The Battle for Customer Loyalty Requires an Effortless Experience
In today’s digital age, customers are inundated with choices and have increasingly high standards for their patronizing businesses. To gain and retain customer loyalty, companies need to provide an effortless experience that is smooth, seamless, and satisfying. If businesses can offer an effortless experience, they will likely keep customers coming back, and maintain loyalty.
What is customer loyalty, and why is it important?
Customer loyalty is the devotion of a customer to a particular brand or company. It is essential because it helps businesses retain customers. Loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and refer friends and family members to a company. They are also more likely to be forgiving if a business makes a mistake. Gartner postulates that loyalty is not driven by delighting customers but by making it easy to do business. 96% of customers who had high-effort experiences reported being disloyal, compared to only 9% with low-effort experiences.
What are some ways to create an effortless customer experience?
Creating an effortless customer experience includes eliminating potential roadblocks and anticipating customer needs. One way to remove roadblocks is ensuring that the website is easy to navigate, the checkout process is smooth, and there are no glitches or errors. For example, suppose a business was to implement native mobile messaging with Apple or Google messaging channels. In that case, the experience can be catered to users who are more often on their mobile devices and expect mobile-friendly websites. Providing a launch point directly from the website into a shopping experience with a guided flow, rich with carousels of images, and a simple tap to purchase or escalation to a live agent in a contact center will ensure a positive, effortless customer engagement experience.
How to anticipate the customer’s needs
The second way to provide an effortless experience is through anticipation. This means anticipating the customer’s needs and providing them with the information or resources they need before they know they need it. This can be done through live chat, personalized recommendations, and proactive customer service. For example, implementing CRM integration or other customer information database improves the likelihood of an agent having enough context and history of the customer to anticipate and address their issue proactively. Alternatively, an intelligent voice response (IVR) system could identify them automatically from the customer’s ID or phone number and offer personalized self-service options or perhaps VIP priority routing to an agent who has helped them before and knows their situation.
Conclusion
The battle for customer loyalty is a never-ending fight. The only way to win this war is by delivering an effortless experience, one that’s based on the needs of customers and prospects. When understanding how they think and how their behavior changes in response, that will help deliver content or services tailored to their wants and needs. To create an effortless experience, remove all the friction that customers might encounter. This includes anything that gets in their way, from filling out a form to waiting for a response. Make it easy for them to do business , and they will be more likely to come back.
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