Most companies pride themselves on putting customers first, but they might not be as customer-focused as they think. “80% of CEOs say they deliver a great customer experience. Only 8% of customers agree” (Bain & Company).
Chances are you might be in that 80%, but how do you become the vendor that customers genuinely think provides a great experience?
There are ways you can improve your process to create that excellent customer experience you strive for. So how do you make your customer experience one that customers want to return to year after year?
This problem spans the entire organization. It starts in sales with the way you sell to your customers, goes through customer experience, and even touches on the product and how the solution itself meets customers’ needs.
How Important Is Customer Experience?
Organizations looking to increase revenue need to think about retaining the customers they have just as much as they do about adding new logos. Every year, it gets more and more expensive to acquire new customers which means customer loyalty is more important than ever.
If you retain an additional 5% of your customers, you can see an increase in profits of 25%. And those numbers go up the more clients you retain. To keep your customers renewing, you have to make their experience using your product a positive one.
What Makes A Bad Customer Experience
There could be many practices you’re unknowingly doing that aren’t helpful for customers and could actively turn them away from your product.
- Forcing buyers to follow outdated selling motions. Modern-day B2B sales are confusing, slow, and frustrating. Too often, sales reps hold customers to their rigid and outdated sales processes without any guidance.
- Poor communication between teams who help customers. When information is siloed, and overall experiences are mismatched, then customer experience can be jarring and create feelings of discontent. You have to get alignment on what that experience looks like and hold your teams responsible for delivering it.
- Having no way to capture customer feedback. Your customer’s opinions are an incredible tool to map out an appropriate experience. Without a motion for gathering and using their feedback, you’re leaving a massive resource on the table.
- Don’t evolve the product to fit customers’ needs. When you hear common requests for your product, that is your cue that some key function is missing. Failing to incorporate these changes can impact the customers’ ability to use the product.
- Over-promising and under-delivering. Whether it’s during the sales process or during implementation, your users notice when you say one thing and do another. Don’t indicate you have a capability unless you can follow through.
If any of these sound familiar, you might need to make changes in order to go from a bad customer experience to one even your customers will agree is fantastic.
How to Make a Great Customer Experience
Every great customer experience includes these strategies.
- Put the buyer in the center from the beginning of the sale. Making a potential buyer jump through hoops to get information about your product is a sure way to lose their interest from the start. Make it simple for them to move through the sales process by employing buyer enablement tools such as demo automation. These tools give the buyers control over where and when they watch while feeding you intent data on what interests them.
- Have a solid customer feedback loop. Do your customers have a way of sharing their opinions on their experience as your customers? This can go beyond just surveys and reviews. You need to listen to what the customer thinks overall. Sharing product updates or training recordings in an automated demo is an easy way to capture customer insights without requiring them to do anything extra.
- Don’t make changes that hurt existing customers. Think about the unintended consequences before enacting price changes or new service charges. While it might seem like a safe choice since new customers won’t know this is out of the ordinary, existing ones will feel the change and may feel punished.
- Develop capabilities that customers point out are missing. Adding capabilities, creating integrations for critical systems, and having your product evolve to match the way your customers work is crucial. Making it easy for clients to use your platform in their daily work will go a long way to keeping them.
- Deliver agreed-upon outcomes. Customers don’t care about what you can promise them, they care about what you can deliver. Build instant trust by delivering the results you said you would.
This isn’t a one-time exercise. Customer needs will evolve over time and require you to evolve with them. Once you have a good system down for gathering and implementing customer needs, build a process around that to ensure you get continual results.
If you can build this kind of customer-focused experience, you’ll see how your hard work creates loyal customers who come back year after year.
Delivering Great Customer Experiences
When you provide customers with a great experience, they’ll reward you with their patronage long term. If you don’t focus on good customer experiences, you risk losing existing prospects. Having clients that are repeat customers will only become more important as the buying process becomes more competitive.
For more ways you can enable your buyers and create a world-class experience, explore our collection of blogs, research, or even your own custom demo.
