Ensuring your customers have a great experience while interacting with your company or startup can be elusive. Sometimes when a customer has a bad experience with a company they’ll drop them forever, which means less dollars for the company.
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Justin MacDonald, Manager of Customer Experience at Infusionsoft, spoke at AZ Tech Beat’s recent Lunch and Learn about how to foster a great customer environment, which will hopefully lead to more profits and future customers.
Here are the six columns of fostering a great customer experience according to MacDonald:
Strategy:
It’s the genetic DNA of your company, according to MacDonald. Strategy consists of the experience you intend your customers to have for your company, attributes your brand may have and your company’s strategy for growing and moving forward.
“Without a customer experience strategy you’re herding cats,” MacDonald said.
With a customer experience strategy your business will be efficient. Having a known strategy becomes more important as your business grows, he added.
Understanding:
Know your customers and how they feel when they experience your company. Be sure to know your target market and the personas of customers you deal with. This way you’ll know how to interact with every type of customer.
Design:
Through a proper design strategy a company influences its customers’ experiences. This is all done through presentation, MacDonald said. Focus on things that actually matter: meeting needs, being easy and being something that’s enjoyable, he said. Make sure everything is efficient and have the basics right.
Measurement:
Measuring a customer’s experiences through surveys is an important tool, MacDonald said. Have the surveys automated so data is always being collected. Two important types of surveys are net promoter score surveys, which measure how often someone will recommend the company and the other is customer experience surveys. Knowing either of these helps you better understand how customers are interacting with your company.
Governance:
At times this is the thing companies are the worst at, MacDonald said. Having a well thought out and designed company doesn’t mean anything when you don’t manage it properly and have the right employees. MacDonald suggests employees should know the goals of the company and any consequences for anything that may happen. Having regular employee reviews and giving them power are great pluses, MacDonald said.
Culture:
Operating with a great company culture is the final piece, MacDonald said. Hire folks who have great integrity so you can empower your employees to lead. Also, socializing with customers and bringing them into the culture is a great plus as it’s personable and creates a great experience for customers, MacDonald said.
Learn more about building your business from our local CEOs, executives and influencers from our Lunch and Learn series at AZTB TV.