You may be wondering why customer experience matters so much. After all, customers are only paying for the product or service they receive from you. But in reality, the value of customer experience can be much more than that.
One of the biggest mistakes small businesses make is not being prepared for a bad customer experience. When things go wrong, how should the business react? Do they blame the customer, or do they do something about it?
In a world where consumers choose based on price and convenience, companies need to provide extraordinary experiences to their customers. Otherwise, they risk losing them as customers forever. This article will look at six steps you can take to turn a bad customer experience into a positive one.
Delivering a bad customer experience is the reality for many entrepreneurs, and you can’t escape it. But, the important thing is how your small business can turn bad customer experiences into extraordinary ones.
Introduction
You can have the best-designed systems to support your business. Or the best employees who will implement different tasks related to your customers.
Also, there will be a large place for different types of mistakes. Mistakes can easily create a bad experience. But, it is not the end of your business. It can be the start of the end of your business if you don’t take anything to solve the problems and improve your business.
Because mistakes are the reality, delivering a bad customer experience can be the reality. So, you should build systems to turn bad customer experiences into extraordinary ones.
In a world where customers don’t just want to be served well but want to be treated as if they matter and are cared for, we want to help you turn your worst customer experiences into extraordinary ones. Also, you need to remember that more and more customer interactions are powered by AI chatbots or voicebots.
Definition of Customer Experience?
The customer experience (CX) is all about your relationships with your customers. It’s how you treat your customers when they’re dealing with your brand — whether that means a phone call to say thank you for an order or showing up at their doorstep with a gift basket for their birthday.
So, customer experience is a term that describes how customers feel while interacting with your brand, either online or in stores.
You need to remember that a positive customer experience is essential for retaining and attracting new customers. And as you may know, CX is also important to the customer’s perception of your brand.
Happy, loyal customers are the best investment you can make. If you treat your customers well and don’t ignore their requirements and needs, you will be rewarded with loyalty.
This is why brands that offer a superior customer experience outpace their competitors.
For example, here are some stats from PWC that caught our eye: in the U.S., almost 1 in 6 customers (that is 17%) will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience or 59% after several bad experiences.
As you can see, you must focus on delivering an excellent customer experience for your customers. And that includes being attentive and helpful as well as providing top-notch customer service.
Customer Experience VS Customer Service
The customer experience is not the same as customer service. It’s all about the relationship, the interactions between you and the customer, and it’s what goes into it that matters.
While customer service focuses on answering customer inquiries and resolving problems, customer experience focuses on the entire interaction and relationship between the company and the customer.
Think of customer service as the act of providing information to the customer, whereas customer experience is about establishing a connection and building trust through the entire customer experience.
Customer service is about keeping the customer satisfied with the current offering; customer experience is about finding ways to make the customer feel better about the future.
You can deliver excellent customer service. However, customer service is only one aspect of the entire customer experience.
For example, suppose you order some product or service through email and get a quick, friendly, and helpful response from the company. In that case, you will say that they have excellent transactional customer service.
But, if you get your products before the agreed delivery time and get in the box some additional value that you have not expected, you will have an outstanding customer experience!
You can see the difference! Customer experience covers more additional services combined into one.
Today’s technology is changing how we build customer relationships, bringing new opportunities to strengthen those relationships.
What is an Extraordinary Customer Experience?
The best customer experience is when customers reach their ideal results working with your company with as few problems as possible.
This means that the customer’s experience will be so positive that he or she will continue to come back to your store. It will encourage more sales and repeat business. Most customers will leave your store feeling happy. They will also tell others about the service you provide.
If they feel the service you provided was exceptional, then you’ve done well. Don’t ever forget that your customers have become your friends. You should take the time to go out of your way to help your customers. Always try to exceed their expectations. You don’t want to let them down.
What Your Customers Will Need to Get With Your Extraordinary Customer Experience
Today’s customers are looking for extraordinary experiences, which means they want new, different, and exceptional things. They are looking for ways to become more than consumers.
If you think about your product or service as a story that makes your company exceptional, then your role as a marketer is to tell that story.
The extraordinary customer experience is a mindset – not a process. It’s the mindset you have when you do the little things that matter. It’s the mindset you have when you treat your customers as the center of your universe. The extraordinary customer experience means that you don’t just focus on the end result but also on the means to get there.
How can you make an extraordinary customer experience?
A great customer experience involves creating the right experience for every type of interaction and method of communication.
💥 Aspects of an extraordinary customer experience
1. It makes your customers feel special and appreciated.
2. Your customers feel like they matter and that they are important to you.
3. They feel like they matter and that they are important to you
4. It goes beyond their expectations.
5. Your customer experience goes beyond what your competitors deliver.
6. It does all of this without friction or inconvenience.
Why Can Bad Customer Experience Destroy Your Business?
Customer experience is critical, but you cannot neglect the fact that the customer experience depends entirely on your business.
It’s not only your product that will make or break you. It is also a reflection of your company’s performance.
A bad customer experience is harmful to your business. It can be both expensive and detrimental to your reputation.
A customer who feels he or she is getting taken advantage of is likely to act negatively towards your business.
When you get a rude, insulting, or uncooperative customer, it makes it easier for him or her to tell others that your business is terrible.
1. Bad customer experience quickly spreads a negative message about your company.
That’s true, and in most cases, bad customer experience spreads with a more significant speed than extraordinary customer experience.
A bad customer experience can turn into a viral marketing nightmare very quickly.
One study found that consumers were more likely to share negative reviews from businesses online than positive ones.
Negative experiences are a powerful weapon for brand reputation management, mainly because they are often true, accurate, and verifiable. The trick to using them effectively is to respond quickly and effectively, using all the available resources.
2. It can have a negative effect on your current customers.
Yes, a bad customer experience can have a negative effect on your current customers who never have experienced a bad experience with you.
When you hear about the bad experience of other customers, your current customers will also lose trust in your business and will hurt your company.
If you have a bad experience with your current customers, they’ll let you know right away. They’ll complain about your products or services, their pricing, or any other aspects of your business. They’ll leave reviews online and elsewhere and tell their friends. And even if they don’t, the damage is done because it was their impression of your business that they left behind in the first place.
In such a way, many of your current customers that have not experienced anything wrong with you will know that something like that can happen to them also in the future.
So, you risk losing some of your customers even if they have not yet experienced poor services from your company.
3. It will quickly build an angry community around your business.
The most important reason to get this right is that bad customer experiences will quickly build an angry community around your business.
It’s not just the people who feel negatively towards your company. It’s their friends and family. That’s what people call social proof. It’s about the credibility and trustworthiness of a brand.
A bad customer experience leads to negative word of mouth and lost customers.
Because spreading bad things about your business has the speed of light, an angry community will often appear to have a negative opinion about you and your company.
Customers are the biggest influencers on social media, which is true no matter what industry you’re in.
If your company is terrible at delivering great customer experiences, you’ll quickly become a target for your customers.
Every person in your company must work to eliminate the mistakes and solve the problems. They need to minimize the negative effect of bad customer experiences and turn it into extraordinary ones.
What Do You Need to Do to Turn Bad Customer’s Experience Into Extraordinary?
If you’ve had a bad customer experience, changing your service into something better might seem impossible.
But it’s not impossible.
It just requires effort and dedication to understand the root cause of the problem. Then it’s time to take immediate action and do all you can to make things better.
You know your company’s customers really well. You’ve been working hard to get to know them and understand their needs.
But there’s one thing you don’t really know: how to turn a bad experience into an extraordinary experience.
This is where you come in. You’ve got the unique opportunity to change your company’s customer’s perspective of its brand – to let them feel like a winner even when they are losing.
If you can change the perception of what’s happening, it can completely turn their experience around.
Let’s look at what you need to do.
1. Mistakes are allowed, but it is not allowed not to manage them. Today is normal to make mistakes.
You will not make mistakes only if you don’t do anything. It is not possible.
It’s never good to see a customer service representative make mistakes, but it’s expected and normal if you’re running a business. Many people think that because they have an exceptional customer experience, they can’t have mistakes. But that’s just not true.
Mistakes happen, and nobody should use them to judge a company’s overall performance.
We all make mistakes. That’s why people say, “mistakes are part of life.” We need to learn from our mistakes and figure out a way to fix them.
As long as you take the time to apologize, correct the problem, and resolve the issue to the customer’s satisfaction, you shouldn’t have to worry about your brand being tarnished by mistake.
When a company doesn’t manage a mistake, it negatively impacts the customer experience.
To manage the mistakes, you need to be aware that you make a mistake. You need to learn why you make a mistake and take concrete actions to improve customer experience.
You will do this by eliminating the sources of problems caused by that mistake. Also, always try to overdeliver value to customers who experienced your mistakes.
📖 Read more…
Here are five ways to boost your customer experience with technology. You need to utilize new technology to improve CX.
What Can You do to Manage Mistakes?
- Be aware that your company made a mistake that allowed a bad customer experience.
- Analyze the mistake and define the reasons why you have made a mistake.
- Make two plans. The first plan you need to make is related to how you can solve the issue with the customer that has experienced a bad customer experience because of a specific mistake. The second plan will need to focus on improvement steps that you need to take to ensure that the same mistake will not appear in the future.
2. You need to have a backup plan if you fail in delivering an extraordinary experience.
Because mistakes can happen, and at the same time, they can’t be entirely predictable, you will need to have a backup plan about what you or your team members will need to do if mistakes that you or they made deliver a bad customer experience.
This means that your backup plan will need to cover concrete action steps that will need to be taken to solve the problems caused by the specific mistake and make an over-delivering of additional value.
If you fail to prepare for a possible failure in the process, you’re missing an opportunity to learn something valuable and increase your chances of succeeding later.
Your backup plan will be your best defense against failure related to your customer experience. If you are worried about the unexpected, you should have a backup plan in place.
You have to think of all possible scenarios. It is important to have a clear picture of what to do next if something happens.
For example, if your customers share their bad experiences on social media, you might respond to them, give the product replacement, call them for a meeting, etc. All of this will need to be part of your backup plan.
It is vital to have a backup plan in place. You should know what you would do if there were problems with your customers.
Only in such a way you can turn a bad experience into an extraordinary one. Also, your backup plan will clearly need to define the responsibilities of the people included in implementing such a plan.
Example of backup plan
Your backup plan will need to use a simple rule. Everything you will cover will be in the form of “If This Than That.”
This means you will make a list of possible things that will happen and define actions steps you will need to take if something specific from the list happens. Here is how your backup plan will need to look:
3. You will need to improvise to turn a bad customer experience into extraordinary if you can’t implement your backup plan.
Even if you have a well-written backup plan that will deal with a bad experience, you still need to be aware that these processes can’t be 100% covered ahead. There will be a different situations with different requirements to be solved.
Your backup plan will not cover you in all possible situations. You will still need to be aware of the fact that a problem will come along. Even when you have your plan ready, you might have to adapt it.
You should be flexible in your plans and adapt them as soon as the situation changes. It’s important to have backup plans because they will fail no matter how much you think about your plans.
This happens because there is no guarantee that you will handle things in the exact same way. Some situations will require some special procedures to handle.
Because of that, when you make your backup plan think and allow improvisations that you can make according to the customer’s needs.
Everything that can allow you to turn a bad experience into extraordinary will be allowed. As you know, the effects of a bad customer experience can have negative consequences for your business.
Remember, you will always have to improvise in the back.
📖 Read more…
Read this article related to 5 things you need to do when your customers stop buying from you to see how to analyze and check if the customer experience is the reason for this.
4. You need to react as quickly as possible.
To ensure that you stay competitive and profitable, you’ll need to react as quickly as possible when it comes to bad customer experience.
This is why it is so important to have a customer service team dedicated to customer satisfaction and delight.
You need to be equipped with a team willing to act on any issue that pops up within the company regarding customers.
Make sure that you respond quickly and provide all the required information. It is also important to keep your team updated about any new developments in terms of your services and offerings.
Customers will appreciate that you are open to feedback and that you are always looking out for new ways to make your company better.
The speed of solving problems, especially problems that your customers have experienced with your business, will need to be on the highest possible priority level. Without delay, your customer support team will need to start working on possible solutions that will turn a bad experience into an extraordinary one.
If your team is delaying solving problems, you can’t stop the negative message about your company. It will start spreading among your current and potential customers.
5. You need to commit to turning bad experiences into extraordinary ones.
Even if you already have a backup plan and allow improvisations when it comes to turning a bad experience into extraordinary, you and your team must be committed to continuously improving the current customer experience and turning bad into an extraordinary experience.
There is no reason to think that you won’t be able to overcome problems. If anything, you can be more confident because you know that you are equipped with the knowledge and tools to deal with problems in the future. But, if you don’t solve problems, you’re never going to move forward.
Your customers need to trust you and rely on you. If they do that, they will be happy with your products and services. If they don’t, then they will go elsewhere.
The key to improving your customer experience is to fix the problem. You must fix the problem and make things better instead of ignoring it. And you should be sure that you have taken the necessary action to ensure that the situation will not repeat.
If you keep following up on your customers’ complaints and resolve their problems, they will feel valued. If you don’t, they will start complaining about their negative experiences.
Because of that, commitment to solving all possible customer problems is an essential part of your business success.
6. After you turn a bad customer experience into an extraordinary one, you need to find out why that happened and how you can ensure it will not happen again in the future.
And the last piece of advice is about continuous improvement. If you can’t fully predict the mistakes, they can be the basis for continuous learning and improvement of your business’s process in delivering an extraordinary customer experience.
What went wrong?
Now that you’ve identified what went wrong, it’s essential to understand why it went wrong and why.
Once you understand why it went wrong, it will be much easier to prevent it from happening again in the future.
You should understand why it went wrong because it’s the only way to understand the cause of the issue and avoid similar problems in the future.
The whole human resources in your small business will need to work on delivering an extraordinary customer experience. The responsibility of turning the bad into extraordinary is on all of them. Regardless of which department they work in, if they find themselves in a situation that can help improve the customer experience, they will need to jump in and do everything they can.
Conclusion
In conclusion, when it comes to improving your customer experience, there’s a big difference between good and bad.
Good customer experiences are those that are consistently pleasant. A good customer experience makes customers feel that they matter. It means that they can expect a quality product or service that works for them. It means that they can expect timely service and that they know that they can always return the product or service and get a full refund.
On the other side, a bad customer experience is one of the top reasons why companies fail. It’s easy to turn good into bad CX, and it’s harder to go the other way.
So, how can you turn a bad CX into a fantastic CX?
We call this the “6-step process to improve customer experience,” and it’s the perfect framework for turning bad CX into extraordinary CX. If you use this method and follow it through, you can succeed, which in turn can lead to better revenue, customer retention, and a loyal customer base.
Question: Do you have experience delivering bad customer experience and turning it into extraordinary ones? If you have such experience, please share what you are doing to solve the situation.
