As technology continues to evolve, customers have become more empowered than ever before. They can research options, take advantage of free trials quickly and easily and share their experiences with your brand.
With this increased power come increased expectations from customers. And unfortunately, many businesses failed to meet these expectations in 2022.
So, we’ll explore the challenges businesses faced when fulfilling customer service expectations during 2022 and provide insight into what customers expect from businesses now and in the future.
What Is Customer Expectation?
But what is customer expectation, and why is it so important?
Customer expectation is the level of service, quality and performance that a customer “expects” from a business.
It can be anything from how quickly orders are fulfilled to how easy it is to find product information on your website.
Meeting customer expectations of service is crucial for your brand reputation since “customers will complain online and give bad reviews if their expectations are not met,” said Tim Clarke, Rize Reviews’ Senior Reputation Manager. After all, “it’s easy to ruin an online reputation but hard to repair it,”
Clarke suggested that companies connect with customers by conducting surveys and asking for customer reviews and feedback since this is usually where you can find what customers expect from your business.
You can even search through your competitors’ reviews and feedback to better understand your own customer service expectations and improve customer satisfaction.
What’s Holding Businesses Back?
It’s not like businesses don’t recognize the importance of customer expectations.
Businesses know that meeting customer expectations of service can make or break their success, but often struggle to do so because of these three factors during 2022.
1. Ineffective Use of Tools and Technologies
Businesses have so many options for meeting customer expectations of service.
From customer relationship management (CRM) systems to AI-powered chatbots, there are a plethora of tools and technologies available for you to use.
However, according to Salesforce research, many businesses struggle with understanding which tools are best suited for their industry and how to implement them effectively.
As a result, many businesses end up using a hodgepodge of different tools that don’t work well together, leading to inefficiencies, frustration and failure to improve customer satisfaction.
You can take a proactive approach to prevent this from happening.
That could mean getting new technology, taking away unneeded systems or replacing old ones with better solutions.
One great example is Rize’s streamlined enterprise-level solutions for a popular multi-location restaurant in 2018.
We leveraged our tech and automated their review process, resulting in a better ability to meet customer expectations of service, lifetime value and almost 16,000 new reviews in five months.
2. Cost-Results Attribution and Measuring Marketing ROI
With the multitude of channels and touchpoints available today, it can be challenging to attribute a specific cost to one particular result.
Without understanding this connection, it’s difficult for businesses to make informed decisions and gather customer insights about where they should allocate their resources for marketing spending and connect with customers.
Knowing which channels and customer engagement strategies yield the best results can help companies to focus on those channels that have proven effective while avoiding those that don’t contribute much value.
By carefully looking into your channels, customer insights and analytics, you can attribute marketing costs to specific results and better understand your marketing ROI.
This will help you optimize your marketing efforts and get the most out of your budget.
3. Balancing Personalization With Customer Comfort
We understand that personalizing your campaigns and giving tailored solutions to your customers is one excellent approach on how to improve customer experience.
But there is a fine line between providing too much personalization and becoming intrusive. Customers don’t want to feel like your brand is stalking them and don’t like sharing more information than they’re comfortable with.
Asking for too much information upfront and being too pushy with sales messages, all for customer insights can lead to customer discomfort.
On the other hand, not providing any personalization to improve customer engagement strategies can make customers feel like they’re just another number to you.
They may not come back if they don’t feel valued as an individual.
This can be especially tricky when companies rely heavily on data collected from customers through various digital platforms such as websites or mobile apps, which may require additional safeguards around how data is stored or used.
First-Party and Zero-Party Data
One way to personalize your campaigns is by utilizing “first-party” and “zero-party” data.
First-party data refers to information a company collects directly from customers, such as:
- Preferences
- Shopping history
- Contact details
Zero-party data goes one step further.
It includes not just demographics but also the context, motivations and intentions of customers. This data can come from surveys or loyalty programs where customers are asked questions about their needs and wants upfront.
You can then implement their suggestions or tell them you’ve heard them and are already working on them.
By doing this, you can learn more about your customers while still respecting them enough to give them an opt-out option.
Analyzing first-party and zero-party data helps companies build better customer connections so they feel valued without feeling like their privacy is being invaded.
2023 Customer Expectations You Must Meet
So far, we’ve been talking about the challenges businesses face when it comes to meeting customer service expectations and cultivating customer connections.
But what do customers actually want from businesses? Here’s what we discovered that can help you improve customer engagement strategies.
1. More Personalized Offers
Despite privacy concerns, customers are still looking for more personalized offers and discounts tailored to their individual interests.
This could mean providing personal recommendations based on past purchase history and customer insights or creating customized bundles that combine multiple products together.
By understanding customer interests, habits and preferences through data analysis, businesses can exceed customer expectation and keep them coming back for more.
2. Transparency in Company Values
Customers today want to support brands that share their values and beliefs.
So it’s essential for companies to be open about their values as a component of their customer engagement strategies – from environmental sustainability policies to ethical production practices – so that customers know exactly where they stand on these issues.
Your values become your tools for better customer connections and an excellent way on how to improve customer experience, even when they don’t use your products and services.
When customers feel confident about a company’s values, they are more likely to become loyal customers and even brand advocates.
3. Consistency Across All Channels
In an age where customer connections happen online and when visiting stores in person, customers expect a consistent experience across all channels.
This means ensuring that product information is up-to-date on all platforms of your customer engagement strategy (such as your website, mobile app and brick-and-mortar store) and that customer service representatives know about all available products and services.
For example, Rize has implemented easy-to-use landing pages for In-House Plumbing to collect reviews. This skyrocketed In-House Plumbing’s reviews from just 16 in 2017 to 373 in 2018!
By creating a unified experience across multiple channels, businesses can exceed customer expectation, improve customer experience and ensure a seamless transition between different touchpoints.
4. Respecting Their Privacy
We’ve already touched on this before, but it’s worth repeating: Respecting privacy is of utmost importance when you connect with customers.
That means being transparent when collecting customer information, providing clear guidelines on how personal data is used and stored and offering an opt-out option for customers who don’t want to share their data.
And this is not only limited to yourself. You must also ensure that your third-party vendors comply with privacy regulations.
By respecting customers’ privacy, businesses can foster greater trust and loyalty among their customer base.
Meet and Exceed Customer Expectation and Grow Your Brand
Meeting customer service expectations should be at the core of your customer engagement strategy.
Companies can no longer rely on an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality when trying to connect with customers. They want to be heard and valued, so it’s essential for companies to find ways to exceed expectations at every turn.
If you’re having difficulty doing this to improve customer experience, then it’s high time to work with an online reputation management agency like Rize.
At Rize, we have the tools and data to help you understand what customers want from your business so you can provide them with an exceptional experience.
We have helped businesses across industries generate more leads, get more reviews and improve their online reputation through various means.
We can help you get customer feedback, set up a review widget on your website and even create a streamlined landing page for all your review platforms.
We want to help you make your customers happy and build stronger relationships with them.
So if you want to stay ahead of the competition and exceed customer expectation, contact us today at 866.325.0303! We’re here to help.
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