How Important is the Customer Experience?

The customer experience is vital to your business. No matter how large your business, the customer experience will either keep them coming back or send them running. How is your customer experience?

How did it Used to Be?

Back in the day, an unhappy customer would write a letter to the company and they might tell a few people about it. This was the way it used to work and the customer experience couldn’t really sink a business quickly.

How is it Today?

In today’s world, the customer experience makes a huge difference. The average individual has at least 130 friends on Facebook and 140 followers on Twitter. This doesn’t even take into consideration the many other social channels or the many review sites out there.

Today, if you provide a bad customer experience, your customers won’t write letters. Instead, they will go online and blast out information about how bad your business is. This can kill you in a hurry. From Yelp reviews to Angie’s List, there’s a site for just about any type of business.

Just imagine, a customer has a bad experience with your company and goes online. How long will it be before they have reached 100, 200 or even 1,000 people? This could cost you so much business that you didn’t even know you could have received.

On the other hand, a happy customer can reach out to 100s of people by sharing pictures of the product you provided them. This could lead to a ton of new business. This is the new type of word of mouth and it can be incredibly powerful.

Oracle conducted a study and it showed that a bad customer experience can lead to up to 20% loss in revenue for the company. This study also showed that only about 37% of companies are even trying to improve the customer experience. This is mainly due to businesses not knowing where to start.

How can the Customer Experience be Improved?

There are many ways to improve the customer experience for any size business. Whether the customer experience needs to be in person, over the phone or online, you can make changes to improve the experience.

If you have a high volume of phone calls, the first thing you can do is get rid of the long automated systems. This can make it very frustrating for customers. Instead, you can use virtual receptionists so that every customer actually gets someone on the other end of the phone when they call.

A pleasant phone conversation can set you apart from the many companies making customers go through multiple menus to reach a real person. This can also help eliminate long hold times, which customers hate. You don’t want to have a bad reputation because of hold times.

Since the first interaction for your customers is most likely a phone call, this needs to be a flawless system. Hiring receptionists to work for you can be expensive; however, if you hire virtual receptionists you don’t have to pay salaries or hourly wages. Instead, you can pay for the actual time they are on the phone working for you. In addition, they will not step away for breaks without someone else covering your phone lines.

The benefits of creating a better customer experience are endless. You may see an actual boost in revenue and you won’t have to worry about losing business due to a poor customer experience. This benefit alone can save your business and help you grow.

In the age of sharing things instantly, creating a better experience for your customers is vital. Any help you can get with this can help you move forward with your business. Virtual receptionists can provide the pleasant experience your customers deserve and make sure they feel important. This can lead to social sharing of good things about your company, along with quality reviews.

Good reviews and good comments on social media can lead to more business and keep you from losing business from a bad customer experience. If you want to build your business, benefit from providing a better customer experience and make sure you don’t lose business because of something you can control, start with virtual receptionists answering your phones.

There are many other things you can do to improve the customer experience, but the phones comes first. Phone communications are way too important for too many businesses to ignore. Start here and move to other parts of your business as you grow.