Like an iPhone, Your Customer Experience Needs Continual Upgrades
Imagine if Apple had not updated the iPhone from the original one released in 2007. How many people do you think would buy it each year today? Probably not many. But Apple provides yearly hardware updates and continual software upgrades to keep the iPhone fresh and exciting for users to experience. Retail customer experiences are much the same.In every business, continual improvement is critical, especially in how you serve customers. The competitive landscape, especially when considering the online presence of most businesses, has made the experience people have with your brand a defining aspect of success. Customers visit locations many times throughout the year and each visit provides an opportunity to ‘upgrade’ the experience.How a customer experiences your location or brand will determine whether they return or not. Anyone will tell you it is significantly less expensive to maintain existing customers than to identify and woo new ones. Building loyalty to your business is key. Consistent, positive, and satisfying experiences are the way to grow your business long-term.What can you do to ensure that you are upgrading your customer experience? Start with a vision of what you want your customer experience to look like. While it will continue to evolve, you need a starting point to look forward from.Here are three actions that you can take to build an ‘upgrade plan’ for your customer experience.
Identify the Current Status
Analyze where you are today in relationship to the future vision. If you already have a customer survey in place, what does the data show? How does that match up to your vision of the future? If you do not have a survey, find a way to ask your customers what they have experienced and how that measures up to their expectations. Conducting exit interviews with customers is a simple way to collect immediate feedback on what their experience was. Where are the gaps?
Raise the Bar
Beyond the basics, look for where you can provide unexpected value to your customers. They can be little things, but they will make you stand out. Just like new models of mobile phones or software each cycle needs to provide something more for the customer. If the customer visits multiple times per year and they get the same level of experience it becomes routine and expected. Adding on to that and improving beyond what they experienced before creates that ‘wow’ you need for highly satisfied customers. Raise the bar for the experience you are delivering to your customers at least twice each year.
Let People Know
As you are making those changes, it is important to let your customers know. Even physical changes such as new paint, flooring, or signage should be called out to your customers. “Did you see our new …?” Show your customers what’s new. Take them over to it and show them how exciting it is. Even if the customer doesn’t need that now, they have had a personal interaction and they have been introduced to something different. When Apple has a new iPhone, they have a big presentation and support that with new marketing campaigns everywhere - they let the world know that they have upgraded the experience.Creating an ever-improving environment for the customer requires a good vision, planning, commitment and communication from the team to improve the experience. As a leader, your role starts with knowing your business environment, raising the bar for the experience, and ensuring you are letting your customers know what is new for them. Give your customers something to be excited about by upgrading your experience today.What does your upgrade cycle look like for providing a better customer experience? Click here or on the comments button above to share your thoughts.Photo by Youssef Sarhan on Unsplash