If you want to grow your business, the most important thing to focus on is the customer experience.
While customer experience can be seen as something fluffy, the data shows the exact opposite. Companies that focus on customer experience drive more revenue, more loyal customers, and more profits. Not to mention, 49% of consumers have left a brand in the past year due to poor customer service.
There are hundreds of stats to prove the value of focusing on customer experience; that’s why we invited the expert, Dan Gingiss, onto Magnet Marketers to have a discussion about what it looks likes for brands to adopt a customer experience focus.
Dan has always been someone that looks at things through the lens of the customer which is why we knew he’d be the perfect person to break down the topic!
Dan Gingiss is an international keynote speaker and coach who believes that a remarkable customer experience is your best sales and marketing strategy. His 20-year professional career included leadership positions at McDonald’s, Discover, and Humana.
Dan is the author of two books, The Experience Maker and Winning at Social Customer Care, and is the host of two shows, the Experience This! podcast and The Experience Maker LinkedIn live show.
Why Focusing On Customer Experience Is Key:
There are so many reasons for brands to focus on customer experience; it’s profitable, it feels good, and it’s the best way to stand out from your competition.
Focusing on the experience is also what allows you to grow your business in a more organic and trustworthy way. When your customers rave about you, you create a flywheel effect that generates repeat and referral business.
Because word-of-mouth referrals are extremely influential in driving purchases, the goal is to get your customers talking about you.
Relationship marketing isn’t about screaming your message and being promotional; it’s about creating experiences that go above and beyond and are therefore worthy of being shared.
“Experience is all about how you make people feel.” @jessikaphillips (click to tweet)
When we focus on how we make our customers feel, we have the ability to understand them better and therefore find creative ways to make them smile. This is how we exceed their expectations.
Marketers have an important role in that we are the people who set those expectations; we are the promisers of the customer experience and we always want to make sure that we’re not just delivering on our promises, but going above and beyond.
The reality is that consumers are more willing to share their positive experiences than negative ones. Humans truly want to share their positive experiences!
The problem is that nearly ⅔ of customers can’t remember the last time a brand exceeded their expectations.
Here’s where your brand comes into the mix: you can take the steps necessary to start to truly exceed expectations.
How To Get Started:
If you want to become a brand that is focused on customer experience, it first starts with understanding that experience is a holistic term.
“We need to understand how every decision impacts the customer.” @dgingiss (click to tweet)
Customer experience isn’t just your social media or email marketing; it is every single touchpoint that your customer has with you, from your paid ad copy to your sales team, to your graphics, to your terms of service page on your website.
Everything adds up which means that every single member of your team is genuinely part of the customer experience process, even if they don’t realize it.
Here are some steps to take to get started focusing on the customer experience:
Use Dan’s WISE Method:
WISE stands for: witty, immersive, shareable, and extraordinary.
If you can do even just one of these with every single touchpoint that you have with a customer, you will be memorable.
Action Step >> Trying to incorporate WISE into everything you do will start to truly transform everything from your contracts to your website copy.
Look At Every Experience:
If your brand wants to focus on customer experience, you need to take the time to truly examine every single interaction with your customers.
Remember that every touchpoint, even an invoice, is an experience. Contracts, your voicemail, the emojis you use in your social media copy; it all adds up to the holistic experience that customers are having with your brand.
Think about everything from the customer’s perspective and once you do, you’ll find unlimited opportunities to create fun experiences!
There are so many ways that you can infuse personality into the touchpoints you have with your customers, like adding gifs to your email signature or childhood photos to your team’s about page.
Action Step >> Spend 2 hours writing down every single touchpoint you can think of that you have with your customer. This list will be hugely helpful in allowing you to spot opportunities.
Say Goodbye To Dull Disclaimers:
As customer experience people, we want our customers to understand the fine print. We want them to know what they’re signing up for.
Brands that truly care about customer experience don’t leave any chance for confusion; they spell things out directly on their disclaimers, privacy policy, and terms of service pages instead of adding a bunch of jargon.
Not to mention, these pages, which are typically boring, can serve as opportunities to have FUN!
It’s all about taking a pause to spot the touchpoints where you can truly infuse a little joy.
You’re going to be memorable if you can make a disclaimer, or privacy policy, something that’s fun to read. In fact, Dan Gingiss has done just that with his privacy policy as well as any error page on his website.
“It’s about using language to your advantage and refusing to be boring.” @dgingiss (click to tweet)
Action Step >> Revisit your terms of service, privacy policy, and disclaimer pages and find ways to remove the jargon and add personality. These pages - aka you - don’t have to be boring! Lean into your personality and be creative.
Go Through Your Website With Fresh Eyes:
An amazing exercise for all brands to do is to go through your website as if you’ve never visited it before. Truly put yourself in the shoes of a brand new customer.
If you’re not easily found on Google, and/or if your website is difficult to navigate and you feel irritated when trying to go through it, that’s a huge sign that your customer is likely irritated too.
Browse around the site to spot opportunities to infuse joy, like through your error page. (Amazon does something amazing with their error page. If you get to an error page, you’ll see a BUNCH of dogs - which happen to be dogs of amazon employees.)
Not only will browsing the site help you think of new ideas for creating experiences, but it’ll help to ensure that your site functions as a seamless experience for the user.
Action Step >> Take 15 minutes TODAY to go through your website with fresh eyes. Bonus points if you have someone new on the team or an intern, try to sign up for an event and/or make a purchase - aka try to trigger a conversion – to see if there are any hiccups in the process.
How Customer Experience Impacts The Bottom Line:
Oftentimes, customer experience falls into a soft skill kind of category because it can be hard to measure.
The ROI of customer experience is not necessarily as clear-cut as a paid advertising campaign.
However, the reality is that a great customer experience leads to more customers who spend more and refer their friends.
Every year, customer experience leaders outperform in the market. Customer experience and stock price truly are correlated.
“Customer experience is definitely going to impact profitability.” @mike_gingerich (click to tweet)
The best thing for brands to do is to spend time and money focusing on maintaining their current customers and providing amazing experiences for them, rather than focusing on getting new ones.
Happy customers will always be your biggest source of new sales.
Want to get started focusing more on customer experience? We recommend reading Dan’s Book “The Experience Maker” and connecting with Dan on LinkedIn!
Is your brand focused on the customer experience? Is there a brand that has wowed you recently?
We’d love to hear about your experience in the comments!
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