Delivering Excellent Customer Experience in the New Virtual World

Each time you connect or meet a customer you leave an impression. It is crucial to business relationships and growth that this impression is as you intended and creates a positive Customer Experience. In our new normal of the virtual world, this shouldn’t be any different.

Despite fewer in person meetings, we are still connecting with our customers via e-mail, telephone calls, or video conferences. Each of these connection points creates a footprint, an impression about your business. This leaves a history or set of experiences which condition each following interaction. So, by ensuring each connection is a positive interaction, ensures longer term growth.

A business cannot exist without its customers, and this is why companies are focusing on how to win new business and, perhaps more importantly, retain existing customers.

A survey by Bloomberg Businessweek found that “delivering a great customer experience” has become a top strategic objective. A recent Customer Management IQ survey found that 75% of customer experience management executives and leaders rated customer experience a ‘5’ on a scale of 1-5 (5 being of the highest importance).

So how do you ensure you are delivering a positive customer experience? Here are some top tips for you that apply both in the virtual and non-virtual world:

1. Create a clear customer experience vision – Set out the guiding principles and the aims, be clear and customer-focused. Communicate these to the wider business and engage with your teams. They will drive the behaviour of your organisation. Every member of your team should know these principles by heart, and they should be embedded into all areas of training and development.
2. Review all your customer touch points – Once your vision is defined, evaluate all your customer touch points against it. Are they communicating and portraying the impression you want? Is the business consistent in its approach? Are all templates branded as they should be, team email sign off the same? Do your teams introduce themselves and present themselves how they should – both verbally and physically. This is just as important in the virtual world as before.
3. Educate and evaluate your team’s customer interactions – By setting your vision, you can also set metrics to measure team performance against them. But ensure you have provided the training and development first that enables your people to aspire and deliver against them.
4. Review business performance and measure against customer experience – Ultimately if sales continue to grow, you are doing something right, however it is important to measure this against customer experience. The easiest way to do this is by conducting customer surveys, ask how they find their customer engagement with you.

If you would like to get your customer experience right, or what to better understand how your customers view your business, contact us at help@pureblueocean.com