Close your eyes and think of the best customer experience you ever had when making a purchase. Think about your favorite products and how you felt when interacting with all of their customer touch points. It could be when you purchased a luxury car, an iPhone, an online course, a gym membership or a simple cut of Starbucks coffee.
Customer experience can be defined how you make your customers feel when their interact with your company, your products and services. In 2020, we must understand that customers want an experience when they spend their money. For the longest time, Starbucks mission statement didn’t mention coffee. It was all about helping people have a better day. It was all about creating an amazing customer experience for their customers to keep coming back.
Here are the top 10 things you must do to turn leads into customers, and customers into fans.
When customers are ready to buy, they may have quick questions regarding your products and services. Imagine walking into a store, seeing all kinds of cool things on display but nobody around to answer your questions.
Don’t leave money on the table! Get someone ready to answer questions before they leave your website and never come back.
Text messaging will accomplish the same results and more so because they no longer need to be on your site to reach you. We recommend you ask for your site visitor’s phone number so you can continue the conversation after they’ve left your website.
If you’re at an early stage in your business and you can’t hire a sales team dedicated to quickly responding to your online customers, use your existing staff or do it yourself. All you need is to do is install chat app on your mobile phone that comes with your chat software provider and you’re ready to answer your customers when it matters most.
Imagine you’re a real estate agent at a party and you get a text message about one of your listings. You quickly answer their questions and you send them your calendar link to chose a good time to view the property. Even if they don’t buy this property, imagine the trust you gained by answering quickly? From experience, I’ve had agents not even return my phone calls or emails. I bought the property using another agent and they left thousands of dollars in commission on the table. All that because they didn’t respond quickly enough and in some cases, not at all. There is a huge opportunity for businesses that will adopt text messaging in their sales strategy.
I spoke to a real agent that received an email at 8am asking for information on his listing. He got back to the customer at 11am. The lead had already called another agent and the deal closed within 24 hours. He lost thousands of dollars because he didn’t have a sales team to respond quickly to the customer.
Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Understand that consumers have problems that need solving and they need to make purchases to make their lives better. They expect you to be the expert to give them the best advise possible.
Imagine letting a customer know you are easily reachable when they have questions. They can easily text you questions and you respond quickly. There is no better way to say you care about them while solving their problem.
Consumers are finding is difficult to reach sales and support teams over the phone. Email has a bad reputation of long wait times to get a response.
I myself have had long wait times when contacting businesses even when I was waiting to place an order. That means consumers are less confident about getting a quick answer when sending an email message. No joke, a company contacted me once 6 months after I filled out an email form to thank me for my interest. And you know what they say “If you can’t get service when buying, the support will be even worse”.
I love answering questions over the phone or chat and letting them know they can text me anytime. When you show that you are available during the customer lifecycle journey, customers become fans of your brand.
Consumers are finding is difficult to reach sales and support teams over the phone. Text messaging is the best way to receive and send quick responses. If you sell a product that involves multiple decision makers, ask to add the other person to the conversation. When you start a group text message, people feel included and that you are there for them.
I remember visiting a friend back in the 90’s and his neighbour had just sold a company for millions to Best Buy. My friend’s neighbour gave me one piece of advice that stuck with me throughout my entrepreneur life: make it easy for consumers to buy from you.
Giving direct access to your web site visitor and existing customer to your sales team. Imagine owning a travel agency and you receive a text requesting info for a trip. You add all travellers in the same text message and send everyone a a link of the trip you suggested. Let them know they can simply click the link and book online.
Consumers don’t want to be sold, they want your advice and information of what best solves their problem. The worse thing you can do is push sales based on commissions.
Once I’ve taken the time to explain a product or service over the phone, customers always ask how they can get a hold of me quickly. I love letting them know that I will text them right away and they can put us in our contact (don’t forget to take their first name to add them in your contacts). I also tell them if I’m not available or out, by texting us someone will respond to them quickly. I then brag how great other sales agents are and they’re all very experienced with the products and services we sell.
Make sure you have scripts put in place and set time aside to go over scenarios. You would be amazed how many sales agents make stuff up during these make pretend calls based on their assumptions. The executives and support teams are the ones who will suffer based on their disinformation. By the way, you may think it’s a sales person issue but the truth is, it’s often a lack of training and it can easily be corrected.
You as a business owner will always try to serve customers in the best of your abilities. Your sales agents should be clones of yourself but for this to happen, they need your guidance.
Customers can be difficult putting strain on your sales team. It’s sometimes easy for your staff to go on negative mode. It’s critical that you keep holding bi-weekly meeting to discuss customer experiences. You want to keep the sales morale high and share difficult customer situation and how to best handle them. Most importantly, your sales staff should share moments they were able to give the best possible experience to a customer.
Customer experience stories are what keeps us motivated to do more for our dear customers. Keep training and keep a positive vibe around the sales staff. Your employees and customers deserve it.
Customers buy based on trust and a good feeling. They are looking to solve their problem. If you’re in a competitive space like most of us, being available and letting your customers know they can communicate with you using their favorite method of communication gives you a huge advantage. It’s letting them know you care about their success
So there you have it! These are the top 10 action items you must do to provide your customers with the best possible experience.
