Why You Must Focus on Customer Experience
If you have at least ONE customer, you should be focusing on customer experience. Customer experience matters whether you are a small micro-business or a Fortune 500 corporation.
Let’s take a look at the reasons why you should focus on customer experience.
Customer Expect a Great Experience
One of the main reasons that you should focus on customer experience is, simply put, customers expect it. Your customer’s expectations are being shaped by all of the experiences they encounter. You are competing with companies like Apple and Starbucks, whether you realize it or not. The more you focus on customer experience, the more likely you will be in meeting your customers expectations.
Happy Customers Stay Longer
Customers that are satisfied with you, stay longer. Makes sense, right? As a customer you are likely very committed to companies that provide a consistently positive experience. This is called customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is beneficial for companies because it greatly reduces costs. For example, it costs companies 6-7 times more money to attract a new customer rather than to retain an existing customer. So often we focus on attracting new customers, when sometimes it pays to focus on the ones that we have.
Happy Customers Buy More
Not only do happy customers stay longer, but they buy more. Companies with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience. I don’t know about you but I would take a 5.7 times increased in revenue!
Happy Customers Refer More.
Happy customers not only buy more themselves but they refer more. I’m sure you can recall a time when you were really happy with a company. You likely sang from the rooftops and encouraged your friends and family to also do business with them. With social media, more and more customers are basing their purchasing decisions off of recommendations from friends and family. By focusing on customer experience you are encouraging your customers to do your marketing for you.
Engaged Employees
Companies that focus on customer experience don’t just see an increase in happy customers but they also see an increase in happy employees. Research from the Temkin group shows that companies that excel at customer experience have 1.5 times as many engaged employees as do customer experience laggards. Generally, if you are doing the right thing for your customers and get to have pride in what you are doing, that will naturally lead to higher levels of job satisfaction and engagement.
There are many reasons why you must focus on customer experience. What is nice about doing so, is it doesn’t always require a big budget or investments in technology. There are always things that you can do to improve the customer experience by reducing the customers effort, making it easy for them, and providing them with options.
If you look to improve a little every day, over time you will notice that you are much better off than where you started.
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