Improve Your Customer’s Experience

Time to Get Started

Now that you have some ideas on how to improve your business the question is where to start. One basic framework for customer experience consists of five steps, and is applicable to both online and offline stores.

Awareness: How to reach your customers and how to get them to your store?
You need to tell potential customers that you exist. Make sure you use both online and offline tools. Create leaflets to promote your business or add your company in Google Maps. For a great guide on how to asses your business to Google Maps click here.

Acquisition: What share of the customers do you reach and why?
Once customers know your business exists, make sure you entice them to visit the store. Let them know that you have a great discount/offer or a new product. Tell customers that they can try your products/services for free. If you ever visited Barnes & Noble, then you know that you can read books and have a coffee in the store – and all you have to pay for is the coffee.

Engagement: When customers explore your shop, do they trust your value proposition?
Once customers are in your shop you need to exceed their expectations. It should be easy for them to find products that are displayed in the right setting and with a good price. It is also remarkable how easy small things can put customers off. Dust in the corners might not mean a lot to you, but I guarantee that customers will take notice.

Conversion: Do customers buy your products or services?
If you have low sales, lack of compliance to one of the previous steps might be the reason. If not, then you need to look at the service and payment process. Is your staff welcoming and helpful to all customers? If there is a long line of customers waiting to pay, congratulations! But be efficient. There is a reason why H&M have multiple counters in their stores.

Retention: How to make the customer connect and come back to your store?
If you have done the first four steps well, you are in a good position. But you need to be ahead of your competition and connect with your customers. Ask them to sign up for your emails or hand out your business card. It shows that you care and they will remember you positively. After all, that’s what it’s all about.

What are you waiting for? Get started - your customers will note the difference!

Improve Your Customer’s Experience

Help Your Customers Decide

Never underestimate the value of a satisfied customer. Just as you’d like friends to enjoy your party, you want customers to enjoy the visit to your shop, be happy with the purchase and come back or even recommend your business to their friends.

Why do customers visit your store and what do they expect to find? How well are you displaying your products and in which setting? For all it is worth, you can have the best product in the world, but if no one understands how to use it they won’t buy it.

IKEA for example, displays their products in a setting where customers haven’t thought about them before. Why would you hang your postcards or wedding invitations on the kitchen wall? And yet, it's practical. It looks good and it makes you realize how organized your home could be. At this point IKEA shows their sales tactics. The clips are sold in packs of three, at a price so low that it is hardly worth not buying them. After all you’ve traveled a long way to get to the store. Right?

If you visit local shops, you might see similar examples that can inspire you. Showing how to use your products or placing a flyer with instructions can boost your sales. It is all about assisting consumers to make the most of their daily lives and offering them something they did not expect.

Move beyond products and services and make it an experience. Thus McDonalds offers more than a meal; it will host your child's birthday party, complete with a candle lit cake and clown. Or Hard Rock Café – are they really in the restaurant business?

The next post will give an example of a customer experience framework and some ideas on how to approach it. Until then – why not take a walk up the street where your shop is located. How does your business stand out in the crowd?

Gather Accurate Business Information

All decisions you take in business are faced with basic uncertainty, effective managers approach problems by interlocking probabilities. Your primary goal should be to gather accurate business information and scrutinize it carefully.

The former US Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs executive Robert E. Rubin wrote in his memoirs "Once you've internalised the concept that you can't prove anything in absolute terms, life becomes all the more about odds, chances, and trade-offs. In a world without provable truths, the only way to refine the probabilities that remain is through greater knowledge and understanding".

4 Rules About Customers – Increase Growth & Earnings

Rule # 1: Your greatest joy is experienced when speaking to the customers.In a start-up phase you should never outsource customer service calls. Directing customer contacts away from you, will distance you from operations. This will weaken your ability to ask the right (read: correct & to-the-point) questions. Enjoy every second of a customer service call -"even if it rips your ear of". Remember as long as you speak to the customer your competitors cannot. At my previous job I handed out my e-mail address via our website, to over 600.000 customers. I did not get that many customers contacting me, but the ones that did contact me gave me very valuable information. Intense customer contact will keep you & your organisation on it's toes while at the same time giving you the right things to focus on. Intense customer contact will "keep you eye on the ball".

Rule # 2: Never listen to your organisation - listen to your customers
Concerns about ongoing business operations and recommendations for product development that arise from within an organization, is a poor estimator of your customers actual problems or concerns. That's why you should take sales meetings with existing and potential customers every week, and do this on your own... you will learn more. In addition, if you decide to outsource your customer service you should continue to take customer service calls every week. Ideas from within your company, that often generate little customer value, will thereby have a harder time passing through the gates of your management team.

Rule # 3: Understand to 100% why your customers purchase your product/service
Understanding what value / uniqueness your product bring to the market should be obvious for all employees of a company, but it's not..... Spending time listening to your customers will generate better decisions, within areas such as marketing and product development. At a Wimbledon tournament, the former CEO of Rolex, Andre Heiniger, got a question from a friend - “How is the watch business doing?" Mr Heiniger's response was -"I do not know - Rolex is not in the watch business we are in the luxury business”. This is understanding your customers and your products! Mark McCormack, author of "What they don't teach you at Harvard Business School", calls this insight - "Marketability" - understanding your products / services uniqueness and position.

Rule # 4: Delight the customer as much as the consumer
Make sure you not only reach out to the customer purchasing your product, but spend time talking to the actual consumer of it. A customer purchase your product or service, while the consumer makes use of it - You mission is to make both of them love you! To many companies spend way to much time focusing on sales, sales & sales (this is great for anyone who learns to benefit from this fact). Sure, focusing on sales is a must, but focusing on the consumers is a prerequisite for continues success and growth of your company. A company that is very focused on this, and that vividly spreads this mindset to it's employees, is Procter & Gamble. Your relationship with customers is initiated by the consumer but prolonged only by the contented customer.