Customer Experience is Key to Customer Service and Brand Loyalty

Positive Customer Experience = Loyalty

When I was in high school (100 years ago), I participated in Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA), an organization that prepares students for careers in marketing, finance, hospitality, and management. In DECA, one point that was driven home over and over was that customer service is the key ingredient to generating and maintaining brand loyalty.

While I’ve carried that belief throughout my life and career, for many years it seemed that companies had forgotten the importance of customer service. That’s changing, thanks to the digital age. Consumers now have the ability to give real time feedback to brands of all sizes regarding their experience in person and online – and bad experiences can go viral very quickly.

Your brand is not defined by your messaging. It is ultimately defined by the way your customers perceive it, making customer experience the highest of priorities. Brands must listen and respond to feedback they receive online, address it, and adjust the way they do business based on this organic feedback.

Here are some tips for improving the customer experience with your brand’s digital presence:

• Ensure that your website is easy to navigate. For more tips on improving customer experience on your site, click here and here.
• eCommerce transactions should be secure and easy to complete. Fulfillment should be optimized for customer satisfaction.
• Maintain consistent messaging across platforms. Inconsistent messaging can confuse and frustrate customers.
• Listen and respond to customer feedback and make changes to procedures, if warranted.
• Empower employees to quickly and thoughtfully deliver solutions to customer service issues that arise via social media or your website.
• Set employee boundaries for discussing customer interactions online. Employees should not argue or debate, nor should they disclose information about the customer or interactions.
• Once an issue has been resolved, follow up with the customer to ensure their satisfaction with the process and ask for feedback on your procedures.
• Examine your website and social media analytics to determine what is working and look for areas to improve the customer experience.
• Not every customer will get one-on-one attention from a team member, but they should be made to feel that their patronage is appreciated and that consideration for their experience is a priority.
• Utilize collected customer data to personalize the customer experience when possible.
• Offer specials and loyalty programs via social media.
• When asking for feedback via a customer satisfaction survey, offer an incentive for the customer to respond.
• Develop a social media policy to establish expectations and boundaries for employees on corporate and personal social media accounts.
• Create a social media crisis management plan – in advance of a crisis – to ensure procedures are in place for quickly managing a crisis and mitigating damage.

 My bottom line advice to improve your digital presence is simple: Think like your customer. In other words, if you were your customer what would you expect from your company? How can you exceed those expectations?

Are you giving your customers an experience worth coming back for or are you sending them to your competitors?

Need help delivering a customer experience that encourages loyalty? Get in touch with us today and we’ll help you turn your customers into fans!

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Carole Billingsley (@YouSeekSocial) is a social media consultant and trainer. Combining her social media expertise with her decades of experience in entertainment and education, Carole founded Seek Social Media in 2011. She is known for her ability to make technical and social media topics easy to understand for even the least tech-savvy business owner. Specialty areas: social media, customer experience, digital presence, crisis management.