Guest Blog: How to Make Effective Customer Experience Strategies for a Software Development Company?

This week we feature an article by Charles Richard who shares an article about how important it is for software development companies to have a successful customer experience strategy.

We all crave for “more”- entrepreneurs expect more from their employees whereas your coworkers as well customers may expect more from you. Basically, each one of us wants slightly more bang for their buck. The following post sums up a little bit in the details of what and how when it comes to customer experience strategies. We all crave for “more”- entrepreneurs expect more from their employees whereas your coworkers as well customers may expect more from you. Basically, each one of us wants slightly more bang for their buck. The following post sums up a little bit in the details of what and how when it comes to customer experience strategies.

For businesses, there are no excuses; it’s just the bottom line, and that is to provide immense satisfaction to the customers. A successful customer strategy is said only when you find yourself surrounded by an aspiration centered mainly on what matters to customers. Whether you are an online retail giant Amazon or the Walt Disney Company, an effective customer-service is something clearly that can make you a cut above. It is assumed that within a few years down the line, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. If you are a software development company, it is very crucial for you to know that your online presence is significant for your company’s profitability.

Let’s Get Acquainted With the Term Customer Experience

Mainly referring to a customer’s perception of their overall interactions, customer experience has been considered as a critical driver of customer retention and acquisition. It’s way beyond attaining requests and offering assistance or help. Now many of you have this misconception that customer experience, and customer service are the same? Probably not! Being a customer, I am sure your point of contact with a company will be usually through interacting with an employee (either by visiting a store or by speaking on the phone). Here you get a chance to deliver excellent customer service. Whereas customer experience is something where you book a vacation via phone. Your tickets happen to arrive early, and the hotel automatically upgrades your room as complimentary. That’s when customer experience comes into play.

Every single touchpoint needs to be covered right from the moment they hear about you or found via Google to how easy or difficult it was to purchase things from you. Basically, the entire journey of your customer with you sums up in these two words.

• Having a deep understanding of their needs
• Unveil their personas
• Deliver must-haves instead of nice-to-haves

What is a Customer Experience Strategy? A sum of every interaction a customer has with a business this includes both pre and post-sales. Here as a business, you need to come up with an actionable plan in place to deliver a positive, meaningful experience within interactions. So for this, you need to take certain pointers into account such as:

• Competitive insight
• Consumer research
• Marketplace data
• Mission & vision

5 Ways to Enhance Customer Experience

Get more insight into creating competitive advantage by putting your valued customer at the first place and managing several aspects such as satisfaction, reduce churn and increase revenues at once.

1. Create a clear vision- First and foremost step is to have a clear customer-focused vision to communicate well with your organization. One of the easiest ways to do so is by creating a set of statements, in simple words a few guiding principles.

As soon as you have these principles in place, you will find things sorted around. Make sure every team member knows what these principles are and they should be embedded in all areas of training and development.

2. Know your customers- Next step after making guiding principles, know different type of customers who can deal with your representatives. To understand customer needs and wants, it becomes essential for you to connect and empathize with situations often faced by them.

One of the best ways is to create a customer persona and don’t forget to give each persona a name and personality. For instance, Cookie is a 40-year-old lady who loves to explore technology. She follows techy tutorials whereas there is a guy called Tim who loves to follow precise instructions offered by the web page.

By creating personas, your customer support team can recognize who they are and understand them better. It’s also an important step in becoming sincerely customer-centric.

3. Emotional connection matters- Have you ever come across a phrase “it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it”? I am pretty sure you must have. The best customer experiences are the ones achieved when a number of your team creates an emotional connection.

A few days back I happened to stumble upon an interesting example that is best suited here. The company took care of the return shipping and had a courier pick up of the product as soon as it learned that their customer’s near one has passed away. In addition to this, the very next day the company sent a bouquet with a condolence note to the customer.

This is the best way to increase trust and loyalty. We are humans we can be easily emotionally attached especially with the feel when we use a product or service. Optimizing for an emotional connection can increase overall sales growth to a great extent. Emotionally engaged customers are more likely to:

• Recommend your product or service
• Three-times re-purchase
• Less likely to shop around or find any alternatives
• Much less price-sensitive

4. Gain feedbacks in real-time– Feedbacks have always been a must! I mean it is very important for you to know that you are delivering a wow customer experience or not? And nobody is going to take this initiative for you; you need to ask out! Try capturing feedbacks in real-time. Post-interaction surveys and similar customer experience tools can be delivered using a variety of automated tools through email and calls.

Of course, you can even think of making specific outbound calls to gain more insightful feedback.

5. Measure the ROI at regular intervals– Last but certainly not the least, measuring the return of Investment. I mean how do you know that all the efforts, investments made in your teams, process and technology are working and paying off?

Measuring customer experience with the help of “Net Promoter Score” or NPS can offer you some valuable information. Moreover, it is pretty easy to implement and measure makes the NPS a favorite with company boards and executive committees.

Final Verdict

Constant nurturing and care is all that takes to create an effective customer experience. Time to create an impact on customer loyalty, higher retention, and increased revenues.

Charles Richard is a Business Analyst at Tatvasoft.co.uk. He is a progressive business leader and A passionate writer. Best at analysis that can leverage the data and information needed to generate increased business value. Besides his profession, Charles likes to share some new and trending technical aspects.

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: The Customer Experience: Eight Ways You’re Killing The Romance