With the rise of technology at a rate that was never been seen before, the pressure to deliver a better customer experience(CX) is higher than ever.
If you want to increase the overall revenue of your business, providing a better customer experience is the first thing you can do. For the always on and always connected generation Z(16-22) and the still prominent generation Y(23-37) customer service matters the most when sticking with a brand. This gives you a large window of opportunity for some of the most exciting business opportunities.
Notable Customer Experience Statistics
Improving your customer service is really not a thing of the new age. Better customer support was a break it or make it type of condition for a successful business even in the early ages.
But with a computer in each of our pocket (more powerful than all of NASA’s combined computing in 1969) the game has been accelerated to a much faster pace. Keeping up with the rising consumer expectations to deliver a better experience is becoming more & more difficult both in the offline and the ever-expanding online world.
If you ever had your doubts, American Express released a detailed report on consumer expectations for the future. A few simple data shows that –
- Gen Z was twice as likely as Gen Y to stop using a product, brand or service due to responsiveness on social media (21% vs 9%).
- More than twice as many Gen Z consumers ranked using text/SMS messaging, searching online resources and talking over the phone with an automated system (i.e. not speaking with a customer service rep but rather using automated menus) as their top three preferred customer service channels to solve a problem, over Gen Y. Gen Y was twice as likely to want to use chat messaging on a company’s website and 25% more likely to resolve an issue via phone.
You can check out the full report from here.
Tools You Can Use
There are always things to improve your business whether you are in a B2B or B2C environment. With the rise of social media and multiple automated CRM & marketing tools, the road to improvement is a lot easier than ever before.
Specifically, in the area of customer experience(CX), you can improve on areas that would have seemed impossible even a decade ago. Customer data that is well beyond from what was available before, can now be had for a fraction of the price sometimes even for free.
Multiple tools are available on the internet that can provide you analytics that can turbo boost your business. You can easily implement Google Analytics, a very popular analytics tool from the giant Google inside your website to track the ROI of your investments by tracking literally everything.
Then there are multiple social media channels(Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) where you can interact with your customers one on one. You can start with most of them for free. Tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, CoSchedule take social media interaction a step ahead, with its automation and customer statistics features.
You can even take feedback from each of your customers individually at their own preferred time using multiple survey tools (Google forms, Typeform) and send automated emails(MailChimp, Aweber) that are tailored to each user base.
Strategies You Can Follow
But still, there are some best practices that you have to maintain your business and your brand to be a customer satisfied one despite all this technological advancement. Below are some key points that you can follow –
- You have to create a clear vision & mission for what kind of experience you want your customers to feel
- Have a clear understanding of your customers. What is their demographics, what is their behavior and so on? This information is not that hard to get in today’s world.
- Use tools that provide you the ability to capture customer feedback in real time scenario.
- Proper measurement of what you invested and what you got as ROI so that you have the data to know what to better.
- And much more
Why WordPress & CX (Customer Experience)
WordPress is the most popular CMS out there with a market share of 60% and absolute usage of 29.2%. It is the most preferred web design & blogging platform in the world right now.
Not only with its staggering number but also with an infinite array of plugins(53,589 at the time of this writing) WordPress can become a really good platform that you can use for great customer experience. You can implement the easiest way to send automated emails to maintain a relationship with your customers using free plugins like MailPoet. For the simplest of customer surveys, you can use form builder plugins like weForms, that can offer great features for free of cost. Connect your Google Analytics accounts with Analytify to see all the complicated information in a much simpler form. Step up your social media game using CoSchedule, Nelio Content plugins.
There are very few things that WordPress can’t do. Who would have thought that we would see an ERP system on WordPress that actually works! WP ERP with its free HR, CRM, and Accounting modules really changed how one looked at WordPress as a mere blogging platform for individual or a publication.
There are also some other great plugins like Yoast SEO (to make your content for findable), WP Fastest Cache (to make your website faster), Sharing (to add social integrations) to get you started.
Verdict
It has never been more ROI positive to be a customer-centric business than in today’s world. The evolution of information sharing has shifted the power of building or ruining a business in the hands of the end consumer. Remember the United Airlines incident or the Uber CEO caught in berating a driver. None of that would have mattered even just 10 years ago. A common misconception that many businesses tend to have is that they think the world is changing while the truth it has already changed.
Platforms like WordPress is also changing along with the world. Many new applications are significantly helping in the process. WordPress can really give the jump start that your business needs. So, if you are using WordPress to power up your business website or online store, you can take advantage of the plugins with rich customer experience. This will enhance the visibility of your service and your customers will feel comfortable on your site.
