How Empowered Customers can make a difference to your Business
In today's digital age, the lines between the physical store and digital experience have vanished. There has been a complete shift as the brick-and-mortar store experience, and multi-digital channels are governed by customer behavior, engagement, and expectations. Businesses earlier focused just on reaching customers, and it was more than enough for customer connect.
Customers and businesses have come a long way from the era of production and sales with limited offerings and choices to the interconnected world we inhabit today filled with information, opinions, and knowledge. It influences customer choices, behaviors, needs, and expectations. As a result, it has a significant say on the organization's quality, nature of experience, and deliverables.
Today's digital age and the interconnected world have ensured that the customer has more information about different brands, products, and services. Customers share information about their choices and viewpoints, and hence their point of view is essential even while designing the products and services. It is the era of "Empowered Customer" who are better informed and have a necessary voice on how businesses and brands work.
"Customer Loyalty" is a significant outcome of "Empowered Customer" essential for businesses' short-term and long-term growth. It ensures that the customers will buy or use existing services and try more products/services. Furthermore, those products/services shall be per customer needs and expectations and lead to positive word of mouth, emotions, and references.
"Empowered Customer" for Businesses
Customers have huge expectations from businesses. With the information and knowledge, customers now seek more control. They like to connect with organizations that share their values and provide products/services that are truly unique and innovative.
From a business perspective, "Empowered Customers" is the process of providing customers with the tools and resources to help them achieve their goals. In addition, it enhances customer experience as customers feel in control, and they can trust the organization as the deliverables are as their needs and expectations.
Research studies show that customers are happier with a brand experience when the companies make efforts to help customers make informed choices. And, this rapport leads to improvements in customer retention as well as opportunities to encourage customer advocacy. It is essentially a differentiation strategy to ensure that the customers stick around and buy more products/services."
But, as a brand, how would you know to make it happen?
It happens for you when your customers voluntarily provide you with suggestions to improve. They provide businesses with ideas and celebrate their successes as their own. Empowered Customers own and spread the word about an organization's products/services to their peers with enthusiasm. And solicit upgrades in products and services.
Hence, through this blog, we outline three vital steps on how businesses can work with and "Empower Customer" in their strategy, deliverables for business growth, and success.
1.Listen and Listen through aligned Feedback systems to understand
"Listen to your Customers" is and has to be the first mantra in today's digital and connected age. Therefore, it is a good idea to allow customers and create platforms to talk about their thoughts, woes, and feelings while experiencing products and services from the organization.
Few tips
Use social media to understand, listen, and let your customers put their opinions, points of view, and frustrations across. It is a great way to listen to your customers. Facebook, Twitter, and a platform to connect can help a business, your brand to know what is in their minds and what kind of emotion is being felt by the customers.
Collect feedback at regular intervals of time. It can be transactional feedback after every or random interaction or cumulative feedback to assess the overall experience over a time frame. The idea is to be open to listening to understand and take action.
Create a feedback system including sending customers surveys to ask them to describe their experience and whether they'd recommend it to their peers. As a decision-maker for your brand, you can use NPS and Customer Effort Score tools to see how satisfied customers are with your company.
There are numerous feedback tools to utilize, and you can visit us at https://www.pinkguava.org/customerexperienceblogs/how-feedback-is-an-effective-tool-for-business-success to know more about the feedback process and its implementation.
For positive feedback, follow up with participants to see if they'd be willing to provide a testimonial. You can then post that review to your website for potential leads to see. For negative feedback, consider it as an opportunity for your Business to prevent customer churn. Reach out to these participants and ask them to provide more details about their experience.
Closing the feedback loop is an essential follow-up of listening to customers. It is to humbly and graciously accept the customer's thoughts, feelings, and experiences and open more avenues to improve.
2. Understand Customer's Journey
Understanding Customer's Journey is an opportunity to provide relevant and correct information at crucial touchpoints to enhance customer's experience and product/service satisfaction. Empowering customers through more details and carefully designed products/services is a great way to improve positive emotion.
You can also utilize Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) as a tool(CJM). It is a tool that is excessively used today across industries. CJM by definition, is a visual representation of every experience a customer has with a brand/organization across touchpoints. It's a story of the experience derived from a customer's engagement culminating in a relationship with the organization.
Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) helps create a cumulative understanding by bringing diverse thoughts, opinions, and expectations and synergizing on who the customer is and what it means to the organization's mission and vision. The process helps gather valuable insights into the consumer's feelings, motivations, expectations, questions or concerns at every interaction point through well-researched Personas.
You can get more details on Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) by clicking the blog here https://www.pinkguava.org/customerexperienceblogs/how-customer-journey-mapping-stands-out-as-a-starting-point-for-your-customer-experience-management-initiative
Few tips
Identify the crucial touchpoints and moments that matter to enhance customer's positive emotions and experience. For instance, the on-boarding of a customer once they purchase a product from a brand. It is a critical stage that can retain your customer, and they might also go and talk negatively about you or may bring more references for the positive emotion experienced.
If your product is complex or takes time to master, informing them of the key steps to use it will help them save time and enhance their satisfaction.
Enhance personalization in your experience design by understanding the data and the patterns around- which customers prefer which platform- what kind of personalization will help the customer to make an informed choice. For example, e-commerce companies recommending products basis people who had similar tastes. Even the reviews are an opportunity with thoughts for everyone to read. Customers who feel supported by a business are also more loyal.
3. It's All About Engagement.
It's no longer about keeping brand conversations in silos. Over time, marketing, sales, and services that earlier operated in their silos now work together in complete harmony. Thus, a service call is an opportunity to increase brand loyalty. A promotion to engage super-fans can turn brand advocates into customers/salespeople. At every touchpoint -there's an opportunity to connect with the Customers and empower them with information and tools.
"Empowering Customers" means not just focusing on the excellent product features to beat the competition. It means delivering over and beyond and retaining customers and calls for an understanding of customer behavior and their emotional drivers. We will agree that the "make" or break" decisions in any relationship are triggered by an emotional impulse, and the consumer-brand relationship is no different. Customer Loyalty built on a strong foundation of "Trust" is one of the key variables to know how your consumers associate with the brand.
You can read more about Relooking at Customer Experience with New Lens by reading our blog by clicking here https://www.pinkguava.org/customerexperienceblogs/relook-at-customer-experience-with-new-lens
Few tips
Initiate conversation with customers on social media by sharing valuable advice, thoughts to create a positive emotion.
Manage change by providing information to customers regarding products/services, what to expect and how to use them. So the usage depth and its impact can be understood by customers leading to more engagement.
Engage to understand if your product and services are supporting your customers to meet their goals. Helping them to grow because will make them hold your brand. Provide guidance, content, and extra information to build understanding and engagement.
Enhance engagement by understanding the reasons for negative emotions or "customer churn," as we call. Pay attention to product usage decrease, features not used, etc. Customers do not want to be told and asked, "Use this and that".Rather more engagement can be turned in by understanding customer behavior and simply asking what they need. It opens opportunities for brands and businesses to enhance engagement to "Empower Customers."
So what are you doing to empower your customers? Let us know by commenting here or writing to us at contact @pinkguava.org