Beautifully Simple Customer Experience Part One
Customers remember how you made them feel and it’s why they come back
If you’re a cannabis dispensary owner or run a delivery service or are a social equity applicant, this should be your mantra: customer experience is why customers come back.
In our earlier posts we covered how 80% of your revenue is from the same, loyal customers. Those high lifetime-value repeat customers only represent 20% of your customer base!
So what can you do to retain these loyal, longterm, absolute revenue boosters? Get on our list!
Keep your loyal customers by delivering an unmatched customer experience
This customer retention strategy has been proven by commercial giants like Amazon and Walgreens, all the way down to the local corner store or cafe. No matter how big or small your business is, loyalty is your key, and customer experience is the way your customer experiences you.
Mindset shift: You deliver goods or services, but more importantly you deliver a customer experience
Successful businesses form unique connections with customers right from the beginning. This might seem overwhelming as a goal, but is not impossible as it seems.
First, let’s consider what customer service even is.
Customer experience is the feeling a customer has about the overall purchase experience
But it actually goes beyond that.
Customer experience begins with how much work you put in empowering employees with your vision and translates to distant areas of your business like browsing your e-commerce site, getting in touch with you by phone or email or social, placing an order and receiving it, from the delivery method to the after-sales performance (sometimes called “e-satisfaction”).
With almost every company vying to deliver not just goods but also an exceptional experience, from giants like Amazon to your local deli, all businesses look at every interaction with their current, potential, and future customers in mind. They need to find ways to make all interactions high quality, and they succeed.
Think about your interactions with businesses you rave about.
Not just what attracted you to that business or brand at first, but more importantly, what you enjoyed about the experience so much you go back time after time, and spread the word.
Engage with your customers
Customers are looking to engage with a service or product that is both convenient and personalized.
For instance, branded apps with customer profiles offer a great way to customize customer experience. Add to that an SMS marketing feature allowing you to communicate with customers in the most immediate way, through text, alerting them of specials and promotions they have a history of buying? That’s an efficient way to engage with customers and takes little time. It makes hearing from you relevant and welcome, and results in high response rates.
Don’t miss this wakeup call statistic! How wrong are you about delivering a great customer experience?
Market research shows that 80% of companies think they are delivering a great customer experience, while only 8% of customers agree with that number.
That gap says a lot.
It is a wakeup call for business owners, and should be for you as well. Marketing might bring a customer to you, but their experience with your business from the first touchpoint and after will determine if they return, and better yet, if they tell their friends.
How your business engages with customers at every level contributes towards their overall experience. Loyalty is key to success, and it starts with customer experience. Customer touchpoints happen mostly online these days. Have you thought about how you can make each of those interactions a stellar experience for your customer?
Schedule a free 15 minute consult now and we’ll show you.
Customers remember how you made them feel
A stellar transaction is the whole point of a successful business, right?
Creating a customer is easy for most businesses, but keeping that customer is what will set your business apart from the rest in the customer’s mind.
Competition for products and services is intense, and if a business only focuses on this metric, it will not be very successful long term.
Data shows that creating customer loyalty is the foundation of a successful business, as customers will return to the place they have had the best experience, even if it is not necessarily the best financial deal.
Price matters of course, but is not the deciding factor for most people, and your prices are not what will keep your customers coming back. Customers remember the purchase experience much longer than they remember the price.
Do you want your customers to remember dealing with you as a positive memory, or a negative one?
Customer experience is crucial. Providing a quick, helpful, personalized experience for your customer is what will elevate your business above your competitors.
Bad customer experience can hurt you, big time
Customers are the true bosses, and can hire and fire at will. Most of the time, the “firing” is just them not returning to your business. You have not earned their loyalty. Other times an experience can be so bad that not only do they not return they give your business a bad name as well.
What are some common mistakes?
- Hidden charges or, charges that show up before finalizing a transaction. These seem sneaky and will put off a customer, and show a lack of transparency.
- Being hard to reach. If it is hard for a customer to reach you, or they have to go through multiple channels to get their questions or concerns addressed, it will be a negative experience for the customer that could prove costly.
Will customer experience cost or benefit your company?
50% of customers say that if they have one bad customer service experience, that will prevent them from returning. That is costly for a business.
Omniconvert.com estimates that US businesses lose an estimated $83 billion annually due to bad customer experience in the form of bad reviews and customers who do not return, and persuade others to stay away as well.
With social media being such a driver, in both positive and negative marketing ways, every business large and small needs to concentrate on customer experience as the numbers do add up.
This is about more than just price point and bettering your competitors. Good customer experience goes beyond helping a business just survive, but also thrive.
Of course, not every experience a customer has with your business will be stellar. However, it is in how your business handles mishaps that make all the difference in taking a negative experience and making it positive.
Customers overwhelmingly understand and are compassionate, but only if they feel the business has empathy and is actively trying to solve the problem.
Transparency can and does inspire loyalty. The most competitive part of good businesses is in providing the best customer service experience. Staying on top of customer service experience can seem daunting, so it is worthwhile to invest time, money, and planning into a customer experience manager.
What makes a good customer service experience
Some statistics to consider:
- 71% of online shoppers aged 16–24 say quick customer support drastically improves their customer experience
- 90% say immediate response important if they have a question, immediate defined as 10 minutes or less
- 73% of shoppers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a brand can do for customer service (omniconvert)
Drop makes customer experience beautifully simple
At Drop Delivery, we live and breathe customer experience.
In fact, our complete suite of delivery management software is built to support a customer experience that’s never before been available in the cannabis industry.
We hand you your own white-labeled, profile-based app that grabs your customers’ attention with a superior customer experience designed to simplify their shopping. Your customers are going to love discovering more product types, viewing more deals, checking their order history for loyalty points they’ve accrued, and shopping by filters they care about such as price or availability.
With Drop’s advanced end-to-end technology powering your business, your day to day operation delivers what customers want, when and where they want it. For instance, our SMS Marketing tool allows you to easily set up campaigns to communicate directly with customers, exactly how they want to hear from you, by text. Since the platform mines the purchase data of each customer, you can segment your marketing messages to customers who have purchased a certain product, increasing your sales. Every step of the way, Drop is thinking of your customer’s experience. Once a delivery driver is dispatched with an order, the customer can track the driver’s progress in the app and always know when to expect the delivery. We could go on, but the bottom line on customer experience is, at Drop we’ve got you.
Drop hands retailers a compliant turnkey solution for delivery management, with the branded app, last mile delivery logistics to track your drivers and deliveries, and a dashboard to manage everything from inventory to staff. We’ll show you how you can have the customer experience program you just learned about, and more.
In 15 minutes we’ll demonstrate how overnight you can turn on a proven, fail-proof operating system for your business. This same customer experience program helped deliver over $15 million dollars of goods for Drop clients last year.
Schedule a 15 min consult with Quincy now.
