Have you ever wondered how exactly you can serve your potential clients from day one — even BEFORE they’ve bought from you? 

Or how you create a customer experience that makes people want to not only buy from you but tell others how amazing you are as well? 

Last week, we talked about the customer journey. If you haven’t listened to episode 95, I highly suggest you listen to that as well because the customer journey and customer experience go hand-in-hand. 

If you’re not paying attention to the customer journey, you should be. Adobe and Econsultancy — two big companies focused on customer research — released the Digital Marketing Trends report, and it shows the #1 most exciting opportunity for businesses in 2019-2020 is improving the customer experience. 

The name of the game in our always-on, buy-anything-at-the-touch-of-a-button culture is creating an experience that people remember. 

You may have heard the term “customer experience” tossed around and thought it only applied to behemoth businesses — but you’re wrong.

In fact, you and I, as smaller businesses, have an advantage over the big guys because we can create amazing experiences for our audiences without having to coordinate a ton of people. 

We just need to decide to make it a priority.

Let’s dive in. 

Biggest Show Takeaways:

•  What the heck is customer experience? The customer experience can include a lot of things, but the bottom line is this: 
  • Your customer’s experience IS your brand. 
  • You can have the fanciest website out there, but if you have a crappy experience after people buy, you’ve got a crappy brand in their eyes.   
• Think of your favorite buying experience. Mine is a local high-end salon and spa called Gene Juarez. I love this place. 
  • Why? When you check in, you get a robe. They ask if you’d like water, tea, or coffee. The lobby is wonderful. The stylists are all highly trained and are amazing. The spa transports you into a different realm, and after any spa service, you can use their fantastic showers that have that huge rain-shower head plus wall jets.
  • Yes, I’ve had the odd time or two where my visit didn’t go as planned or didn’t live up to my expected customer experience, BUT the goodwill they’ve built up over the 25+ years I’ve been going overshadows those couple of bad experiences.
• Do you have a place you’ve been going to for years and years that you love, and they deliver an amazing experience every time? If so, consider the following:
  • What makes them amazing to you? 
  • How does it make you feel? 
  • And how much do you think it adds to that company’s bottom line to deliver a wonderful experience time and again? 
• Delivering a great customer experience is HUGELY important for ANY business. 
  • With today’s environment where you can see bad reviews at your fingertips, I’d say it’s one of the MOST important things to building a long-term sustainable business. 
• The better experience customers have, the more repeat customers and positive reviews you'll receive, while also reducing the frustration from customer complaints and refunds.
• The benefits of focusing on delivering great customer experience include:
  • Increased customer loyalty
  • Increased customer satisfaction
  • Better word-of-mouth marketing, positive reviews, and recommendations
• Not delivering a great customer experience does the exact opposite: 
  • No customer loyalty
  • Big refunds and people not paying
  • Bad reviews and zero recommendations
• What can you do to ensure you’ve got a great customer experience? 
  • There is no one checklist to follow to guarantee good customer experience. Your business is unique, and so are your buyers. 
  • There are a lot of things we can learn by looking at our own experiences and data across different businesses. Hotjar did a survey of 2000 customer experience professionals, which I’ll link to in today’s show notes, but here are the key takeaways from that survey: 
    • Make listening to customers a top priority in your business. Ask questions, listen to feedback, and even proactively go find out what people are saying. 
    • Use customer feedback to develop an in-depth understanding of your customers. When you understand your buyers, you’ll understand what they need to feel supported and engaged in your customer experience. 
    • Implement a system to help you collect feedback, analyze it, and act on it regularly — surveys, responses to emails, interactions on social media, the list goes on and on. Pick one or two and implement them.
• Good customer experience comes from asking your audience questions, listening to their responses, and taking action on their feedback in a way that makes them feel included, supported, and valued.
• Create Profit Without Worry — one system at a time. I’ll show you how to attract a steady flow of buyers without all the hustle with this free download →  5 Steps to Profit Without Worry.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Hotjar customer experience survey of 2000 professionals
• Connect on Facebook
• Connect on LinkedIn
• Connect on Instagram
• Create Profit Without Worry — one system at a time with this free download →  5 Steps to Profit Without Worry.