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Sometimes in business, we mistakenly assume that our target audiences will go with whichever company offers them what they need for the lowest price. But even though budgets matter, research has found time and again that low price points are far from the only factor consumers consider when choosing a brand to buy from.
In fact, research done by Oracle revealed that 86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience. This means you don’t need to take part in a race to the bottom of pricing in order to gain customers. If your customer experience is top-notch, your reputation will attract more of your audience to you, and existing customers will be more likely to stick with you. So, how do you know if you can compete in the customer experience arena? Keep reading.
Evaluate your Customer Journey
Even though many of us think we know what it’d be like to be one of our own customers, we often don’t. Have you stopped to think about what it’s really like for a prospect or customer who wants to use your brand’s products or services, or what makes up your customer experience?
The only way a prospect can gauge the quality of your business’ customer experience initially is by their first few interactions with your brand. If they visit your website and find the ordering process clunky, they might not give you a second chance. If they call in to your support team and feel like the customer representative is rushing them through the call, this contributes to a poor customer experience right out of the gate. If they see a sponsored ad of yours on Instagram and buy the product advertised, they’ll sour on your brand quickly when the product arrives if it looks nothing like it did online.
This means that every single touchpoint your business has with its customers contributes to that all-important customer experience. And oftentimes the very first touchpoint a prospect has will make or break whether they think you’re worth any more of their time.
Focus on Improving the Experience, Rather than Cutting your Price
So with that context around customer experience in mind, it’s important to evaluate every step of your typical buyer’s journey. Go through your website with a fine tooth comb to see how fast your page loading times are and if they can be improved. Add a FAQs section to your site if you find that customers are repeatedly asking the same questions. Reduce the number of clicks it takes for a customer to make a purchase. And make your customer service agents readily available (and ready to handle any question or concern that comes their way).
If you don’t think you can objectively put yourself in the shoes of a first-time buyer, you can always enlist the help of a secret shopper. You can either pay someone external to go through the experience someone might have when interacting with your brand for the first time, or you can ask family members and friends to pretend they’re an interested prospect. The point is to get some unfiltered feedback about the customer experience you’ve created from people with fresh eyes and different perspectives.
You might find, when checking out your customer journey, that a few aspects could be better handled by a BPO partner. For example, maybe you discover there’s a glitch with your chat platform and you’re missing an opportunity to correspond with customers because it doesn’t work smoothly. Or perhaps you find out that your customer service team isn’t as quick to follow up with customer complaints as they promise to be. If you uncover issues like these, or other significant hiccups with the customer experience, you might want to think about engaging with a qualified BPO partner like Conectys who could manage and improve these areas for you.
How does your Customer Experience Rank?
Once you’ve identified any flaws in your customer journey, and dedicated yourself to finding ways to fix them, look outward. Pretend you’re a prospect who is interested in one of your competitors’ services, and go through the initial process of surfing their website, asking more for information and engaging with their brand (covertly, of course). You should be able to pretty easily compare the customer experience you’ve created with that of the competitor, and quickly determine who has the better customer experience. At this point – it should be you.
After going through this process, you should feel confident in the journey your customers will go through with your brand – and not have to worry if you’re more expensive than others in the market or if you have to raise prices at some point. Customer experience matters most.
If you’d like help improving aspects of your customer experience, please contact us to learn more about how we can help.
