Customer experience is a crucial component of a successful startup business. A positive customer experience is key to the success of any business.
Research from PwC shows that 33 percent of customers will disengage from a business or brand they like if they have a bad experience.
It is all the more important for startups to offer a positive customer experience from the very beginning. However, customer experience generally evolves over a long period and often involves a lot of trial and error.
How Startups Can Boost Customer Experience
Here is a blog that will explain how startups can enhance the customer experience even though they may be new entrants in the market. Let us explore a few strategies startups can implement to boost customer experience.
Introduce a Loyalty program
Several customers are always on the lookout for a good deal. A loyalty program may be just what they will be interested in. Implementing an interesting loyalty program will drive engagement with your brand and increase customer retention.
By introducing a loyalty program software for your business, you can effectively assess your customer base and identify which of your customers buy premium products and which of them are more inclined towards bargains that may be less profitable for you.
This will enable you to focus your marketing efforts on the right group of customers. These are the customers who truly value your products. Focus on improving their experience with your brand and products.
Customers will usually spend more money on businesses where there is a loyalty program, to earn rewards. Whatever costs you may incur in establishing the loyalty program could be reimbursed through increased sales that the program generates.
You will, however, need to customize the loyalty program to match your brand and customer base.
Keep track of your customers’ journey
You must carefully study your customers’ shopping behavior patterns to understand their progress through the sales funnel. This will better enable you to grab their attention at the right stage. For instance, a customer at the product research stage may need more details about your product before making a purchase.
Actively tracking your customers’ journey requires data to analyze their behavior at every stage. Studying this data will show you those points in the customer journey that reflect a high conversion rate. This data will also allow you to identify stages in the journey that result in poorer conversions. You can work on improving these areas in the customer journey.
If you do not track your customer journey, you will not get clear visibility into the performance of your sales funnel. To improve the overall customer experience, it is important to plug the gaps in your sales funnel.
Make refunds easily accessible
A deciding factor in the success of your startup business is good customer service. How your business responds to a customer’s grievances can impact brand perception among your target audience. Making refunds more easily accessible is only one way to achieve good customer service.
Make the refund process hassle-free and simple. This will put any disgruntled customers in a more positive frame of mind concerning your business. Perhaps they may be inclined to give your business a second chance.
No-questions-asked returns and refund policy that stretches up to 90 days is a good idea, based on your business model. Requesting customer feedback about the reason for a refund will help identify what went wrong in the transaction.
Remember, refunds are part of the business journey. By offering a quick seamless refund process, you can minimize any negative impact of returns and refunds on your fledgling business.
You could consider adding refund customers to a separate email list. Your email campaigns could be effectively customized to include added incentives to encourage these customers to buy your products in the future.
Always try to turn negative experiences into positive learning opportunities.
Learn from your competitors
Remember that gaining the loyalty of your customer base in the very beginning is much easier than attempting to regain their trust after making a few mistakes.
Implement continuous product testing to find out where the customer experience falls below expectations. You should identify flaws in your products rather than wait for your customers to report a bad experience.
If in doubt, you could always look to your competitors in the industry to see how they achieve good customer experiences.
Good customer experiences result in business growth
The customer experience has a significant impact on your sales. Make a concerted effort to build a positive customer experience, because the loyalty of your customers is important for business growth.