Platform Overview
View all the features available with Attendease
JustReg
Meet our simplified registration solution
Features
In-person
Hybrid
Virtual
BY TYPE
Blog
Keep up with the latest events news, topics and industry insights
Resources
Get the latest whitepapers, ebooks & videos on corporate events management
Support Center
Helpful answers from the Attendease team
Event Management
December 15, 2022
Kollectively
Whether you’re launching a new product, hosting an event, or conducting business as usual, your customers’ experiences need to be one of your top priorities.
Customer experience (CX) includes all of the interactions a customer has with your business that inform their opinion of your organization. These experiences and how your business responds to them can determine whether a customer stays loyal and recommends your product or service to others or seeks to do business elsewhere.
A strong, deliberate CX strategy can help you improve your retention and word-of-mouth marketing by turning customers into advocates for your business. In this guide, we’ll explore a few ways you can improve your CX program to create frictionless customer interactions, ensure customers feel heard, and provide evidence your program is succeeding that you can bring to your board. Let’s get started.
Your CX program should help you identify trends in customer feedback that can inform long-term improvements. However, where CX really shines is its ability to help you respond quickly to customers who have had negative experiences and take action to prevent them from lapsing.
Ensure you’re using a CX platform that can identify survey responses with negative feedback and automatically elevate them to the appropriate manager to respond and close the loop. PeopleMetrics’ guide to closed loop customer feedback explains this in detail:
This cycle will then repeat every time you receive new feedback from customers. To ensure that feedback is acted upon promptly, set up automatic alerts to notify managers. This helps break down data silos and empowers employees to act as soon as feedback is elevated to them, creating more efficient, frictionless experiences for customers.
For large businesses, analyzing every survey for insight into specific problem areas can seem impossible. After all, no one at your business actually has time to read thousands of surveys. Fortunately, with text analytics, you can get an overview of your customers’ thoughts and opinions by taking their actual words into account but without poring over each survey individually.
Use CX software that includes text analytics and automated sentiment analysis features. Ths will provide you with a high-level overview of how customers view your business. With text analytics, you can:
Text analytics is a powerful tool, but keep in mind that there is a margin of error. For example, text analytics might have trouble knowing how to categorize misspellings or slang it isn’t familiar with. While these issues will be minor compared to the amount of surveys text analytics are able to accurately analyze, they can be pervasive in large data pools.
To reduce these impacts when investing in CX software with text analytics, ensure your platform provides a human touch alongside its reporting capabilities. This means your CX software provider should be a partner in understanding your customers’ experiences rather than just a service you renew but don’t interact with outside of the technology.
Your customers’ experiences are informed by a variety of factors outside of just product quality and price. While a customer may initially make purchasing decisions based on those factors, they’re unlikely to continue buying from a business they feel doesn’t listen to their concerns or respect their time.
Frustrated customers are at a turning point in their engagement, and poor follow up can harm retention. That’s why during these intense and potentially emotional moments, businesses should strive to treat their customers with empathy and patience.
To determine the most intense, potentially high-emotion points of your customers’ experiences, try creating a customer journey map. This map should include a satisfaction trajectory, which is a line graph that represents on average how customers should feel at various points in their journey.
For example, satisfaction is likely to start low as customers are still learning about your business, then is expected to increase after finding the information they need and deciding to make a purchase. However, you might note a common dip in satisfaction from when customers order a product to when it arrives, as they’ll need to wait for shipping, which can be an annoying process.
A business who knows they have a long shipping process might get ahead of this issue and show greater empathy to customer concerns by sending regular messages tracking where their package is and create a system where customers can easily report whether they believe their package was lost in the mail.
Outside of interactions with individual customers, your business can also project empathy as an organizational value by participating in corporate social responsibility (CSR). Crowd101’s corporate giving statistics report shows that 90% of companies claim that partnering with a charitable cause enhances their brands’ reputation. For supporters who care about a specific cause or want to make ethical shopping decisions, this can be the deciding factor in whether they make a purchase or are even drawn to your business in the first place.
CSR and showing individual customers empathy can even overlap in some situations. For example, if your business is hosting a CSR event, consider not just how you represent the cause your business has partnered with but also how customers at that event are treated. This applies to other aspects of CSR, as well, such as providing information on your business’s philanthropic projects that’s easy for customers to find and understand so they can make informed purchasing decisions.
Your CX strategy influences how you approach individual customers and your business as a whole. Improve your efficiency with tools that can alert you to problems and provide a bird’s eye view of your customers’ experiences. But never forget to add a human touch by ensuring you have systems in place that facilitate listening to individual customers and approaching them with empathy.
Author: Sean McDade
Sean McDade has been helping companies optimize customer experiences for over twenty years. An angel investor in the Philadelphia region, he is also the founder, CEO, and visionary of PeopleMetrics, a leading provider of experience management software and advisory services. In addition to working with a number of leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, he is the author of two books.
Event Trends
January 21, 2021
January 12, 2021
January 5, 2021
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
Comment *
Name *
Email *
Website
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
Δ