Customers are watching you from every possible angle. Are you ready?
When the opportunity presents itself, the typical customer will use five to six channels to keep an eye on and interact with you, recent research from Accenture found. What’s more, they rely on a lot of “outside information” to determine whether they’ll buy from you or continue to stay loyal.
Customers turn to corporate websites, review sites, news and product comparison sites, plus Facebook and Twitter, to gather information.
But surprisingly, their No. 1 way to get information on companies is through word-of-mouth — via friends, family, colleagues, people on the bus, etc.
You may not be able to control all of the information online about you, but there are ways to create good buzz that impacts the customer experience.
Get the word out
The unfortunate truth is, customers talk about bad experiences more than good experiences. So you need to ensure the good experiences outnumber anything else.
Three keys:
- Be prepared. Customers’ most basic need when they contact a company is knowledge. Anyone who is on the front line, fielding contacts from customers, needs to be the most knowledgeable person in the company. Your service pros don’t need to know everything, but they need to know where to find the answers to everything. That ensures every customer will walk away with their biggest need realized.
- Make it easy. If customers have to work at anything when contacting your company, they’ll complain. Make a regular “red-tape review” of your procedures. If it seems like something would be a hassle to your mother, you can bet it is to your customers.
- Make it pleasant. You’ll only add to the customer experience if the people who deliver it are friendly and basically the kind of people you’d like to hang out with. Customers feel that kind of genuine courtesy.
