How to Create a Better Customer Experience

Personalization is key to positive customer experiences and achieving customer success.  However, customer success is comprised of many touch points across a brand: sales, marketing, on boarding and training, and customer service. It is essential that these teams NOT be siloed, but act and move as a unified whole in order to create valuable long-term relationships with customers. For the sales team, acquiring a customer is the most important step in the customer journey, but for the company as a whole, it’s just the beginning of true customer success.

What are the most important aspects of the Customer Experience?

As Mark De Bruijn,  Head of Marketing EMEA & MEE at SAP Customer Experience, discusses in his article, Bringing Emotion Into The Customer Experience, “In the unbridled hunger for data it’s easy to forget that, as a brand, we focus on people. Therefore, it is not data, but emotions that should be central to the customer experience.”

Most brands do not understand nor invest in the resources needed to create personalization for real Customer Success (CS). There are four elements of Customer Experience which contribute to overall CS.

1. Positive Emotional Response:  Emotion is often a response which cannot be controlled. It is an important factor defining the strength of a customer relationship and very necessary in order to build long term loyalty. Unexpected negative emotional responses can destroy relationships in a few minutes which may have been years in the making.
2. Personalization:  While personalization is one of the newer elements of measurement in the customer experience – it is now recognized as the most important contributors to creating positive emotions and thus customer loyalty.
3. Trust:  You can think of trust in two ways – Confidence (belief that a company can provide a quality product or service) and Benevolence (a customer’s belief that the company puts its customer’s interest above their own).
4. Ease of Product or Service Delivery:  How easy it is to complete the transaction without “customer sacrifice” of time or effort. It is critical to make it as easy as possible for a client to get answers to questions and easily navigate to complete the transaction?  

These are the most critical elements because each interaction between a company and its customer ultimately contributes to improve or impair brand loyalty. A customer’s emotions towards a brand affects their engagement and purchase behavior, both consciously and unconsciously. Bottom line, negative emotions can derail a relationship with a customer.

Fostering strong, positive emotional connections with customers can deliver financial gains. According to their article What Separates the Best Customers from the Merely Satisfied (based research published in the Harvard Business Review), Scott Magids, Alan Zorfas and Daniel Leemon state that “customers who have a strong emotional bond with a brand have a value of 25% to 100% more than customers who are merely satisfied.” Further, to assess how well a brand is connecting to customers, they developed the “emotional connection score” (ECS), which measures the share of a brand’s customers who are fully emotionally connected to it. Brands with low scores are leaving money on the table when they mistakenly believe that their work is done once customers are in the door.

How do CS teams create that emotional connection and why is it so difficult to accomplish?

Limited bandwidth is one of the biggest complaints across customer success teams at startups and growing companies. Teams are spread thin as tech teams press to release updates while maintaining integrity, sales teams press to increase the sales pipeline, and marketing seeks new lead sources. Often CS teams are the last in line to receive additional resources.

One key to success is the ability to scale CS teams by leveraging tools that allow improved efficiencies while creating meaningful personalized experiences in order to drive value for customers. Businesses lose $102B each year due to churn, not because a customer didn’t like the product, but simply due to a bad experience. Our team at swivl is committed to helping companies reduce churn and grow revenues by personalizing and optimizing each touchpoint of their customers’ user journeys.

These are the underlying reasons behind swivlStudio.

We invite you to meet Hoover, our Intelligent Assistant learn more about swivl and how we can empower your team and your business to improve Customer Experience.

‍

Join our newsletter to keep up with all the latest trends on how AI is enhancing the customer experience.