Customer experience refers to the interactions and experiences that the customer goes through throughout the entire customer journey, starting from the contact initiation to becoming a customer who comes back for multiple transactions. Customer experience is an integral part of customer relationship management since it goes a long way in creating a loyal and referenceable relationship with the customer.

Much has been said and written about creating a great customer experience since this proves to be one of the most effective ways to grow the revenue stream and create a predictable source of revenue for the organization.

Studies have found that customers are willing to pay for a better experience and often switch brands due to poor experience.

Hence it is clearly one of the low-hanging fruits to grow your customer base and revenue stream.

Here are 10 simple, easy to implement yet effective actions that can help you boost your customer experience as well as create a healthy revenue stream for your business:

1. Take frequent feedback on your products/services –

   1. Start with asking simple questions on "How do you rate this experience" right after the interaction or the touchpoint
   2. Often, customers are just too busy completing the action they intended to perform; hence, they may not respond, but some will respond with their experience or rating.
   3. Often you can turn an agitated customer into a neutral one by listening to their despair and promising to investigate it.
   4. You will also get to know things running well in your organization and things that the customers love; this is definitely a significant input to your management to take action.
   5. The best part is that you will get to hear from some of the delighted customers and capture their feedback.

2. Provide small conveniences that make your customers' life easier –

   1. Small conveniences make your customers' life easy for which they are willing to pay a premium.
   2. Look at your products and services and explore those things that can make life easy for the customers, like free home delivery if you deliver merchandise or goods.
   3. If your offering is a software product, then offering a free demo or a free trial goes a long way in establishing the trust of your user community. While offering a free trial, avoid asking for the credit card details to increase your trial list of users.
   4. An illustrative video explaining the product's features is also a great addition to make your product usability easier and adoption higher.

3. Make the purchase process easy and quick for your customers

   1. Have an option for express checkout for customers who are not registered on the website – with details of Name, Email id/phone number, address depending on the nature of the business
   2. Autofill data to save time for the customer for the returning order
   3. Have a provision to ask for permission to save cookies on your website to minimize the load time for the customer when they visit the site next.

4. Have your customer preferences as part of the customer profile

   1. Save your customer preferences and details as part of the customer profile so that they do not need to specify that every time they shop in your store, e.g., Jane likes her coffee without sugar or Mrs. Smith wants her veggies with no plastic packaging.
   2. These details can be collected on the first purchase and saved for later. E.g., Do you want door delivery at noon or evening

5. Make your processes and terms transparent and easy to find on your store–

   1. What makes Amazon the most preferred store globally is their easy and quick return policy making it transparent to the customers while they are making the purchase.
   2. Terms for returns/exchanges/refunds and the most frequent questions should be easy to find in the store.

6. Make help available with the click of a button and empower your employees to solve customer problems –

   1. Make your customer service reachable at the click of a button.
   2. Empowering your employees to solve customer problems makes the transaction process quick and smooth without a long waiting time for a decision from the management.

7. Look for win-win solutions – Give something to get something

   1. Have an attractive refer and earn policy – that makes each happy customer into a referenceable customer and get more $ for you.
   2. Give a gift card for a review on a website for your product
   3. Give away goodies for customers who take time to provide feedback that can improve your service/product.

8. Timeliness in response is more critical than resolution

   1. Establish an SLA for all issues to be acknowledged by your team. Keep the customer informed so that they are assured that the complaint/issue is logged and someone is working on it.
   2. Do not wait for the resolution to happen to get back to the customer.
   3. Have a set of workaround or quick resolutions for the most common issues reported by the customers and ways to avoid them next time.

9. Send the welcome/customer onboarding email from a senior leader/CEO/Founder – 

   Send festive greetings or update emails to your customers thanking them and providing them newer and better products/features as well. This makes a strong positive impression on the organization. Create an emotional connect with your customers via your leaders and staff with whom they interact. Keeping the communication channel open gives the customers enormous trust and confidence in the brand to reach out for any issues they may face in the future.
10. Go through the customer experience yourself to know the experience firsthand -

Going through the process yourself will help you understand hassles, delays, hiccups faced by the customer. This will help you find the problems in your process better – think like a customer while going through this process, do not bring your operational challenges into mind.

Conclusion –

Customers are more empowered than ever before in a competitive and evolving market, with many options around. Hence customer experience needs constant attention and nurturing.

It is one of the most trusted ways to positively impact customer loyalty and higher retention, and improve revenue growth.

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