30 percent of customers will leave a brand they love after one negative experience.
You can slice this information whichever way you like, but one thing is clear: consumers have no time for mediocre services. With so many options at their disposal, they’ll quickly find a business that meets their experience expectations.
As a business owner, you certainly have a customer experience strategy. Is it working effectively for your business?
If you’re seeing tons of negative reviews and poor customer retention rates, something isn’t right. It’s time to correct your mistakes before it’s too late.
To help you out, we’re giving you possible reasons your customer experience sucks, as well as what you can do to fix it.
Let’s dive into it.
Your Product Isn’t Living Up to Customers’ Expectations
Your customers have expectations.
When they buy your product or service, they at least expect that it will work as you have advertised it. Selling a home internet service that promises 1000 Mbps? Your service better delivers the advertised speed; otherwise, your customers will be disappointed.
Bear in mind that your product or service is how customers experience your brand every day. They might not call you or come into your store often, but as long as they have your product, the experience is ongoing.
Therefore, if your product quality isn’t up to snuff, it’s easy to see why your customer experience strategy is failing. The good news this can be an easy fix. You just need to make product quality improvements and ensure you’re offering customers the best.
Your Website Is Underwhelming
In 2019, a survey established that 46 percent of small businesses didn’t have a website.
At a time when almost everyone is either shopping online or starting a search for a product or service online before making a physical shop visit, it’s baffling that several businesses still aren’t online. If your business is one of these, your customers aren’t having a good experience with your brand.
But then, solving this problem isn’t as simple as just putting a company website together. You can have a website and end up offering a worse experience compared to a business that has no website.
Your website’s users need to have a good experience. They shouldn’t wait longer than 3 seconds for any of the site’s pages to load. The site should be accessible to the users regardless of whether they’re visiting from a desktop, smartphone, smartwatch, or other internet-enabled devices.
Once they land on the site, they don’t want to see cluttered pages with loads of content that isn’t useful to them. They want a fluid design that enables them to navigate around the site with ease.
Have you visited a site and tried to figure your way to its homepage? If it took you more than one click to find the home page, there’s only one word to sum up your experience: bad.
Your customers are going to judge your website by current industry standards. If it comes short, you’re giving them a bad experience.
Hire a professional website designer and developer to create your business website. If you already have a website, find out where it’s failing and make improvements. Decibel.com has great information on how you can use website heatmaps to study user behavior on your site.
Your Customer Helplines Are Inadequate
Keeping an open line of communication with customers is key to offering a great customer experience and running a thriving business.
Unfortunately, keeping this open line of communication is easier said than done. Yet, your potential and existing customers are always looking to contact your business and make inquiries or file complaints.
How quickly can someone reach your business and get the help they need? If it’s taking longer than a few hours for people to get to someone in your business or get a response, you aren’t doing yourself any favors.
What’s more, we now live in a world of instant messaging. If you aren’t offering your customers a way to message you and get instant responses, you’re hurting their experience.
Plus, customers want a variety of contact options. Especially if your business caters to diverse demographics, it’s important that you offer diverse contact options. There are customers who will want to call in, others will want to send in emails, some will want to chat on social media.
Your Brand’s Online Reputation Is Wanting
Over 90 percent of customers read online reviews before making a purchase.
Besides reading reviews to determine whether your product works, they’re also looking to evaluate the kind of customer experience your brand offers. Terrible reviews mean the experience isn’t great, so most won’t bother to even visit your website or local store.
Every business, even those that don’t have online operations, are bound to collect online reviews. It’s your responsibility to monitor your business’s online ratings and reviews as they can make or break your reputation.
If you’ve got negative reviews, it’s never too late to get a fix. There are online reputation management services that can help clean up your brand’s online reputation.
Craft a Customer Experience Strategy That Works
Great customer experience is the key to high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty. You can’t pull this off without having a CX strategy that works. With this guide, you now know how to find holes in your strategy and make effective adjustments.
Don’t stop here. Keep reading more of our posts for deeper business insights.