I have written many posts on the value of your organization’s customer experience. They are usually motivated by some recent personal experience I had. Today’s post is no exception. This time it didn’t involve a “person” – it was an electronic experience.
We often rely on our websites to be the first level of contact for our prospects and customers. We spend enormous amounts of money driving folks to our site, gaining visibility and awareness. Once on the website, it is easy to see its effectiveness – how many pages were visited, for how long, etc. That’s the sales side.
But what about the customer support role our websites now need to play? Do we make it easy to find resources to resolve issues?
Ease is critical for support. A key difference in the support experience versus the sales experience is that the user is in a completely different frame of mind. They are likely confused, unhappy, and may even be mad.
So, after all the effort and expense we went into selling a customer, we can then blow it in one poor support experience.
Most of us work to obtain long-term clients with repetitive buying habits that expand our revenues with lower sales costs. But even single sales have an essential role in our marketing and attracting others.
Take the time to sit in your customer’s chair and review your post-sale customer experience. You may find that you’re hurting your business and not even know it.
Today’s buyers in the online marketplace have many more options – and tend to move quickly when confronted with a bad experience. Depending on your business, their only “personal” experience with your team may be through your electronic employee – your website.
Your customer’s experience with you, on a personal level and electronically, has never been more important as we move into 2023 and the new challenges it will present. Use their eyes and look at both the sales and the support experiences you utilize to maximize your success!
Here are a couple of those earlier posts on customer service I mentioned that you may enjoy:
- Experience Wins: My Take-Aways from Horst Schultz – His story on leveraging the customer experience into success in the hospitality market
- The Key to Customer Relationships-Service – Our history at HL Group and how the customer experience drives our success
