You have heard the term, a happy customer is worth his or her weight in gold and this is true. A customer who is happy with your business will spread that intangible but so valuable ‘word-of-mouth’ publicity that will be more effective than any other method of marketing due to its authenticity. As a startup, your resources are limited and you want your business to grow to the maximum possible without spending too much.
Ensuring that your customers are happy with you can help you do that. But you may argue that you have a good quality product or service and it is reasonably priced, then what else is required? Yes, a quality product or service at reasonable prices is essential but it is only a part of what makes the customer happy. What you need to focus on is the customer experience.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience goes beyond customer service and refers to the experience your customer has with all the touchpoints throughout his or her buying journey and even post that. Today, most customers start their buying journey much before they visit your e-commerce or physical store to make the purchase.
Customers start their buying journey by looking at reviews about your product or listening to other customers’ voices on social media. The next step of the journey could be when they get in touch with your customer-facing teams for more information. Your entire nurturing of them through the buying process, the actual buying itself, the delivery of goods or services, and the post-sale support and services are all factors that affect the customer experience.
A seamless, friendly, and business-like experience is something that all customers want at every stage, though the extent of the importance of these factors varies. Investing in a solid CRM and customer service software could help your business make the experience seamless for your customers.
Five reasons you should not ignore customer experience
5 Reasons for Startups to Focus on Customer Experience
Establishes your brand better
Whether you acknowledge it or not, your business brand perception makes a difference to the way customers approach you. Providing a seamless customer experience establishes your brand persona in the minds of your customers. For instance, a jolly and friendly brand persona is appealing to B2C customers, especially for a younger demographic. In the same way, an efficient but friendly persona is more appealing to the B2B customer segment.
Improves customer lifetime value
Selling your product or service to a customer is not a one-time transaction, but rather a lifetime of value from the customer. A happy customer who has had a good customer experience with your business is likely to go for repeat purchases from you and this means you will be improving the lifetime value of your customers without much additional expense.
Reduces cost of marketing efforts
With an excellent customer experience mechanism in place, you can dramatically reduce your marketing costs. People tend to listen to the stories of other people rather than stories from brands. And when you offer a good customer experience to one customer, he or she is likely to share the story online and such stories are invaluable when it comes to establishing your brand. You can further amplify these authentic experiences by collaborating with UGC creators who create relatable content that resonates with potential customers and use them for different marketing purposes. It is one of the most powerful ways to organically market your brand.
Provides you with invaluable insights
The process of providing a good customer experience across all customer touchpoints will ensure that you collect data points. These data points will provide you with invaluable insights when it comes to improving your product or customer service. For instance, your perception that price is the tipping point for purchase decisions may change when you realize that customers give a lot of value to long-term usage of the product or the quality of services.
It helps with market research
As a business, you are always on the lookout for the next level, whether it is in terms of extending your product lines or exploring new markets. When you have data collected from the entire customer experience that your customers are subjected to, this can provide you insights for your future plans as well.
In conclusion, we can agree that customer experience is not something that startups can ignore. If anything, you need to focus on customer experience to be able to deal with the fierce competition in today’s markets. At EnKash, we believe that customer experience is not only connected to the product or service aspect but also to the payments and collections processes. That is why offer a free AI-enabled spend management platform that helps you manage the financial aspects of your business well.
