Imagine this: You took your family out for dinner at a local restaurant everyone’s talking about. It’s the first time in seven long months you got the chance to spend quality time with them.
It’s Sunday evening, so the place is overcrowded. There are people everywhere. After waiting in queue for over an hour, it’s finally your turn.
One of the staff members takes you and your family to a table that hasn’t even been cleaned yet. He says to you and your family members, “Please have a seat. I’ll send someone to clean the table.”
Five minutes pass and nobody cleans the table.
That’s bad experience #1.
After a few minutes, a waiter finally arrives and cleans the table.
Now, you’re sitting there waiting for someone to attend to you and take your order. But every waiter you see is busy attending to other customers. You raise your hand to try to get their attention and try—unsuccessfully—to wave someone down.
That’s bad experience #2.
And the bad experiences don’t stop there. Over the course of the evening, you’re faced with rude staff, undercooked food, and incorrect orders.
After a night like that, would you consider visiting the place again? Our guess is no. The culprit? A poor customer experience.
Customer experience is one of the biggest key differentiators between businesses today. A fantastic customer experience will help you win new customers and repeat business. A bad customer experience will send people running to your competitors.
The Importance of Delivering a Top-Notch Customer Experience
The Covid-19 pandemic has not only fueled the digital revolution but also changed the way customers think—permanently. No matter what vertical your business belongs to or who your target audience is, companies all across the globe are faced with the obstacle of rising customer expectations.
Consumers have access to a wealth of data at the tip of their fingers. A simple Google search is enough to tell them just about anything they want to know.
They also have more options than ever before—your competitors are waiting to steal your customers. In fact, 58% of your customers will switch to one of your competitors upon having a poor experience with your business.
From the moment customers find you—whether in-store or digitally—you need to have systems and processes in place to make sure their interactions with you are positive.
According to McKinsey’s The State of Customer Care in 2022 report, most customer care leaders’ fastest-growing priority area is improving the overall customer experience.
If your customers want to purchase a product on your website, you need to make sure that they’re easily able to:
- Find your product
- Add it to their cart
- Check out without facing any technical glitches
If a customer runs into a problem with one of their orders, you need to make sure that:
- They can easily reach out to your customer support team
- Your support team addresses the issue quickly and comes up with a satisfying solution
To sum it up: Every interaction your customers have with your business should be quick, easy, and positive. That’s the only way you’ll earn loyal customers.
Customer Experience Obstacles
Let’s talk about the challenges. It goes without saying that many customer service experience burnout. Not having the right systems and processes in place can leave your team struggling to keep up. Apart from this, some other mistakes most companies make are:
- Not collecting customer feedback. If you don’t collect customer feedback, your customers may be facing issues you don’t even know about.
- Not understanding your customers. If you want to serve your customers better, you must understand their pain points.
- Restricting your customers to a single channel. Different customers like interacting with businesses across different channels. You can elevate your customer experience by offering multi-channel communication. However, while doing so, you need to make sure that your customer service team is easily able to address all queries from different platforms from a single dashboard.
5 Ways Local Businesses Can Improve Customer Satisfaction
So now you understand the problem. Let’s talk about the solutions. Here are five simple tactics that local businesses should implement
1. Understand Your Customers and Their Pain Points
To deliver an outstanding customer experience and improve customer satisfaction, you need to understand your customers. Here’s how.
- Dive deep into your customer personas. Focus on their demographic information, purchasing behavior, pain points, and more to understand who your different types of customers actually are.
Stuck? Read Getting Clear on Your Ideal Customer to learn more
- Identify the challenges your customers face the most. Once you do that, the next step is to dive deep and figure out whether your products or service are actually helping them solve their problems. If the answer is no, you need to ask yourself: What can I do about it? How can we improve our offering?
- Interact with your customers often. Ask them why they purchased your product or service. Learn firsthand how your product or service makes their lives easier. Furthermore, learn more about them as people. Strong customer relationships will have a massive impact on your business.
