Give your customers pleasant experiences
Customer experience is one of the hottest areas these days in business and everyone in business ought to understand this marketing concept.
Many people know and appreciate customer service. That is fair and fine. However, it’s also very important for anyone serious about business to fully understand that there are more customer touch points that are now being considered as crucial in the creation of customer happiness.
Customer experience is therefore a much broader concept than customer service. It has many more touch points than customer service.
Customer experience as a concept that takes into account how the customer feels across multiple touch points from awareness to post-purchase.
Customer experience is therefore a multi-dimensional concept with functional and emotional attributes to be aware of.
The customer has to feel good when they get into your environment. Your business environment should be clean and customer-friendly.
Remember the atmospherics have a multi-sensory effect on the customer. The sound, the lighting, the air-conditioning; all these are part and parcel of the atmospherics.
The people that interact with the customers are also a key brand touch point. A service provider must be pleasant, helpful and knowledgeable about company products.
One of the greatest customer frustrations is buying a product that doesn’t work. A product is such a fundamental brand touch point which should deliver the expected functional benefits. Products can deliver positive or negative experiences to customers.
Customer experience is how the customer feels as they engage with your brand at different points of the spectrum known as the customer journey. Things that cause the customer to behave in a certain way are called consumer behaviour determinants in marketing.
In Marketing, consumer behaviour as a field of study is an area of inquiry that draws heavily from quite a number of disciplines that include micro-economics, cognitive psychology and such other fields and social sciences like sociology.
The influences that impact on the consumer’s behaviour are many. These range from internal psychological influences (like perception, attitudes, motivation, learning, personality) marketing mix influences, situational influences and PESTEL influences.
The customer will likely not buy if the price is not right. The customer will not buy if the product doesn’t appeal to him. The customer will not buy if he doesn’t know about the product.
The customer will abort the purchase if they get frustrated with the processes. The customer may not buy if the service doesn’t impress him/her.
The above are termed marketing mix influences.
The marketing mix is a conceptual framework still applicable today in delivering value to target markets.
The elements of the marketing mix are broad variables around which the business should interrogate its performance on each one in view of optimising that performance.
Make sure you have the right product at the right price being promoted through correct channels and found in the right distribution channels.
Dealing with a business that does not deliver is one of the nightmares and frustrations that the customer faces.
Good customers deserve to be treated in a special way because they bring money into the business.
I also want you to know that there are bad customers. These are people that want value but for nothing.
I suggest and highly recommend that you do not serve them. They will waste your precious time and resources for nothing. (I know how to deal with any type of customer!)
You also need to understand that there are good and reasonable customers; customers that pay for products and services without giving you problems. You must concentrate more on such type of customers.
I have dealt with both good and bad customers. Customers that pay and those that don’t want to pay even after a good service has been delivered.
Bad customers affect the timing of your cashflows. Cashflow is a very critical issue for business success.
It is the lifeblood of business.
No business would survive for long without good cashflow!
The challenge is that sometimes you will not be able to tell in advance how good or bad a customer is until you deal with that customer.
He who runs a business must understand that the customer is one of the very central stakeholders required for business success.
A business could have all the inventory, all the infrastructure, all the IT systems, all the set up and even a board in place! All these things do not amount to anything when customers are not there!
Customers love to have wonderful experiences when they deal with any business.
There are known benefits that accrue to the business that gives customers wonderful experiences:
- Improved revenue
Every business wants an increase in revenue and one of the best ways would be to impress those customers you already have. I know that’s not enough but it’s one of the ways through which a business could get new customers.
A happy customer has the natural tendency to speak favourably about a business to relatives and friends.
- Improved reputation
Anyone who has done Public Relations will know that a business should have deliberate actions it does to create a positive image.
People relate with entities based on their perceptions of those entities. Good customer experiences have the effect of creating positive perceptions in the minds of different stakeholders.
Customers’ expectations are heightened and influenced by a number of things. Messages that we send through different media channels help shape the customers’ expectations.
What people say about our businesses will keep shaping what our customers will expect from us.
The experiences that our customers had in the past have the power to determine what those customers will expect from us in the future.
Customer expectations are a function of a multiplicity of forces, factors and variables as mentioned above. When customers deal with us, they have a certain level of expectation which is based on those influences we have described above.
When what the customer was expecting does not happen, that customer’s expectations will be disconfirmed. This will mean a disappointed customer in other words.
The customer’s expectations of value should be met by the corresponding performance or delivery by the company. This results in a condition called customer satisfaction.
There are so many negative effects that come to the business as a result of disappointed customers. Some of them include a bad reputation and low future sales.
The ideal situation is to meet or exceed customer expectations. Going below customer expectations is quite detrimental to the overall well-being of the business.
Clemence Mutembo is a marketing consultant, customer experience and sales coach and can be contacted on: 0778 994 994.-ebusinessweeklu
