Improve Your Customer Experience and the Rest Will Follow

As the old saying goes – the devil’s in the detail, and I believe customer experience is also in the details. Making every aspect of the customer experience seamless is crucial to winning and retaining customers.

I always think of customer experience as the same as running an event. When you run an event, you think about every little detail – what will happen with the parking attendant when people drive up to the event, what’s the experience going to be like when the guests enter the building and what visually are they going to see? What will they smell? What are they going to eat? Party planners will consider every aspect of the experience before, during, and after the event. All these small details work together to build a positive customer experience – and it only takes one bad experience to ruin all your hard work.

As Warren Buffett says, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.“

So what are some common problems companies face regarding customer experience?

You aren’t focusing enough on nurturing existing customers

Many businesses will focus on customer experience with the mindset of lead generation but not on customer experience with the mentality of nurturing a long-standing customer relationship.

I’m a great believer that your database is your gold; therefore, you need to polish that gold and look at the experience your customers have to grow organically.

If you nurture and focus 80% of your activity on promoting your database, you will see a much higher return for organic growth, leading to increased revenue. You will earn more because happy customers will refer you to other business leaders, buy more of your products, or use your services more often.

Your business should aim for a low churn rate and a high yield. Plus, I believe the more investment you put into a client, the better your return will be!

At Attain, we are huge on customer experience because we want our clients to have longevity. Therefore we have introduced a Revenue Operations (RevOps) team for better communication between different roles during tasks because…

99% of failure has a root cause in communication

Another part of customer experience is fixing your mistakes. If something goes wrong in the customer experience, a root cause analysis is crucial.

You need to train yourself to be a bloodhound, to sniff out problems and ensure they don’t happen again. And when these problems inevitably occur, you need to be the first to take accountability and offer your customer solutions.

Your customer will most likely understand if you explain things as they happen, but not if you waste time and approach them at the last minute.

Communication is so crucial to us here at Attain. So much so, that we are putting all our account managers on a written and verbal communications course to ensure the best customer experience for our clients.

You are too focused on aesthetics

If you find yourself spending a lot of time on aesthetics, stop!

Don’t get me wrong – your brand is essential, but this is surface-level stuff. It’s like dating someone because of the way they look. You need to go deeper into the character and values of that person to make the relationship last.

Not many people realise that relationship development is crucial to customer experience. Many people will initially approach your business for the aesthetics of your service. Still, longevity with a customer is created when they appreciate your values and the character of your business and want to invest time and money. Your business needs to nurture a client before and after they become one.

Onboarding turns into offboarding

If a business hasn’t got its onboarding process right, you will likely see cracks forming in relationships early on. From my experience, I know that if the first three months of onboarding are not done correctly, we will likely experience problems six to nine months later.

I call this the birthing process – because if a child is birthed and doesn’t have a supportive mother, they will likely have difficulties later on. So the onboarding is effectively the foundation years, where the client needs to be well looked after.

If a tiny detail is missed, this is enough to create a ripple effect that creates more significant issues in your working relationship.

You don’t have a CRO

I like to think of the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) as a professional event planner. Every event needs a planner who is able to oversee all the different aspects that will come together to make up an event. When the invitations go out, people will be told what to expect and what to wear.

A CRO is in charge of managing every function that impacts revenue within a business and implementing initiatives that improve business revenue streams.

The CRO has complete visibility over all business areas so they can see and resolve any issues occurring in different areas of the business. They also oversee the sales team to make sure they are setting achievable expectations with the client, so the team doesn’t turn up to the party in, say, a cocktail dress when the theme was 1920’s flapper.

The CRO is the most critical factor when it comes to customer experience because they align all business strategies to ensure everyone is working together to meet the customer’s needs.

Conclusion

There are so many little details that need to work together in order for your business to provide your customers with a fantastic customer experience, which in turn, will grow your revenue.

Some of the things your business needs to think about are nurturing existing customers, communication between your team and clients, relationship building, and having a talented CRO who manages the customer experience strategy.

Without all these things, your business will struggle to deliver an incredible customer experience.

Alexandra Donaghy
M: +64 21 029 01370
E: alex@weareattain.com