience

The customer is king, and they need to be treated as such.

For a business owner, this means going out of your way to offer the best customer experience; otherwise, your loss will be your competitor’s gain. With these tips, you now know what you can do to overhaul and revolutionize your customer experience strategy.

There are a lot more improvements to make in your business, so stay tuned to our blog for more helpful advice.