Before eCommerce and SaaS went mainstream, you didn’t have to worry too much over churn if you had a good product offering.
Users needed your product/service, they had nowhere else to get it, and so they stuck to your brand whether customer experience was good or not.
Trivialize user experience in the 2020s, and you’ll have scenarios like this:
As the barrier to entry continues to fall, competition continues to get stiffer. And your competitors have the best motivation to get your customers.
If you chase your customers to them with bad CX, they’ll gladly oblige.
Why is customer experience important?
Some business owners know that CX is everything and that you exist as a business simply because you have customers who purchase to keep it alive.
But if you happen to be among those who do not know, below are some reasons that make a good experience necessary for the success of your business.
Findings say customer experience is important to keep your customers
In a 2020 customer experience report from Zendesk, half the customers who participated say they switch to competition after just one experience.
In the case of more than one bad experience, the switching customers increase to… 80%.
Bad customer experience can scare off potential customers
Take a look at the experience of Myntra’s customers above, and imagine if you are just hearing about the brand for the first time, what would be your reaction?
Negative reviews like this, once they make it to the Internet, can signal a red flag to an intending customer. And the Internet has a way of magnifying problems.
Whether they are on Twitter or LinkedIn or other review sites, Google understands search intent and it often brings comments like this to its SERP pages, where most customers make their research.
So, you should avoid reviews like that by all means.
Customers either advocate for or against you
If you dish out a bad customer experience but count on your customers for their silence, you are not being honest with yourself.
A report from Super Office has shown that 13% of unsatisfied customers will tell up to 15 or more people that they are unhappy with your brand, while 72% of happy customers will share their good experiences with about six people.
It’s more natural for people to talk when they are frustrated, since a bad experience is an emotion that always tries to find its way out, and the Internet is good at amplifying such forces.
But enough of small talks. Let’s deal with the crux of this matter.
3 Customer Experience Tips to Keep Your Customers Away from the Competition
Making your customers happy isn’t rocket science, most companies aren’t just deliberate about it.
For those who want to be, but don’t know how to, the following three steps will set you on the right track in improving your customer experience.
Create a Unifying Customer Experience Culture
Customers touchpoints with your product differ based on their personality and how they choose to interact with your product.
One way to make sure your customer experience doesn’t suck is to establish a CX culture that goes beyond one department.
In order words, don’t leave CX in the hands of the sales or support team.
Define how you want your customers to feel when interacting with your brand and lay down a blueprint that your team members can follow in dealing with customers.
No one does this better than Zappos and the way they spell it out on their homepage is very telling.
“Today, we still sell shoes — as well as clothing, handbags, accessories, and more. That “more” is providing the very best customer service, customer experience, and company culture.”
There is something incredibly smart about Zappos rebranding itself from a shoe seller to an ‘experience’ seller — people pay for a good experience.
At the end of the day, your customer lifetime value (CLV) is everything when it comes to how your business fares in the long run.
Businesses that manage to make their customers stick make repeated sales and cross-sell their existing accounts. From whatever angle you explore it, it makes sense.
Be the one to ask questions from your customers first
In this report that I read on HuffPost, “Only one out of 26 unhappy customers complains, the rest churn. The lesson to be learned here is that companies should not view the absence of feedback as a sign of satisfaction. The true enemy is indifference.”
Yes, this report might be getting on in years, but it’s a timeless truth in customer-business relationships.
Do not wait on your customers to make complaints before you ask them if they were satisfied with your services. Ask them if they are, as their answers can unlock untold insights.
And refusal to do so may keep you in darkness as to what is going on in their mind.
In order to do this right, you can employ three strategies:
1. Ask on social media or listen through social media
If you have a huge social media following, stay alert and always be on the lookout to answer customers’ queries. But don’t stop at that, you can use social listening tools to figure out who is talking about you and what their concerns are.
If you don’t have a large following, it’s time you started the process of building a community for your customers on social media.
2. Collect their emails and follow up regularly
Don’t just use the email address of your customers to make new feature announcements or send your blog content.
It’s very important to reach out to them if you notice a change in their behavior on your website or app. This isn’t something you can do manually though, the best way is to find marketing automation tools like Hubspot and Zendesk to help you automate that.
3. Use in-app modals and customer survey tools
If you notice a customer is canceling their subscription, in the case of SaaS, you can use in-app survey tools to ask them what the problem is. This will help you make a last-ditch attempt at getting them back on board, and even if that fails, you’d ensure they aren’t advocating against you when they leave.
You can also use in-app communications tools like modals and tooltips to guide your users if you feel they might be looking for something.
In case you don’t know, this is what a modal looks like:
Be big on sales enablement content
Many times, customers are churning because of a problem that’s already been solved but they may not know it.
One of the best ways to prevent this from happening is to create sales enablement content of different forms.
This is how you can do it:
1. Create blog posts on how to use your products and problems users might be facing
If your customers have a problem with any side of your product or services, their first-in-line go-to sources are either Google or your blog.
They want to see if anyone had had a similar problem and how it was solved. It’s why those of us in the B2B content marketing have been advocating for new brands to pay more attention to bottom-of-the-funnel content these days.
If you can set out the solutions to their problems on your blog, they probably won’t leave. If you can make such content rank on Google, that’s much better.
I recently learned that effective sales enablement is one of the most underestimated benefits of SEO content and when I did, the knowledge left me in awe. Surprising as it may, more customers research a problem with our product on Google than we think of, as the post established.
I cannot establish the causation, but it makes sense since it’s natural for customers to want to know if others have experienced a similar problem and how it was handled.
Companies like Google, Moz, Semrush, and several others do this all the time.
2. Create other forms of content across different channels
For many customers, PDFs are the best resources. While for some, video content appeals the most.
This is not surprising, a complex SaaS tool may require a video tutorial for users to be able to use it very well.
I once experienced an issue using the Elementor theme, and I was able to resolve it simply by watching a video they made to that effect.
What’s really important is for you to have great sales enablement content ready and train your sales team on how to utilize them.
Conclusion
The reason why I brought SaaS and eCommerce together in this post is that both industries rely on repeat purchase to survive.a
Of course, it pays every brand to have loyal customers, but SaaS and eCommerce can’t just survive without the repeat purchase they get from their customers.
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