Why Customers Choose Great Experiences?

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

- Maya Angelo

A crucial question for your business, isn’t it? Are you clear why customers choose your business? Related to the experience you have provided? More often than not. It is surprising to us how many clients and potential clients aren’t clear on this question.

Differentiated customer experience is critical to business success. Companies that consistently provide the best customer experiences are most often the most successful.

So what constitutes a great customer experience?

The quality of your company’s customer experience is ultimately determined by the way customers feel after their last interaction. If the customer is unhappy, your company’s customer experience is bad. If the customer doesn’t have a feeling one way or the other, your company’s customer experience is mediocre. If the customer feels good, your company’s customer experience is satisfactory. But if the customer feels delighted, your company’s customer experience is a substantial competitive advantage. That is the only one that matters to success.

Customers’ feelings about their interactions with companies are driven by several specific factors:

Time

Most people today suffer from too little time. Always and it is an increasingly important factor. Time is the one thing that even the richest customer doesn’t have enough of. So customers’ perceptions about your company’s customer experience are largely influenced by time. Often the meaning correlates with convenience. This means you have to reduce the time it takes for them to:

Find you

Engage with you

Communicate their problem

For you to resolve that problem.

How well are you doing with these components of the problem?

Keep learning: Customer Reviews: Mistakes That Can Lower the Customer Experience

Employee Expertise

Customers need to believe that your company’s employees are good at what they do. They must perceive that your staff is well-informed about products, services, policies, issues, and any other relevant subject matter. So, to project their best knowledge to your customers, you have to make sure that they are fully empowered with information that’s accurate, complete, and up-to-date. And the ability and time to provide sound advice.

Personalization

Customers don’t want to be treated like a number. They want to feel valued and understood. Their belief? That the money they spend with your company entitles them to such treatment. The differentiation of the experience your company delivers will, therefore, be at least in part contingent on your ability to personalize your interactions with customers across all channels — whether that means knowing their name, their previously expressed preferences, or the particulars of their current situation. Lots of small ways to create customer personalization.

Care

Customers like knowing that you care. Great service is the top reason customers keep giving their business to companies and the top reason they recommend those companies to others. On the flipside, 80 percent of customers say that they have stopped doing business with a company because of bad service experience. More often than not, they will never do business with such a company ever again. For these reasons and others, it is critical to ensure that your company delivers great service care. The care that results in great experiences that are remembered and talked about.

You can’t over prepare on your customer experience if you want customers to select or stay with your company.

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.