Why bother with a good customer experience?
The CRM and Sales Impact Report released by SugarCRM recently shows that consumers are likely to pay 25% more if they receive a “frictionless” customer experience. A poor experience has the opposite effect. The report stated that 19% of customers will leave after a single bad experience and 60% after a few lacklustre experiences.
What is a good customer experience?
Consumers expect their experience with a vendor to provide the benefits of a relationship with a local store, but with the time savings and convenience provided by digital. In this era of sophisticated e-commerce platforms and online marketplaces, consumers have been trained to expect high levels of personalised choice and tailored offers. To make matters worse for small to medium sized enterprises trying to keep up with the big boys – not all customers are the same.
How can you match and exceed demand for this experience?
You can convert a one-time purchaser into a repeat purchaser and then into a brand advocate by focusing on your customer’s journey from engagement through to customer service. The customer has many touch points with your organisation. How they seamlessly interact with an end-to-end experience, which blends digital and staff interactions, will impact on churn rate. However, if you make this investment you have a better chance of not just winning new customers but retaining them and turning them into a marketing channel for your business.
Converting buyers into advocates is important, as 84% of consumers will take action based on a recommendation from a friend or family member. To add to the challenge, social media can spread good news fast, but bad reviews travel faster. This diagram by Deloitte shows the relationship between a company and its customers can range widely between shareholder and activist.
What technology is there to make this happen?
Building systems that can deliver processes, which turn a marginal or satisfied customer into an evangelist or even a micro-influencer, is not an overnight exercise. However, technology now plays a major role in delivering and maintaining a business’ process and culture. SugarCRM has developed a new suite of sales and marketing automation tools, which can connect your business to your customers. For example, you can access the world’s largest e-commerce ecosystems or offer live chat and asynchronous messaging to find your voice in an increasingly busy marketplace, where consumers are tuning out to traditional advertising and finding new ways to make purchasing decisions.
In this video, Darren Flood from Evolution Marketing and Richard Miller from SugarCRM have a “fireside chat” and take a light-hearted look at the latest customer experience trends and technologies. The video explains how a business can use customer experience technology to turn a marginal customer into a repeat buyer.
If you don’t have an in-house IT team, with mar-tech expertise, we are here to help
If you need some help unravelling the complexities of your customer experience strategy, Evolution Marketing Services has over twenty years of experience consulting with clients to design, deploy and maintain technology-mediated sales and customer experience solutions in Australia. We are different because our team of highly skilled consultants and engineers pride themselves of delivering the best customer service in the industry. Our speciality is complex projects that require a high level of technology customisation and integration. We want to work with you to make your sales and marketing technology solution work for you.
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