A great customer experience is the key to nurturing leads and increasing customer retention. Likewise, without addressing customer experience pain points, your business is likely to lose the leads and prospects that marketing investments gained.
A customer pain point is a specific problem your leads or current customers face along the buyer’s journey. If your business can identify and solve these pain points, it will more effectively craft a strategy that moves customers faster along their journey.
It’s become increasingly evident that prioritizing customer experience (CX) is not just a primary ambition of SMBs to win over prospects that have tighter purse strings than last year; it’s also the key competitive differentiator in many cases.
But what exactly constitutes a great customer experience, and how have expectations changed among customers and potential customers?
Let’s take a look at a couple of the recurring themes and pain points that come up with regard to CX, and how businesses are dealing with them.
Customer Experience Pain Point 1: Personalized CX
Personalization is one of the current customer experience pain points with a big influence over businesses.
After the past couple of years, customers demand businesses deliver a personalized experience. Over three-quarters (76%) of customers expect companies to understand what they want and to tailor their service accordingly.
The very best businesses go out of their way to personalize their service and marketing for their prospects and customers.
This improves conversions and retention, and 4/5s of customers say they are more likely to do business with a company that offers a personalized service.
How are organizations achieving this personalization for their customers?
How Businesses Can Use Data
Every business has data on its customers and prospects. Use it and utilize a system that can help you store and aggregate this data with ease, like an ERP. With data, you can also gain insights into customer experience pain points.
Most modern ERPs, like Dynamics 365, have CRM modules included in them that have this capability.
Be careful though—while many SMBs are in fact adopting and implementing CRM tech (91% of businesses with more than 11 employees already have a CRM), only 69% of them actually use it to target customers.
In these cases, it’s best for businesses to use them effectively.
Related Blog: What Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Can Do for Your Sales and Marketing
Segmentation
Segmentation is one such way of effective use of customer data.
The basic concept of segmentation is that, through the use of a cloud ERP, you can automatically analyze and leverage the data by segmenting your customers into different categories depending on key characteristics, such as their behavior, geographical location, demography, and many more.
Related Post: What is Behavioral Segmentation in Marketing?
Personalizing the experience for your customers as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach allows businesses to enhance their relationship with their buyers, and therefore, to retain customers.
Omnichannel
Different customers interact with businesses across different platforms.
Successful organizations understand this and will engage with their prospects and customers across a range of channels — social media, text, email, website, app, and of course paper correspondence.
Using an omnichannel approach helps businesses create a variety of touchpoints throughout the buyer’s journey and fully engages customers with the use of technology.
Companies with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel strategies.
Customer Experience Pain Point 2: Poor Website Experience
57% of customers won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website on mobile. This means mobile optimization would solve a big customer experience pain point.
If we could shout this from the rooftops we would: it is absolutely, without exception, imperative that a modern business offers customers a positive website experience that is at least on a par with competitors.
Customers are more demanding in their expectations as regards an organization’s website and are unforgiving of poor experiences.
In short, if your site is outdated and in need of a refresh, there’s no better time to do it than the present.
How are businesses fixing this?
Optimize for Mobile Use
Optimizing your site for mobile users is important—perhaps the most important aspect of developing a website. It also covers many of the technology pain points customers face.
Now more than ever, your site represents your storefront with the aftereffects of the pandemic and buyers favoring online business interactions to in-person shopping.
This has upped the stakes for mobile optimization — and businesses that can offer a fast and intuitive site are reaping the rewards.
So important is this aspect of customer experience that Google has announced it will incorporate how well a website performs on mobile into its ranking algorithm—effectively punishing slow and clunky websites by lowering their position in search results pages (SERPs).
Leverage Technology
How can you provide a satisfying customer experience through your website? One way is to use widely available technology to service them in a timely and effective manner.
Have you noticed how common it is to see a chatbot AI widget pop up on a website these days?
We ourselves at Impact implemented our own chatbot in 2020 so that we could offer customers an easy and quick way of dealing with common queries they have.
8 out of 10 consumers who have engaged with a chatbot report it as an overall positive customer experience.
Users are increasingly receptive to interactions with AI tech if it means they can get an answer quickly, and that’s exactly why the popularity of chatbots has increased in recent years. Indeed, the number one predicted use case for chatbots is customers getting a quick answer from a business.
Of course, there will still always be a need for human interaction in customer service but streamlining them where possible using AI has proved an effective method of improving the customer experience.
Related Blog: 5 Web Design Tips to Help You Drive Sales
Offer an App
Apps may seem unnecessary for many businesses, but the truth is that many SMBs would benefit from offering an app for their customer base.
Apps provide higher retention rates and offer another channel of engagement for businesses, in addition to the added data received by having customers log in to an app rather than visit a site.
Apps are purpose-built for mobile, which helps address the web optimization issue, and customers are more inclined to spend time on an app than a website.
Thanks to new technology like low code, apps for even the smallest businesses on tight budgets can be developed with ease.
In fact, 90% of IT leaders feel that the flexibility and speed of low-code environments are positioned to improve customer experience better than more traditional development platforms.
Bottom Line
Customer expectations have changed over the last several years as regard to the experiences they have with businesses.
Recognizing what these expectations are and solving them through the use of technology is key to differentiating yourself from competitors.
This is particularly the case when it comes to offering personalized experiences and in offering positive experiences across your engagements with them — most predominantly through your website.
Check out the benefits of using a managed marketing service, including higher customer retention and ROI, and lower marketing costs, in this blog: What Can Managed Marketing Do for You?
