Customer experience marketing has changed the way consumers choose a brand. Back in the day, companies relied on the quality of their products and services to attract customers. This is no longer the case today. Offering great products or services is considered the bare minimum requirement expected of all brands. However, providing an exceptional customer experience is something that every business should deliver but most fail to do so.
Your customer experience should align with your marketing strategy. Efficient and effective online customer experience management bolsters your efforts to attract customers and nudge them into your sales funnel.
One factor that can make an impact on your customer experience is online reputation. Customers have become the center of priority for most businesses, with the rise of social media and customer review channels like Google and Yelp. A dissatisfied customer can write a negative public review which anyone can read, making online reputation management services vital for a company to survive.
This article defines the ideal customer experience and explains how having a solid online reputation management strategy can help improve it.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience is the nature of how people go through your sales funnel, from the initial discovery of your brand to after they become customers. Some business owners mistake customer service for customer experience, but customer experience covers the entire customer journey.
A great customer experience ensures that, from the moment your customer visits your website until after they make a purchase, they enjoy their interaction with your site, brand and team. This means every interaction the customer has with your brand should be positive, quick and easy.
According to this recent study, the elements of excellent customer experience comprise of:
Personalization
Customizing your emails, promotions and ads to the right audience is key to turning customers into advocates. One example is sending an email to thank your customer after they’ve made a purchase; another is crafting targeted ads for people who have purchased a specific product from you in the past. Customer data is needed to personalize your marketing campaigns and send relevant content to the right customers.
Speed
Your customer’s needs are not totally taken care of when they complete a transaction with you. As they consume your product or service, they might discover another need that you can fill. Updating your products and services to meet new customer demands is vital. Successful customer experience professionals use data to implement quick but accurate product improvements that boost customer retention.
Ease
Customers don’t want any inconvenience. Some prefer getting marketing messages through email, while others prefer text messages. If you are aiming to improve your brand’s customer experience, you must tailor your methods accordingly. Making it easy for customers to do business with your brand is the best way to improve customer experience and keep them coming back.
When it comes to digital marketing, customer experience is not always the primary goal. However, putting customer experience at the center of your digital marketing strategies can bring lifetime benefits to sustain your business.
Who Is Responsible for Customer Experience?
Implementing a customer experience management plan involves a holistic approach to ensure a seamless and consistent experience, from point-of-sale (POS) engagement to after-sales.
Because customer experience involves all stages of a customer’s journey, all teams should be involved — marketing, sales and customer service. Combining these customer experience reputation management teams can also ensure you build a unified campaign focused on improving customer experience.
Suppose your company does not have the resources or workforce to execute an efficient customer experience and marketing strategy. In that case, you can get help from experts like a customer experience marketing agency to save you time and bring excellent results without the additional cost of personnel training and software.
Why Is Customer Experience Important?
The main goals of providing the best customer experience are customer acquisition and existing customer retention. However, beyond meeting your customer acquisition or retention goals, there are many benefits that come with implementing a superior customer experience reputation management marketing campaign.
Let’s look at some important statistics that support the importance of customer experience:
• Customers will spend 17 percent more for good customer experience (Source: American Express).
• Eighty-four percent of companies who invest in customer experience achieve better revenue (Source: Dimension Data).
• Each year, $1.6 trillion is lost because of poor customer service (Source: iPerceptions).
• Seventy-four percent of consumers will switch brands if they find the buying process too difficult (Source: Salesforce).
To summarize, not only does great customer experience influence customer acquisition and retention but it also directly impacts your revenue. Investing in effective customer experience marketing services or hiring a competent customer experience marketing agency is proven to increase revenue and bring a great return on investment (ROI).
Of course, some industries carry more of an expectation for excellent customer experience than others. It is paramount for industries like medical and legal services. Rize’s reputation manager, Tim Clarke, says, “Customers are very emotional about their health outcomes and also legal matters. The cost makes everything more emotional. Some of the bad reviews in these industries are very negative.”
How to Improve Your Customer Experience Marketing Strategy
There are many aspects to online customer experience management, since it covers the entire customer lifecycle. To come up with your own plan, you need to identify and build a strategy for every stage of your customer’s journey.
Gather Customer Data
You won’t know what your customers think about your brand unless you do some research. Having online review management software can be useful to track online reviews from multiple platforms and provide a fast response.
Along with data-gathering, you should also look at key metrics that are relevant to measuring customer experience. Conversion rates, churn rates, retention rates and customer satisfaction scores are some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) you can use to analyze and create the right customer experience management strategy. Online reputation management services include customer research and data-gathering.
Get Your Staff on Board
The best online customer experience management strategy will only work if your marketing, sales and customer service teams understand the importance of providing customers a consistently positive customer experience. Create standard customer experience guidelines for each team to ensure that your customers consistently enjoy great service throughout the customer lifecycle.
If you are hiring a customer experience marketing agency or using several online reputation management services, make sure you communicate your goals and challenges to ensure you get a tailored strategy that works for your brand.
Improve Your Online Reputation Management Strategy
Your online reputation management strategy can support your customer experience tactics. As research has shown, 97 percent of consumers look at online reviews when making purchasing decisions. An effective online review management system is able to shape a customer’s opinion of your brand even before they engage with you.
Key Tips For Better Online Review Management
A great reputation management strategy can generate leads and revenue early in the customer journey. Whether you have your own reputation team or outsource an online reputation management company, you need to create customized plans that fit your customer’s needs.
Reply to All Online Reviews
Whether you get a positive or negative review, responding within 24-48 hours is a great way to show customers your level of commitment to resolving their issues. Write your responses politely and briefly and offer a solution. If a solution is not immediately possible, give the customer a way to contact you to discuss the matter offline.
Responding to online reviews can be time-intensive and not all companies have the resources to get this done. A viable solution is to hire an online reputation management agency that handles review response. Rize Reviews provides this service in addition to review generation and review monitoring. Without a customer experience reputation management team, replying to all reviews can be tedious and ineffective.
Identify and Fix Issues as Soon as Possible
When you have enough data and identify any consistent issues customers keep bringing up in online reviews, you need to come up with a quick but long-term solution. Ignoring a major customer concern can lead to irreversible reputation damage which you can easily avoid. Get to the root cause of the problem, create and implement a solution and communicate this action to your customers.
Leverage Your Website or Blog to Create Positive Content
While you can’t stop customers from writing negative reviews about your business, you can use your own platform — such as your website or social media profiles — to talk about your brand in a positive, engaging and helpful way. With the right content and digital marketing, your customer experience can be immensely improved.
Publish helpful tutorials or useful updates about your products and services to educate your audience while answering questions they might have. As for positive reviews, you can always showcase them on your site. Online reputation management company Rize Reviews offers a review widget that allows you to display top customer feedback on any web page on your site.
Conclusion
Making an effort to improve your online customer experience management style might be hard work, but the rewards are worth the effort and cost. Acquiring customers can easily be done with basic digital marketing customer experience tasks. However, keeping loyal customers for life is more valuable and provides long-term benefits.
It’s also important to note that having an online review management system or hiring an online reputation management agency can significantly enhance your customer experience. When people find social proof that your brand is among the best, they are more likely to have a positive start in their customer journey.
Are you interested in getting reputation management experts to help you with your online reputation management? Rize Reviews provides fully managed services that does not require you to learn new software. We provide intensive client support using online training and a video library you can access at any time.
Reach out to us to learn more about our online reputation management company and get started with creating a better online reputation that improves customer experience.
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