Customer Experience costs market share
Whether your business is claiming it, or the one losing it.
However, good customer experience can be used as a differentiator for new and old businesses
- Uber’s easy-to-use user interface, in conjunction with its pricing and offer, can be credited for its exponential growth.
- FNB’s customer rewards program and its banking app’s easy-to-use user interface has helped it maintain a competitive market share.
- Zappos uses empowered customer service employees. These employees can spend as much time on the phone with a customer as needed, they are empowered to do whatever is needed to solve a problem- no transfers needed. Customer satisfaction is the only measure that matter
And… Apple
Apple reclaimed and maintains its brand loyalty and market share, because of innovation and customer service
Their “Hands-on help” program provides phone support for customers not near a store. Driving success of the customer over ROI for these interactions. People rely on their phones and expect they’ll always be there, and when they’re not working, it’s very frustrating. So, Apple provides a Genius Bar where experts can help you fix your phone, hands-on. When a customer isn’t located near a store, they provide phone support. Plus, the troubleshooting is free, so Apple isn’t making money off the process (“driving success of the customer over ROI for these interactions”).
The result of Apple’s commitment to customer success is brand loyalty. Over the past 8 years, their brand loyalty among customers has stayed above 73% (Statista).
When customer service is used in conjunction with other strategies it can lead to limitless business success. However, when other strategies are used and there is a lack of customer service, there is a limit to the success a business can achieve.
Humanize the customer experience
Design thinking focuses on preempting customers’ demands and anticipating their wants to better provide them with innovative solutions and therefore a more remarkable customer experience.
Developing a Design Thinking mindset around customer experience can help to build services and processes around customers by:
- Becoming Customer-Centric
Being customer-centric means developing your business strategies keeping customers in the frontline. It means offering an enriching experience through the buying, fulfillment, and post-sales process. Research by Deloitte found that customer-centric businesses were 60% more profitable versus businesses that were not customer-centric.
- Humanizing the Business and its Image
Use engaging written and video content to describe the origins of your brand and the values you stand for and back this up through implementing KPIs in the processes and roles within the business. As much as technology is helping, it’s also hurting us, so maintaining a balance is key. Realise we do not sell our products to machines.
- Investing in Employees
Your employees are your business, and they impact your customer’s emotions and experience. It’s important to ask for and listen to their input regarding the business, and how to improve working conditions and customer service. Ensuring we keep employees, updated through training allows us to drive, support and maintain a customer focussed experience. When employees are joyful and advocating for your brand, your customers will sense their passion.
- Personalizing the Customer Experience
An effective way to humanize the customer experience is by personalizing service. To do this businesses need to comprehend each aspect of their customer’s journey. And use this understanding to enhance it and that of the roles supporting its customer. Observations of customers and employees in the customer journey are key, as it is not always possible for an employee or customer to be aware or articulate issues or enhancements that could be made when part of a journey.
- Making use of qualitative and quantitative data
In all companies, the assembly, analysis, presentation and dissemination of information can present immense challenges. That said, the lack of experience and expertise in understanding and scrutinizing information is a monumental opportunity lost to a business. It is not as simple as “what is the data saying? It’s also about what is the data NOT saying?”
Now imagine your entire business had a design thinking mindset. Oh! what great things you could do…
At Success By Design, we design and implement business growth strategies, optimize processes for productivity, and improve customer experience to increase sales and profit in a sustainable way. We turn business challenges into opportunities, book a 30-minute free discovery call now.
Think differently!