3 Ways To Improve Costumer Experience

In this post you’ll find 3 strategies you can employ to improve the quality of the costumer experience with your business.

 

Along with the ability to develop and launch great products/services, there is also the need to improve the way the costumer feels about not only the product/service, but also the business itself. Big companies like Apple, or Google, which although giants on their industries, still invest their resources on improving the experience the costumer has with their brands. This can be said to be one of the many reasons why they have been around for so long. With an increasing ability for companies to match each other’s performance or quality, competing on such parameters is a strategy that might be losing its effectiveness as time goes by. High quality is today the minimum required demand of the average costumer, and if you want to beat the competition as a business, on top of great quality/performance products, you also have to invest more on the way the costumer interacts with your business at every level, this is an investment in costumer experience.

 

3 Ways to improve Costumer Experience

The way the costumer feels about your brand and its products has a lot to tell about whether they will leave the moment another business comes making a better offer, or whether they will stick with you. This along with the quality of the products/services you offer can improve, or be detrimental to what goes by the name of price elasticity. Which is in simple words, nothing but the degree of “slack” the business has with the costumers to increase prices while keeping the current demand. High elasticity would mean that small price changes could cause the business to lose a part of if not all of its costumer base for the competition. It’s true that some industries are more sensitive to price change than others, but it’s also true that the way the costumer values the business and its products can determine how can those changes cause them to switch to the competition. This could also affect what goes by the name of costumer retention, which is about the ability of a business to, as you’re probably guessing, to keep the costumers they attract. It’s almost pointless to have lots of costumers coming in, whether from marketing or any other kind of strategy, if they don’t stick with the business.

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1. Simplify website and/or app

One way to improve the level of user experience is by improving the visual aspect of any website or apps the business owns. Notice that what is meant by “improve” is not to add more functionalities, since this often results in a more complicated and difficult to use interface, but to instead try to find first the set of things that make the core activities on the app/website more complicated than they have to be. A big part of real improvement comes from simplifying instead of adding, as taught on the book The advertising effect by Adam Ferrier, the author mentions the fact that sometimes, all it takes to boost sales is to remove complexity. We live in a world in which we don’t tolerate complication at any level. Something as simple as finding a piece of contact, or a long loading web page is enough to make most of us look for the next best offer. When we are assigned the task to “improve” something, we, specially the creative ones, tend to be tempted to add more, instead of removing. The more you simplify, the least the user will struggle to use your website/app, and this is an important place to be if you’re concerned about the costumer’s experience. One example of this is amazon.com, which implemented this idea by making it as easy as possible for the costumer to make a purchase whenever they are ready to do so.

 

2. Make it easy to receive complaints

Don’t run away or try to avoid costumer complaints. Although they are always negative, they don’t have to be perceived as such. At the core of any complaint or criticism lies the possibility of growth, which when not taken personally, or misattributed to something else, can be the stepping stone for the discovery of ideas or businesses opportunities which you wouldn’t be able to find.

On the book The lean startup by Eric Ries, the author focuses on the importance of the implementation of the costumer’s feedback on your product development cycle. By doing this, you step away from mere assumptions of what might be that thing that the costumer needs or desires. Costumer feedback is an opportunity to not only know what you’re doing wrong, but also to find out what you’re doing right. The development of a “killer” product is a journey without a map. We all make assumptions about the right direction in the hopes that we eventually get to where we want to get to. By integrating the costumer feedback, you get a shortcut to what goes by the name of product/market fit. Which is in simple terms the state in which the product fits the needs of the market it makes part of, and the market fits the needs of the business in the form of high demand.

Guessing, no matter how smart the guesser, is by no means better than the opinion of the costumer itself. This is why the author encourages us to create a minimum viable version of the product/service we would like to implement, and instead of spending thousands if not millions of dollars developing a product for launching, to build a version with only the necessary features for testing, and from there, according to the feedback you get, making the necessary changes to meet the needs of the costumer.

3. Fix costumer complaints

Another way to improve the costumer experience is by fixing what’s wrong. We get feedback not for the sake of it, but for the sake of improvement. So, the moment you’re told about what’s wrong with a product/service, the next step is to take the necessary actions to fix it. Unsolved complaints just like complicated websites/apps are also detrimental to the user experience. It’s important to never forget that just as we’re trying to outperform the competition, the same is happening from the other side of the table. Just like us, our competitors are looking for ways to take a bigger cut of the market, and one thing that can make a business lose costumers for the competition, is certainly poor or no solutions for the costumers’ negative feedback.

Summary

When it comes to costumer experience, there is much more one can do than the above tips. If you don’t know where to start, these are a good place to do so but are by no means the last. Just like business ideas, always keep looking for new ways to improve the costumer experience. Don’t take anybody’s word for anything, create the habit to always test whatever you learn whenever possible. Do the same with the tips above, and see how it works out for you 🙂 .

 

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