By Linda Williams
In a market experiencing tremendous competition and economic uncertainty, keeping customers close to the heart can be the key differentiator among thriving businesses and foreclosing mom-and-pop shops. If you’re a business owner in LA County, the customer experience should take center stage. Besides garnering a band of loyal customers, focusing your concentrated attention on the customer experience leads to increased referrals, sets you apart from competitors, and establishes a long-lasting bond with your customers.
Most of us have heard the sentiment “the customer is king.” That said, don’t dethrone your target consumer by failing to allocate time and financial resources to the customer experience. If you’re a business owner navigating these trying times, you’ll want to prioritize your target customer now and for years to come.
With this in mind, below are strategies you can infuse into your business model. That way, you can monitor the evolution and enhancement of customer experience (CX) over time.
Harness the power of technology
With an increase in business applications, speed and agility are critical pillars for driving customer experience. Constantly updating applications is pivotal in keeping your customers on their toes and coming back for more. To stay relevant in the market, stay up-to-date on the latest technological innovations.
In light of the above, business owners should consider the Kubernetes-based container platform from SUSE when centering their focus on the customer experience. Put simply, with Kubernetes, you lower costs and save on time. How? For one, these container solutions allow you to deploy less IT workforce, lending to minimal supervision. This way, you can channel your efforts towards innovations like machine learning, personalization, and IoT to optimize the customer experience.
Understand your customer
Through research, develop a persona for your customers. Understanding your customers’ profile helps you connect with them more intimately based on their unique attributes, personal motivators, and pain points. You can use interviews, focus groups, and surveys to collect insights about your customers. Analyze the data to identify opportunities and develop solutions to the challenges your customers are facing.
Customer journey mapping
If you are keen on improving your customers’ experience, you must understand their journey when interacting with your brand. Understanding this origin story helps you take note of the pain points and maintain what’s working.
Journey mapping provides in-depth insights about your customer beyond what you already know. It helps you establish aspects of the journey, even those that aren’t easily identifiable but have equal weight and significance to the overall customer experience.
Journey mapping helps assess the below metrics:
- Insights: Understanding the existing customer journey better.
- Impact: How to optimize budgets and efforts to enhance the customer experience.
- Opportunities: Diagnosing the existing customer journey
- Innovation: Identifying areas you can update to improve the current customers’ experience.
Journey mapping helps you capture the most pivotal moments of emotional load, allowing you to transform your brand to match the customer’s expectations.
Brainstorming new strategies
Brainstorming is a structured idea generation technique completed via collaborative efforts. By bringing on the right personnel with the relevant knowledge and skills, business owners can solve the problems at hand. To harness the power of brainstorming, encourage divergent thinking without restrictions. Then converge the ideas that best meet the customers’ needs.
Brainstorming is followed by an agile process of customer experience design development where unproven ideas are retired, and viable concepts are developed further into a business case to inform action.
Final word
Now that you’re acclimatized to the customers’ pain points, journey, and interactions with your brand, the next step is to devise a system that measures your customers’ experience. Here, many companies turn to a customer experience tool that records, measures, analyzes, and reports on customer experience data.
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