Customer experience is how a customer perceives their total interaction with your business. This encompasses the entire customer journey, from the point of awareness to the consideration phase, eventual purchase, and post-purchase stages. You may have the best products or services to offer, but if you have a low score in the customer experience department, it may all amount to nothing. Having customer support, meeting customers' expectations, and satisfying their needs are absolutely critical for your business to thrive.
Regardless of what enterprise you're engaged in, advancements in practical science now make it possible for you to build better relationships with your customers. This article will shed light on just how you can leverage technology to enhance customer care and service.
Boosting Customer Experience With Technology
Concept Testing
The axiom, "If you build it, they will come," isn't necessarily true. Many supposedly revolutionary products have failed to live up to all their hype. Perhaps, the timing wasn't right, or the products were indistinguishable from others in the same category. Here is where concept testing can make a difference.
Concept Testing is the evaluation of a customer's response to a product or service idea before it is launched or made available to the public. Concept testing surveys on your product development, logo, pricing, packaging and messaging, can save you significant investments in time and money by steering you clear of bad decisions. In addition, the customer insights you can gain from concept testing methods can create vast opportunities to maximize acceptance and market impact.
Social Media
Traditional sources of gathering customer data can be a waste of time. Just think of all the hours and energy invested into telephone and paper surveys only to receive low-response rates. After all, who has the time to plow through all those questions and come up with the appropriate answers? It can also happen that the loudest voices may not truly represent your target market, which means that their feedback may essentially be worthless.
Social media has changed all that. This interactive technology hands over the power of giving feedback to the consumer or customer. By allowing enhanced connectivity and real-time sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, and other networks, social media provides companies with invaluable feedback, notwithstanding their location. The platform also empowers everyone to effortlessly engage you in conversations, not just your most vocal customers. These touchpoints can obtain for you organic and relevant information on which to base product or service improvements, which you may likely miss from the usual means of securing feedback.
Data Analytics
With the popularity of the internet and the digital world, we now have unlimited access to mind-boggling amounts of facts and figures. While having information at your fingertips is definitely a boon for any business, the sheer volume of data available can be overwhelming. Without the means to properly handle it, potentially beneficial, even critical insights can fall through the cracks.
This is the reason why data analytics has become one of the must-have tools for any successful business. Data analytics platforms can help you effectively and efficiently organize data to better understand your customer and create customized strategies to match their different needs and preferences. Using various tools and techniques, you can glean invaluable insights to make informed decisions that will allow you to provide maximum value to your customers.
VR and AR Technologies
While the words virtual reality and augmented reality may seem more appropriate in science fiction novels, more and more companies are finding them helpful in enhancing customer satisfaction.
Virtual reality or VR uses computer technology to allow customers to experience a world that is either similar to the real world or doesn't exist at all. Industry leaders, such as Google, Microsoft, and Samsung, have invested early on in this technology, realizing its potential impact on business.
VR can help companies bring their businesses to their customers, wherever they may be. For instance, through VR-powered headsets, Marriott International gives 3D views of custom-designed setups to event organizers so they can try the hotel chain's services even without being physically present at the venue.
On the other hand, augmented reality, or AR, is the creation of a virtual environment with a connection to the real world. This provides an interactive experience where real-life objects are amplified or enhanced with computer-generated visual, auditory, and other sensory elements. Some of the most successful companies have tapped into this exciting and novel innovation to engage customers and encourage them to check out their offerings. An example is L'Oréal Professionelle, which launched a 3D hair color tester that uses artificial intelligence. Its StyleMyHair app is popular among hairdressers and consumers who want to first see how new colors styles suit them before deciding to purchase.
Customer Experience Metrics
Management guru Peter Drucker once said that "you can't manage what you can't measure." His meaning can further be extended it "what you can't measure, you can't achieve."
In the past, the term "customer experience" seemed like one of those seemingly ambiguous business jargons, such as synergy and value-added, that can only be quantified haphazardly, if at all. Thanks to modern digital innovations, you can now assess if your efforts in pleasing customers are making any dent in their overall perception of your company. Data scientists have created key metrics by which you can.
Metrics highlight the milestones of your customer experience initiatives and help you zoom in on areas for improvement. For example, the Net Promoter Score tells you the likelihood that your product or service would be recommended to friends and family. A second helpful metric is the First Contact Resolution, which shows how fast your company can address issues and give customers the help they need. Yet another is the Customer Effort Score, which measures how difficult or easy it is for customers to interact with your brand.
The Wrap-Up
Customer experience is key to ensuring the sustained growth of your business. By tapping the powers of technology, you can transform into a customer-centric company capable of delivering excellent customer service and satisfaction, allowing you to maximize sales and profits in the long term.
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