Customer experience is all of the interactions a customer has with your business, from beginning, to middle, to hopefully, not the end. Going the extra mile to ensure that these interactions are positive will do wonders for your business. Let’s look at some of the benefits of improving customer experience.
Loyal Customers
When you keep your customers happy, they are most likely to remain loyal to your business. Whenever they need more products and services of the types you offer, you’ll be the first one they turn to. For instance, if you’ve been doing a great job preparing a client’s taxes, you’ll probably keep that client for years. Lousy job? No comment needed.
Less Churn aka Turnover
You work hard and pay a lot of money for sales and marketing in order to win customers to your business. Once you have them, it’s much easier to keep them than to win new ones. But you’ve got to keep them happy. If you do, many will remain loyal to your business, often for many years. All this weighed together will result in profits that greatly exceed the costs of keeping your current customers satisfied. In other words, less churn, greater return.
Repeat Customers Buy More
When new customers are happy with their first purchases from your company, they are likely to return to make another. If that purchase goes well, the customers, seeing that your company is trustworthy and dependable, become repeat customers. Repeat customers tend to make larger purchases, since they know they are buying from a company they can trust. Larger purchases mean an increase in your bottom line, and with no additional sales or marketing expenses on your part.
Complaints Go Down
As sure as the world is round, your business will always get complaints. Some will be legitimate, some will not. What matters is how you handle them. Customers with legitimate complaints should be handled with kid gloves. You want to do everything in your power to satisfy their complaints and retain them as loyal customers. You also want to provide the best product or service you can so that complaints don’t arise in the first place. When customers say good things about your company, it also keeps employee morale high. People like to work for successful, reputable companies.
As for illegitimate complaints, they should be handled carefully. You’re not going to want these people as future customers, nor are you going to want them to leave negative reviews about your company. This will require a bit of wisdom on your part, as you’ll have to decide the best course of action in each instance.
Fewer, Or Better Still, No Lawsuits
Believe it or not, 90% of businesses are engaged in litigation at any given time—and that’s according to Forbes. Not only that, but 18 percent go bankrupt as a result of a lawsuit. Others suffer severe financial setbacks due to negative settlements or judgments.
The long and short of it is that you want to do all you can to prevent a lawsuit from happening in the first place. The best way to do this is to keep your buyer experience topflight. Happy customers usually don’t take businesses to court, but unhappy customers sometimes do. Don’t let a judge settle the problem between you and your customer, settle it yourself. If you have to go to court, only do so if you know you’re going to win.
More Positive Reviews
It makes sense to conclude that customers who’ve had a good experience with your company are the same ones who write good reviews. This requires effort on the part of everyone in your organization. Depending on the nature of your company, this might include production designers, production staff, website designers, sales teams and customer service personnel. Read a review or two and you’ll see that customers often mention the people whom they’ve had a good experience with. It might be the owner, someone who answered the phone, a repair person—you get the idea. Everyone in the company can make a positive contribution in this area.
On the flip side, your efforts to create a good buyer experience will reduce the number of negative online reviews, something you want to keep at a minimum. Also good to remember is that you have it in your power to convert someone who started out having a bad experience with your company into someone who ends up having a good experience. Read a review or two and you’ll see this often happens. Someone writes that they received a broken item, called the company about it, and the company apologized and immediately replaced it. Review rating—five stars. This isn’t an outlier, it’s the norm.
Increased Referrals
How many people have ever asked you whether you can recommend someone to them that provides a particular good or service they need? Or how many people have you asked the same thing? It has to be a lot, because people do this all the time. They’re looking for companies they can trust, so they ask people they can trust to help them with the effort. This is where good buyer experience comes into play. If their experience is good, they’ll spread the word. They’ll tell their family, friends, business acquaintances and anyone else they know to give you a call. Some may even go so far as to share their experience on social media, which could lead to hundreds, or even thousands of referrals. Best not to underestimate the time-tested power of the referral.
A Thriving Business
When customer experience is good, all of the arrows are pointing in the right direction. The number of loyal customers goes up. Turnover goes down. Customers purchase more. Complaints go down and lawsuits are avoided. Positive reviews go up. Current customers refer your business to new customers. Your business not only thrives, but it enjoys additional benefits, such as:
- reduced insurance costs
- enhanced ability to attract partners
- stable revenue stream, and
- higher business valuation
Amazing how one little, but very big thing—keeping your customer happy—can make a tremendous difference in the success of your business.