Improving the customer experience at your business is all about bottom-line profitability. Happy customers return again and again, and they are also more likely to tell others about your product or service. While a solid marketing campaign can get people through the door (or to the website, on the phone, etc.), a poor experience whilst in your shop is going to turn them off of the sale. As such, developing a robustly positive customer experience is essential to boosting sales figures. 

With that in mind, take a look at the following five ideas for improving customer experience:  

1. Get to know your customers.

Getting to know your customers is, hands down, the most important step you can take in improving their experience. Fail to do this, and your company is going to be operating in the dark. This begins with in-depth market research, which is best carried out by a third-party consultant such as Market Force. This will reveal why the people who purchase from you are motivated to do so. In most cases, business operators find a few surprises in the results. The business may be doing something right on accident, and gaining a better understanding of this allows the design and implementation of new marketing programs and customer service platforms that can make the experience even more rewarding. 

2. Communicate your customer-service vision to your employees.

After spending all of that time and energy on better understanding your customers, it’s essential that you develop a clear vision for business operations with your customers at its centre. This vision needs to be communicated to your employees. Of course, simply explaining your expectations for customer interaction is not going to be enough. Instead, business operators need to establish incentivised programmes that encourage employees to live out that vision as they work on the front lines of customer service. These are, after all, the brand ambassadors who will implement the strategies that you developed in the consulting phase. 

3. Check up on employee action.

There is nothing wrong with expecting those who are on your payroll to maintain brand standards when they interact with customers after developing strategies through which your employees can deliver a higher level of customer service, and then training the employees how to accomplish this, it’s important to follow up with service checks. Some checks can be largely aesthetic – i.e. enforcing grooming standards or conducting spot checks. However, sending in secret shoppers is one the most effective ways to follow up. Let your employees know that ‘undercover’ agents will be calling in, visiting the shop or otherwise making use of customer service channels. Knowing this will happen without knowing when it will specifically occur provides employees with the motivation they’ll need to stick to the new and improved strategies. 

4. Encourage the highest levels of employee satisfaction.

With all of this focus on the customer experience, some employees may start to feel undervalued. It’s a natural reaction when all of the focus is about generating a positive environment for others. Counter this by conducting periodic employee satisfaction surveys and following up on the information you gather. Happy employees perform better, and the satisfaction they experience is contagious. Your customers and clients will catch it, too.  

5. Seek feedback from your customers

At the end of all this, the next step is to determine how effective your new measures have been. Market research companies can help with this step as well, conducting surveys and designing follow-up strategies to gauge customer satisfaction across several points of contact. This information can be used to validate the effectiveness of new customer service campaigns while shedding light on possible revisions for the future. 

This article is written in behalf of Market Force - an international company with plenty of experience in the customer intelligence industry. They offer services such as mystery shopping and customer satisfaction surveys.