3 Places Your Customer Experience Is Lacking

Your business relies on its customers in order to survive; survival hinges on making customers happy and keeping them happy over the long term. And now, with the evolution of technology moving at a rapid pace, customers are expecting an experience from start to finish.

“Customers today now expect and demand a quality, customer service-oriented experience every time they deal with you--in addition to the product or service you sell.” –Business.com

If your customer experience is lacking – in the purchase process, in your call center, or online – this can have enormous ramifications for your business’s bottom line and its future.

Before taking one more call or accepting one more payment, consider how you can improve the experience your customers and therefore your bottom line.

The Purchasing Process

Getting your customers to complete a conversion with your business is a multi-step process. Many businesses fail to follow through with that process to the very end, resulting in lower conversion rates and higher customer dissatisfaction.

For the specific industry of online shopping, for example, the average shopping cart abandonment rate is 66.22%, according to Baymard Institute. This is attributable to a number of easily-corrected mistakes within ecommerce websites, such as:

• The average online checkout process requires 5.08 steps (some online retailers require up to 9 steps in the payment process).
• 24% of ecommerce stores require customers to register an account in order to complete a purchase.
• 50% of these stores ask customers to supply the same information more than once; 81% require buyers to receive their email newsletter or fail to provide an opt-out option.

By taking steps to minimize the above problems and utilizing marketing techniques to encourage shoppers to complete their purchases, online retailers can improve their conversion rates as well as their customer experience.

Your Call Center

While the number of customers who engage businesses over non-traditional means is growing, call centers are still a mainstay of customer service.

Bluewolf reported that 40% of incoming support requests are still directed to call centers; however, they found that 52% - more than half! – of total inbound calls are not resolved in the first call. Your first call resolution is a hugely important reflection of the quality of your customer service and, therefore, your call center’s bottom line.

• A 1% improvement in first call response equals $276,000 in annual operational savings for the average call center SQM benchmarks.

Social Media

Social media is continuing to grow and expand out to various industries, including sales, marketing, and customer service. As more customers engage businesses over social media, the importance of an appropriate, consistent, and speedy response will also grow.

According to research presented by Bluewolf, the number of customers who attempt to engage customer service through social will grow by 53% in 2013. However, only 20% of the Fortune 500’s 100 largest companies engage with their customers on Facebook.

58% of who tweet about a bad experience with a company will not receive a response from the company.

• In order to maintain – much less improve – your business’s current level of customer satisfaction, you need to engage with your customers over the web, especially social media. A consistently poor or negative customer experience can end up losing you up to 85% of your business.

Making improvements in your customer experience can save your business money, increase your revenues, increase your customer retention, and solidify your business brand as one that is helpful, competent, and worthwhile to invest in. Consider making changes that will improve how your customers experience your brand online, over the phone, and through social media.