Best practices for customer experience

What is customer experience?

Customer experience consists of many things and can be described as the impression your customer's have of your business and brand as a whole. This comes from a customer’s experience during the buyer’s journey. From the first point of contact with a prospect until the post-purchase support point, customer experience can be affected by any point in the sales cycle. Every interaction between the company and the customer is a chance to build stronger relationships, but can also create a weaker relationship if their customer experience is poor. There are two main points that create the customer experience, these are the sales people and product or service they are selling. The sales people need to understand the value of what their product or service they are selling brings to the customer in order to carry out a successful sale.

Why is customer experience so important?

In today’s society when it comes to selling, the customers are the ones who have the power, not the sales teams. That is why it is so important to give them a great customer experience. Your customers are the critical part of helping your business to continuously grow, so it is essential that you keep every one of them happy throughout the sales journey through your customer experience. Not only this, if you have a great customer experience, this will help to promote customer loyalty and will help you retain these customers for future purchases. Having good customer experience will also make it more likely for customers to recommend your company to others, again growing your business further and standing out from your competitors.

Best practices for customer experience:

While we have identified the need to have a great customer experience in your business, many companies struggle with ways to implement this. Below we give you some of the best practices for you to implement to create a positive customer experience.

 - Make interactions quick and easy for the customer - when finding out about and purchasing a product, the last thing a customer wants is for the buying process to be lengthy and complicated. Ensure you implement tools such as how-to videos, simple and quick payment options or an FAQ’s page on an easy-to-use website to help make the buying process as easy as possible.

- Personalise sales with customers - always ensure that you understand your customers specific needs and why they are looking into purchasing your product or service. Every customer wants to feel they are getting a personalised service from the seller so don’t generalise your product.

- Create a consistent experience across social media channels - one of the first places many customers look when researching a product or service they are interested in is on social media. Nowadays, social media is a big influence on how your company looks to your buyer, so making sure this is consistent and professional across all channels is essential.

- Review customer feedback - the best place to find where you excelled and what needs improving is through receiving feedback from your customers. Reviewing this regularly and acting on any positive or negative feedback will only make your business grow stronger.

- Invest in your frontline sales teams - after all, your frontline sales teams are the ones interacting with you customers. Invest in regular, high-quality sales training to ensure that every one of your sales team gives the best customer experience to your prospects.