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Five Tips For Tackling Customer Experience Problems

Forbes Business Development Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Maxime Rieman

When Adobe surveyed close to 3,000 companies in 2018, about one in five identified "optimizing the customer experience" (CX) as the most exciting opportunity in their organization. Given that it's such a widely recognized issue, the result may come as no surprise to most business development professionals. However, there is a huge difference between knowing that customer experience matters and understanding how to approach it in your organization.

How do you measure and prioritize experience? How do you effectively identify problems? What steps can you make to improve it? These are all questions that should be on the forefront for any small, midsize and enterprise-level business. Even the most minor improvements in your process can have a tremendous impact on sales.

Check out these five tips on how to approach and think about the experience of your clients.

1. Consider If Your Industry Needs To Evaluate Customer Experience

Before we begin, it's important to acknowledge that focusing on customer experience, while nice in concept, doesn't have a big impact in all industries. For example, one report from Forrester showed that credit card providers "shouldn't bet on CX for large revenue gains," while auto manufacturers have the highest revenue potential. Of course, revenue isn't the only measure to look at. If you're aiming to improve your brand, for example, then customer experience may still be a factor to consider. You should research potential impacts before devoting time to this approach.

2. Start With KPIs: Measure Customer And Client Satisfaction

"Customer experience" can, at times, seem like an amorphous concept. That's why, before making efforts to change it, you ought to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) to help pin down exactly what you want to improve. For smaller firms, that means talking to your clients about their satisfaction. For enterprise-level companies, automated customer services are the way to go.

Once you have the data, interpreting it is the next step. If you have a dedicated team of researchers and data analysts, they will do this for you. If you're doing that work yourself, an easy place to start is by checking customer experience metrics over time — rather than looking at the results for a single survey. Unless you have serious problems, the initial data you gather won't provide much insight. However, you'll want to pay close attention to how scores and answers change over time as you continue to survey your customers.

3. Identify Specific Problems And Examine Experiences For Specific User Groups

The first step in addressing customer experience is to identify problems and prioritize them based on impact. If you begin by tackling customer experience broadly, rather than identifying specific issues, you'll likely see poor results. Worse yet, you may break parts of your CX that work well.

Are clients unhappy with how long it takes to get back to them when problems happen? Do you receive frequent complaints about how long it takes to close a sale? These are the types of questions you should be asking to identify problems. Ideally, you should create questionnaires that help you identify and prioritize problems.

Analyze different client segments for potential issues — starting with your most important clients first. For example, mobile game companies that offer "freemium" apps put most of their efforts on improving the customer experience for just a small segment of their player bases. Research suggests that 70% of all in-app purchases are made by just 10% of the players — so-called "whales." You likely already know who those customers are in your business. Begin by analyzing and addressing their experience first, as it's likely to have the biggest impact on your bottom line.

4. Make Sure You're Addressing Wait Times

One survey by American Express, a Value Penguin partner, found that customers are willing to wait up to 13 minutes for over-the-phone support. Why focus on improving this as a metric? The same study found that nearly 74% of respondents said they spend more with a company that has a history of providing positive and quick customer service.

Even if your support teams cannot resolve a customer's problem immediately, it helps to acknowledge their issue. Reach out to your client and reassure them you are aware of their issue. Even this small gesture can improve how they view the entire exchange.

5. Make Sure Your Customer Support Infrastructure Scales With Your Business

All the good intentions in the world cannot make up for a lack of business infrastructure that can support an adequate customer experience. As your company grows and takes on more clients, make sure you're scaling more than just inventory. Don't stretch your customer support staff thin; otherwise, everything we discussed here will begin to slip. Your team will have less time for your "whales," wait times will likely increase and so on.

As you scale and grow, it may become necessary to leverage debt to handle the expansion. You might seek investors or take out small-business loans. If you choose the latter, it's best to first consider government-backed loans from the Small Business Administration. These historically have the lowest interest rates, ranging between 4 and 13%. Newer businesses may have to seek loans through online lenders, and these can be considerably more expensive.

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