Customer service is one of the most important aspects of any business. The customer experience is the first impression that people get about your company, and if it is not on a high level, it can potentially even be the last one – and you don’t want this to happen.

Almost any business that deals with customers have customer support. Some are good, some are mediocre, and some are downright bad. But sometimes, even being mediocre won’t do since customers that pay top dollar for your product expect to be treated as your top priority – and they have every right to.

Here are some statistics to back this up:

• 66% of customers expect their needs to be met online
• Customer-centric companies do better 60% of the time than those that aren’t

Within that core are some fundamentals of great customer experience that any business should follow. And we’re going to cover these fundamentals in this article right here.

The Essentials of a Great Customer Experience

If you want to be successful with your customers and make them feel satisfied, you should focus on these essentials of customer service.

1. Understand Your Customer’s Journey

The first fundamental of good customer experience is understanding your customer better. This includes visualizing what your customer does and mapping out the journey that they go through while doing business with you.

You should consider every step from browsing your website to finding your product, ordering on your site, taking care of shipping, paying, and returning the product.

A good example of a great customer experience where the company understands their customer is Stitch Fix, a clothing subscription service that offers its customers return labels for products that they want to return. It shows an understanding of what a customer needs to go through when they want to return a product if it doesn’t fit them.

So if the customer doesn’t receive the right product or if it doesn’t fit them, they can simply return it without going through the hassle of finding these documents online. This is a common practice for many clothing companies, but those who offer this option are more likely to have repeat customers.

Another great example is Recruit CRM, an Application Tracking System Software that offers a great user experience to recruitment companies. It provides all the necessary tools a recruiter might need to recruit the right employees in a very user-friendly manner, clearly showing an understanding of what a recruiter needs to recruit the right employees.

There are good examples of a good customer experience, but you should look to tailor the experience based on what your business has to offer and the customer journey that your customers go through.

2. Remain Positive and Helpful

When dealing with customers, you should know that every customer has their own needs and wishes. No two persons are alike, which means you’re going to have to accept that you’re in for all kinds of demands from your customers.

But when one has to deal with all these demands (ordinary or extraordinary), it’s all too easy to get negative and judgmental about your customers. And this mindset alone can lead to poor customer service and experience as a consequence.

To deliver a great customer experience, you should remain positive and put yourself in the shoes of your customer.

It’s easy to set up good customer service with helpful agents. But what matters nowadays is personalization. Customers already expect a level of knowledge about them when they seek support.

On top of that, always make sure that the main goal of customer service is to solve the issue. This is why you should always be prepared to solve an issue no matter how outlandish or demanding it might seem to you or the customer support agent.

3. Listen and Respond Quickly

Bad customer experience has a lot to do with poor or delayed responses from the customer success team. Up to 80% of all customers in North America will leave a company for good if they get a feeling they’re not respected and treated as they should be.

If you receive a question from your customer, you should always aim to respond as quickly as possible. This might mean having a relatively big team of customer support specialists to help you with the demands of your customers. Another good possible way of dealing with this is including chatbots on your website or offering a free discovery call for new customers.

Of course, this part will also depend on the scale of your business. If you have thousands of customers, then making a discovery call for every single one of your customers will not work.

However, if you aim to have a smaller base of loyal customers, then this is exactly what you should be looking to do if you want to be successful.

4. Personalize the Customer Experience

As customers, people want to feel special and treated right, especially according to their wants and needs.

You want to make sure that every aspect of your business or website caters to the specific needs of each customer.

A good way of doing this would be, as an example, showing your customers items on your website based on what they’ve looked at previously and based on their interests.

This will help them choose the items they want to buy from you without them having to search your site for too long.

Also, nobody wants to be treated like a ticket number, so good communication is always necessary for ensuring a good customer experience. Make sure to personalize communication with your customers as much as possible and use their personal information when helping them out.

5. Listen to Your Customers

Even though you might already have a good customer support system in place, you should know there are always areas of your customer experience that you can improve.

A good way of finding loopholes in your customer experience is – well, asking your customers what they think about their experience with you. For example, even the biggest companies such as Youtube do this regularly, and you should do this, too.

A great tool that can help you set up a survey and collect immediate feedback is Nicereply. It provides a number of different options for you to choose from, such as customer satisfaction surveys, net promoter score surveys, in-signature surveys, and many more. You can also use your own template and customize the type of feedback you want to receive.

Final Thoughts

Good customer experience is the staple of any business out there. If you want to be successful with your customer, you should do everything in your power to help them out. Because nobody out there wants to feel like just another customer in the line. The role of customer service is to make your customers feel heard and appreciated.

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