Customer Experience is Your Defining Micro moment. Brace Yourself

The attention span is getting shorter. Reaching out to acquire new customers is good, but retention gives better ROI. Getting to know your customers and building relationships with them is easier. As per Hubspot, the cost to acquire new customers has increased by over 50%, in the last five years.

With consumer expectations and behavior continually evolving this shouldn't be surprising. Micro moments filling in the consumer experience journey, they want to discover, resolve their problems, watch, buy, ‘now’.

These are intent-rich moments (for businesses), exactly where the decision is made. You miss out on the important intent signals, and they move ahead.

How do you plan to acquire and retain your customers before running out of patience?

Uncovering Concept and Some Stats, First

People today reach out to their smartphones before anything. The behavioural changes and expectations for speed, driven by smartphones, has fractured the consumer journey into hundreds of smaller decision making, impressive moments.

The predominance of social media and importance of speed can be an enormous barrier or an effective tool.

Click, swipe, check, exit.

Repeat.

In these smaller moments of discovery, 64% of people find customer experience more important than price. Since customer experience is not static, micro-moments, as Google calls it, have truly changed the way decision journey is driven.

It is an overall impression you leave with your customer, resulting in how they think of your brand, across every stage of the customer journey. Multiple touch points factor into the customer experience, and these touch points occur on a cross-functional basis. 

The predominance of social media and importance of speed can be an enormous barrier or an effective tool.

Here’s why you should care about your customer experience strategy:

• Customers who have had an unpleasant experience on a brand website are 88% less likely to return
• 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing, and 40% visitors end up visiting a competitor’s site instead
• After one negative experience, 51% of customers will never do business with that company again.
• 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for great customer experience. In fact, by the year 2020, customer experience is expected to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

In all this, 

• It is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep a current one.

Everything is not just about new acquisitions.

What Do Your Customers Want?

The #1 reason customers switch to a new brand is feeling unappreciated.

Daunting as it may feel now after reading the statistics, it’s really no different from your overall business strategy. Foremost, understand that you need to listen and empathize with your customer.

Because “..when customers share their story, they’re not just sharing pain points. They’re actually teaching you how to make your product, service, and business better” (Kristin Smaby, Being Human is Good Business).

If you can understand what makes your customer feel the way it does and why, it would be easy for you to find a solution between your brand and their needs — providing meaningful service.

Another important part of the strategy is to ensure, it is not limited to the customer-facing roles. Sharing the feedback and solution across the organization helps you improve overall customer experience and relationship.

How to Prepare Yourself?

#Customers remember the service a lot longer than they remember the price

Your relation with your customer starts the moment they discover your brand but it doesn’t end with the sale. It sums up any and every interaction they have with your business, both pre- and post-sale across different marketing channels.

What you sell bothers least, if you don’t know how to sell it, therefore start with:

1. Understanding your consumers’ need

   While customer trust is quite hard to earn, things can be sorted with knowledge. Know about you customer -- their problem, goals, demographic, and so on -- the better chance you have to create meaningful experiences.
   
   Google identifies the micro-moments into four stages.
   “I-want-to-know” moments
   “I-want-to-go” moments
   “I-want-to-do” moments
   “I-want-to-buy” moments
   
   These can be leveraged by analyzing the data and working on the prospective ideas. A person searching for ‘Drupal 8.7 upgrade features’ on Google is provided with an awesome feature list blog on your website, you capture them in their I-want-to-know moment.
   
   That’s when they come back to your website again.
   
   A customer-first email communication strategy with appropriate CTA, later, should be able to help them to turn into their ‘i-want-to-buy’ moment.
   
   Ultimately, showing up gets your brand in the game to be chosen, not just seen.
   
   Make it easier to map out content and services, allocate your team’s time and resources, and achieve. 
   

2. Listen them out. Patiently
   

   Other than assuming and translating data into perspective, the more accurate way is to listen and not speak!
   
   As it has been pointed out earlier, how when customers share their story, it is rather an opportunity instead of looking at it as a problem.
   
   Learn to listen.
   
   Because you know your opinion and needs well, except you don’t know theirs.
   
   Remember that even if your happiest customer will go about appreciating your service, bad word-of-mouth will travel faster and reaches more people.
   
   Americans tell an average of 15 people about a poor service experience, versus the 11 people they’ll tell about a good experience.
   
   The best way to get started is through asking your customers to be part of an honest customer satisfaction survey. It can help you gauge how your customers feel about your
   company, where you need to improve, what are your strong points.

3. Share meaningful and real-time information

   The attention span is getting shorter. Reaching out to people is important but creating the right kind of messaging, all the more important. It’s important that you don’t allow automation to compromise personalized service.
   
   The predominance of social media and the importance of speed can be an enormous barrier or an effective tool. Whichever you choose to proceed with.
   
   Look what people are searching for - terms they are using, their key areas of interest – and create content and provide solutions that help for different channels of communication.
   
   Customers expect businesses to respond to their emails within an hour. And on social media it is even lesser. Simply, put, being there as part of the micro moments just isn’t enough.
   
   A delayed response can signal to the customer that you’re avoiding responsibility or you’re unprepared to fulfil their request.
   
   At the end of the day, people want to know that they are not only being helped by other people, but rather, that they are being helped by other people that understand their needs.

4. Be Ubiquitous

   #Only 9% of customers will stay on the mobile site/ app if it doesn’t satisfy their needs.
   
   New smart devices are emerging, and consumers are embracing new ways to interact with them, like voice commands. As a result, the micro-moment behaviors kick-started by mobile will only multiply.
   
   50% of internet users looked for videos related to a product or service before visiting a store.
   
   Mobile quickly delivers results when they’re impatient, provides inspiration at their fingertips when they’re curious, and gives them a personalized experience when they’re demanding one. And customers overwhelmingly show appreciation for great service with their wallets.

The ROI of Customer Lifetime Value

Offering outstanding customer services is easier with proven better ROI. Lifetime customers also mean an increase in referrals, so you definitely understand the importance of customer loyalty. Turning the customers into the advocates for your business gives out better returns  

And the way to create advocates is to offer superior customer service.

• Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increase profits anywhere from 25% to 95%.
• A moderate increase in customer experience generates an average revenue increase of $823 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues.
• After having a positive experience with a company, 77% of customers would recommend it to a friend.
• When it comes to making a purchase, 64% of people find customer experience more important than price.

Businesses should invest heavily in measuring customer satisfaction over time and work to consistently give better service

In this day and age, customers are making purchase decisions based on more than just the best price — they're making buying decisions based on shared values, engagement, and the emotional connection they share with a brand.

Be Genuine

Customer perception is one of the most valuable aspects of a company. Managing that perception in all its forms should be a top priority and is the responsibility of every single person in the organization. Keeping customer a priority should be a part of company culture.