4 Ways to Create Customer Experience that Retains Customers
Customer Retention is essential to build a sustainable business. Loyal customers bring in repeat business and provide stable revenues. How many times have you given up on a product or service due to a bad experience? As a customer, it is sad to walk away from a promising service that fits your budget but provides bad experience.
Here are 4 ways to create a customer experience to retain your customers:
- Provide Personalised Customer Experience
One of the most effective ways to improve Customer Experience is to personalise it. Personalised emails are more likely to be opened as they are tailored to customer needs and are therefore relevant. Seeing your name in an email’s subject line or greeting makes it stand out among all the emails that crowd your Inbox.
Similarly, do you prefer communicating with a person or an organisation? Use a real person’s email ID (e.g., tim@xyzcompany.com instead of no-reply@xyzcompany.com) to communicate with your customers.
Providing special recommendations when your customers shop online is a great way to personalise their experience. It helps customers find what they are looking for. Also, you can occasionally send them triggered emails based on their interests or past shopping history.
- Reduce Friction & Pain Points
Customers can face difficulties at various points of your service such as user onboarding, accessing documentation, using a specific feature, making payments, etc. These pain points eventually cause customers to stop using your product or service. One of the most effective ways of providing great customer experience is to proactively reduce friction in using your product or service. To do this, put yourself in your customer’s shoes, go through the processes yourself, identify the pain points and remove them. You can survey your customers about their experience and act based on their feedback. Find out at which step your customers get stuck, during onboarding. What percent of payments are failing? Can you provide alternative modes of payment? How many users drop off after the trial period? Lesser the friction, better the customer experience will be.
- Choose Quality over Speed
Customers prefer dealing with a service that values quality over speed and is thorough in its approach. Sometimes, we may receive urgent customer support issues where we need to choose between speed and quality. According to a study by Gallup Group, customer were 50% more likely to engage with a service that came across as “courteous, willing & helpful” as compared to speedy. Quality customer support reduces the number of iterations for the customer and provides for a much better customer experience.
- Provide Self-Service Support
According to a study by Forrester, 72% of customers prefer self-service support to get answers to their questions, instead of email or phone support. It saves them the trouble of contacting customer support, and reduces the load on your support team.
Go through the support tickets, emails, issues & bugs reported by your customers to find out frequently asked questions and commonly faced issues. Create knowledge-base or FAQ-style articles to address these questions and problems.
Use screenshots & video tutorials to make it easy for customers to see how to implement the solution. If customers are able to find out answers on their own, it increases their confidence in your product, boosts their productivity and improves retention rate.
Great customer experience makes your product easy and intuitive, removes friction and establishes trust in your brand. This leads to repeat business, high customer retention and growth in revenues.