What do customers expect from businesses today?
What are the common customer expectations that companies need to work on to provide an excellent customer experience (CX)?
Personalization
Look to personalize the experience throughout the customer journey, whether it’s pre, during or after purchase. This focuses the service experience around them.
This could happen when a customer service agent uses the customer’s name in conversation, or when the customer receives email discounts, tailored to what they usually, or might like to buy. It can occur as a service, like personalized shopping styling, or be built into the product itself, so it’s just right for them.
Not only does it help to direct customers to products and services that they like, making their customer buying journey easier; but it also improves sales. 80% of customers would be more likely to use an organization if they offer personalized experiences.
Quality customer service
Customers want to see that you care about their wellbeing, lives and what matters to them - and customer experience is the way to do it. By focusing on your customers, your organization can become 60% more profitable.
This expectation can’t be stressed enough: Treat your customers like VIPs. The value of customer services actually influences the prices that customers will pay - Americans will pay 17% more to buy from a company that has a reputation for its great service. Companies have made real money from their reputation for having great customer service alone.
Don’t let your customers feel underappreciated (said to be the top reason why customers switch brands) by making more effort to engage and learn more about your customer’s wants, feelings, desires and beliefs.
Be authentic and genuine in your interactions, and most importantly, be human. Empower your customer service agents to help the customer and make that their sole goal.
Quick resolution-time for complaints
Customers want speed. They expect a company to solve their issues quickly, whether the complaint has been on digital channels - like social media, feedback email and webpage comments - or off-site on third-party and review sites.
In particular, review sites are key examples of places that businesses should be actively monitoring. When issues do arrive, a quick resolution will leave customers with a good impression - 53% of customers expect businesses to respond to negative reviews within a week.
Within social media, fast responses are the norm for a customer. Statista found that 18% of customers expected a response from a company’s social media within one hour. As all information is public facing, action or lack of action can be shared quickly, for better or worse.
Low-effort experiences
Customers don’t have a lot of time to spend figuring out how to purchase something using your system. They’ll say ‘no, thank you’ to the multi-step buying process and ‘hello’ to one-click buying and saving banking details for next time.
How can you make your customers’ lives easier? Give easy-to-understand instructions on how to use the platform, maybe in the form of a ‘start tour’ or a ‘get support’ button. Even after the purchase has been completed, you can give the customer extra support when using the product or service. Lastly, sending reminder emails ahead of time close to the customer's service renewal date, or periodic emails to ask for feedback will be appreciated.
Track customer effort with a customer effort score (CES)
Up-to-date knowledge
Customers want to interact with people who can answer their questions quickly and correctly, to give them the information they need to make their buying decision. Microsoft found that almost one in three people (30%) say that speaking with a knowledgeable and friendly agent is the most important part of customer service.
Make sure your employees know what’s hot, what to say and how to handle questions they don’t know about. It’s no good having customer service agents that don’t know about the latest products or information - ‘the blind leading the blind’ is not a winning strategy.
In addition, giving customers knowledge tools to help themselves is highly recommended. Research by Steven Van Belleghem showed that 70% of customers expect a company’s website to include a self-service application. One report showed that 73% of customers wanted to be able to solve their own problems on their own.
Improve your contact center with the Call Center Agent Experience Guide
Omni-channel availability
The customer wants to use the channels that they’re most comfortable with. Forrester found that 31% of customers reach out through Twitter, and almost a third of customers used SMS messaging to request assistance.
Not only that - 9 in 10 consumers want a seamless omnichannel experience. Is your product/service available to your customers across all available channels?
People behave in different ways, so it’s important to cater to these different needs - whether that’s at noon or night, monday or a weekend. Be prepared for your customer’s channel preferences and dedicate the right resources to make sure they achieve their goals.
Engage customers consistently across multiple touch-points
Customers view contextualized engagement and seamless transitions between different communication channels. If the businesses engage their customers based on earlier interactions, it could act as a winning formula.
Businesses that follow the omnichannel communication strategy have witnessed a significant 89% increase in customer retention and a 9.5% year-over-year increase in annual revenue.
Customers expect businesses to be active across multiple channels like the web, social media, email, mobile devices, etc. Maintaining consistency among every channel improves the customer experience that impacts brand reputation positively. So, break your silos and manage your client expectations by following the tips below.
· Identify all the channels that customers choose to reach out to your business.
· Unify all your customer conversations at a single place to get a better understanding of your customer journey.
· Use the insights to engage your customers throughout their journey across all touchpoints.
As a business, having a strong omnichannel customer service strategy is critical to have a unified view of your customers and be able to take necessary actions before they churn.
Key takeaways
· You can map your customer journey to understand their behavior and know the areas where they need your assistance. You can offer proactive assistance across the behavior stages via the right channels such as live chat, chatbot.
· You can acquire customer feedback and improve your support process to learn and exceed your customer expectations.
· Following an omni channel approach reduces the number of customer complaints as you can reach out to them across various channels.
Easy-to-use platforms
Customers want an easy experience with your communication platforms. They want to feel smart using them, achieve their goal and leave without feeling stressed.
Complexity is not your friend if you’re trying to gain points with your customers. American Express found that 40% of customers dealt with complicated interactions, such as payment disputes, by preferring to talk to a real person over the phone.
If you want to ensure a smooth journey, or evaluate where your customer pain-points are, try out customer journey mapping.
Products and services that perform well and do what they’re meant to do
This customer expectation is the most basic: knowing that what they buy will perform the actions, and have the features and functions, as advertised.
When customers buy your product or service, they think they’re buying exactly what you sold to them. If that product or service breaks, it follows that they’ll expect you to fix it as part of the transaction you made.
Show integrity by doing what you say you will, and sticking to your word. Your marketing information and communications out to all your channels should say the same thing in a consistent manner.
If there are serious issues with the product or service, let your customers know, think about service responses to the issue and get working on a fix.
What are customer expectations?
Customer expectations can be defined as the perceived value or benefits that the clients look for while purchasing products or services. It often includes understanding customer service.
The customer experience (CX) is based on what they expect from the overall brand. Successful businesses focus on meeting and exceeding clients’ expectations with superior quality products and services.
Here are the different types of customer expectations:
· Implicit expectations – are based on business performance and formed by experiences such as comparison with the products or services of the competitors.
· Explicit expectations – refers to well-identified product performance standards, quality of the product, and services rendered by any company.
· Interpersonal expectations – reflect the relationship between a customer and brand across the customer lifecycle.
· Static performance expectations – refer to the front-facing elements of your brand such as accessibility, customization, dependability, etc.
So Now the final takeaway Proven Strategies to Exceed Customer Expectations
1. Engage customers consistently across multiple touch-points
2. Provide faster real time solutions 24×7
3. Keep your communication transparent
4. Focus to cultivate customer loyalty
5. Collect customer feedback
6. Meet your client expectations by going the extra mile
7. Use social media to understand customer expectations
8. Conduct market research
9. Keep your customers engaged
10. Proactive handling of customer complaints
Conclusion
Customer expectations have a profound impact on every business. It implies across the whole organization in its own way. Being customer-centric is the best way of managing clients’ expectations. Once you plan and understand what your target audience expects, it becomes easy to meet and exceed them.
Customer service today is not about telling people how great you are and giving figures to prove it. It’s about creating memorable experiences that do the talking for you.
All you need to remember is to:
· Take your time
· Connect with the customer
· Do more than they would expect
Providing great customer service does not have to cost you the Earth either. Out of all the examples provided only one gift card was given. In fact, some companies who have excelled in customer service have even managed to remove their advertising departments entirely.
When you also consider 85% of clients would actually be willing to pay up to 25% more to get better service. Why would you be doing anything else?
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