The internet is undeniably a blessing to the world.
Wouldn’t you agree?
It brought with it nearly infinite choices for consumers, as well as helping businesses reach a wider market.
But it also came along with some challenges.
One of such challenges is that customers receive an avalanche of messages from different brands daily.
And because of this, it makes it tedious for them to choose products/services that suit their needs.
What’s more, these brands all seem to sell the same products at the same price. This makes finding the right fit even more arduous.
Accordingly, this situation has forced customers to look not only at the product features, but at the brand itself.
They are now asking questions such as:
- Do I know this brand?
- Does it have a good reputation or not?
- Can it deliver on the experience I seek?
- Does it live up to its own values?
- Do my friends/family trust them?
They may also seek out only companies that values that they agree with.
These all point to one thing.
Can you guess what it is?
If you said ‘Trust’, you are not far from the truth.
The thing is customers look for and do business with brands they can trust. According to Eptica, 79% of customers will take their business elsewhere if they stopped trusting their current brand.
Don’t take this personal. You won’t do business with a company you don’t trust, would you?
For this reason, you are saddled with the responsibility of building trust with your customers if you hope to keep them.
Do you know how you can do this?
Let me show you a 4-stage process to improve your brand reputation and customer experience.
And the first thing you need to do is…
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Listen To Your Customers
Relationships are built on trust.
Trust, in turn, is built on understanding. To understand your customers, you need to listen. And listen effectively.
Many brands have VoC programs in place that rely heavily on surveys. And as we have learned, surveys aren’t enough.
To listen effectively, you need to keep an ear out on multiple channels.
For instance, you could analyse social media, emails, and blog post comments to learn more about what your customers are saying.
Because this will help you cover more ground and gather more data on what your customers are saying.
Remember, your customers aren’t on only one platform. And so, you want to spread out to as many channels as possible to listen to as many as you can.
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Automate The Insight You Gather
As digital platforms multiply, the volume of data is growing by the second.
And there’s one thing that is worse than insufficient data – too much data! When you have too much data that you cannot handle, it becomes useless.
This is happening right now. Customers contact brands through different channels almost 500 million times in a single month.
That’s a truck load of data to deal with.
Worse still, most of the data is in text format which makes it even more difficult to process for emotional cues.
The best way you can do this is to automate the data processing.
And by this, I mean you should use algorithms to analyse this large amount of data. You can program the algorithms to sort through the data to reveal the emotions behind the text.
Automating this process will enable you spot patterns in your customers’ opinions. In addition, it saves you the cost of hiring data analysts to interpret the data.
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Share The Revealed Insight To Everyone And On-The-Go
Many companies fail because departments do not run with the same information. Or fail to circulate current information to all departments in time.
There is also the problem of exempting certain departments from getting current information, maybe because they aren’t customer-facing.
The truth is that improving customer experience is everybody’s responsibility.
And as such, customer insight should be shared with every department in real-time. The shared information will help foster change in systems in every department to improve customer experience.
Remember, the customer insight should be disseminated immediately to everyone in your company to allow for uniform change across board.
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Act (In Unison) On the Customer Insight. Rinse and Repeat.
Now you have got insight.
It’s time to act on it and improve your customer experience.
To start with, you should identify specific pain points or problems that your customers face. And then provide a quick solution to prevent them from leaving your brand.
Next, you need to use the data to spot problem trends/lapses in your business and make the necessary adjustments. The data can serve as an early warning system to notify you of impending issues before they get out of hand.
Improving customer experience and building brand reputation is a continuous process. There’s no end to it.
Therefore, you must constantly analyse data, spot problems, make improvements, rinse and repeat.
In Summary…
Customers have a zillion options of products or services.
The sheer number of choices is overwhelming. Now customers look beyond product features and prices, and pay attention to experience and brand reputation.
Therefore, as a brand, you must focus on building your reputation by instilling trust in your customers. Using this four-stage process, you can easily and seamlessly improve customer experience.
POSTED ON January 31, 2020Share:
