Providing a great and easy to use customer experience is the rising tide that floats all ships.
It may feel like your product is unique, but it’s not. The fact of the matter is that it is so easy to create and market products today that there are probably at least three other companies doing the same thing as you. Sorry to say, but your product is probably the thing that differentiates you least from the companies around you. In fact, a recent Walker study found that by the end of 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.
Your customers care more about the support and experience you provide than anything else. Beyond what your customers want, providing excellent support benefits most of the core aspects of your company as well. It boosts customer loyalty, contributing to repeat purchases and higher lifetime customer value; assists with customer testimonials and content for your marketing team; it even provides constructive and positive insights to your design and product teams.
Most companies have started to understand the value of remarkable support: 88% of companies now prioritize customer experience in their contact centers over other metrics like speed of resolution or sales. Just in case you aren’t sold on it’s importance, here are four things that are most impacted by providing remarkable support.
It should come as no surprise that when you put effort into providing an excellent experience, your customers are happier. When you move forward with the customer placed front and center in your strategy, they feel valued. That feeling of being valued grows into a level of loyalty to your team.
A recent survey showed that 68% of customers leave because they feel the company they are buying from doesn’t care about their business. What better way to show your customers that you care than taking their needs and wants into consideration and putting them at the center of your business strategy? Providing remarkable support in the form of answering their inquiries in a timely manner, providing them the support that they need, and even just hearing their feature requests does exactly that.
Beyond happy customers, providing an excellent support experience also makes for happier employees. Companies that excel at customer experience have 1.5 times as many engaged employees compared to brands that don’t show up for their customers. If you think about it: when you surround yourself with happy people, you usually feel much happier. The same can be said for when you help happy people all day. If your customers are cheerful and happy to receive your assistance, it will be a much better experience than if they were all angry with you.
Providing a great and easy to use customer experience is the rising tide that floats all ships.
It might not make sense immediately. You might be thinking to yourself, “how would spending money on what has traditionally been considered a cost center actually increase revenue for my company?” But people want to spend money on products that they are loyal to and familiar with.
The Temkin Group found that companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within 3 years of investing in customer experience. You gain loyalty by advocating and creating a system that your customers feel supported by. If you make your product easy to use and understand, it’s that much easier for customers to adopt your product and turn it into an integral part of their day-to-day processes.
The product that turns on with the touch of a button and works right out of the box will have much more traction than the one that requires months of lead time and a whole team of people to implement it.
Similarly, without an emphasis on their experience, you’re at risk of losing your customers. While your most loyal customers are going to be vocal about what is bothering them, users that are less invested (and hence more likely to leave) won’t let you know before they go. Because of this, $1.6 trillion is lost every year in the US because of poor customer service. If you haven’t cultivated a relationship with your customers and haven’t provided them with an excellent experience, you’re going to lose them—and they won’t even tell you before they go.
Sometimes, even if you’ve built an excellent relationship with your customers, it’s not enough to keep them. PwC surveyed 15,000 consumers and found that 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions. By creating loyalty through remarkable support, you open yourself up to deeper constructive product insights.
If people feel invested in what your company is doing and trust that you care about them, they’ll be much more open with their insights. Submitting a feature request is significantly less scary and vulnerable when you believe that the company you’re reaching out to genuinely cares what you have to say. Not only that, but you’ll likely have more demographic knowledge of your customers as you learn about what they do or don’t like when receiving support. With that, you’ll be able to target more effectively and get more frequent and in-depth responses to the surveys that you send out.
Making your product stickier has a ton of benefits outside of great feature requests, though. Experience-driven businesses report between 1.6x – 1.9x higher YoY growth in customer retention, repeat purchase rates, average order value, and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) than other companies. Those are some numbers you can take to your executives!
As much as some of us might hate to admit it, marketing is important. The best form of marketing you can do is giving your customers an excellent experience to talk about. That could be surprising them with swag or gifts on important dates, providing them with personalized recommendations on how to use your product, or even going above and beyond when they have a specific issue. People love to share their experiences, positive or negative, so treating them excellently and giving them something to talk about is a win-win.
This is especially true because 50% of Americans would choose word-of-mouth if they were asked to pick only one source of information to trust. Getting your customers to talk about you positively is incredibly impactful because it shows the people around them just how much they value your brand. The good news isn’t coming from your marketing site or a promoted tweet, but from someone just like them. Their trust for the people around them becomes their trust for you, and it’s stronger than the trust that you could have earned yourself in the same amount of time.
Conclusion
Sure, providing excellent support creates happy customers and an easier job for your support team. It also has lasting benefits that impact company-wide metrics and boosts your whole company.
While remarkable support feels good to provide (c’mon, we know it makes people happy to make others happy) there are real, tangible business effects. It makes it easier for your marketing team to find great fodder for case studies, but also gives people something to talk about: how awesome you are! Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most trusted ways that people choose to get their information.
Remarkable support helps to boost customer loyalty, too, which trickles down into metrics like lifetime value, annual and monthly recurring revenue, and customer retention. Everybody wins!