According to a recent study by Gartner, more than 60% of the businesses across the world are projected to compete on the basis of CX (Customer Experience) in the near future. This is why a growing number of organizations are emphasizing on their marketing and branding efforts to get there.

Customer experience has come a long way and is at present a prominent differentiator in today’s cut-throat and volatile market ecosystem. As a matter of fact, customer experience today is more of a thin line that differentiates a growing and thriving business from a dormant one. Thus, for a company to reach atop the pinnacle, it is imperative to build and foster a culture or marketing/PR/branding strategy that revolves around its customers. Long story short, customer experience ought to sit at the core of a company’s success strategy.

Do you know what’s common with most of the successful organizations is that they put their customers in the first place always.

Here are few tricks aimed to help a business rock at customer success:

1. Understand that customer service and customer success are two different things

Firstly, you need to define and understand the difference between customer service and customer success. Though interrelated, these are two separate things. Customer service is more of a support-oriented aspect aimed to address the concerns/queries and grievances and help customers over particular issues. Whereas customer success on the other hand is about a proactive phase or stage aimed to address key challenges and paving way for customer success. Though welcoming as it may sound, customer success, but customer service also plays a crucial role. The key to winning at both is to make sure that both customer success and customer service are well-defined and organized in context of goals, roles and responsibilities.

2. Treat your employees well

Yes, treat your people the way you would want the customers to treat your business or brand. Building a brand name via satisfied and happy customers requires satisfying your employees in the first place. This is because employee experience is directly related to customer experience. A business when retains satisfied and happy employees, it in a way drives their passion to help others mainly its customers. Most importantly, an employee friendly work culture works great when it comes to drive brand loyalty.  No business would win the trust of its customers if it fails to care about its employees that cater to them.

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3. Utilize user-generated content

Do you know, success stories combine the enthralling power of data-driven storytelling? Yes, these content pieces help a business lay emphasis on real case scenarios, challenges, innovation and outcomes thus, assisting to make the product and/or service worth and tangible to the audience. Most important of all, success stories mirror a company’s commitment towards the success of its clients.

4. Customer service needs to sit at the core

Make customer service the crux of sales and marketing strategies. The ability to provide top-notch customer service consistently is unarguably a huge turn on and goes a long way in winning the trust of your customers. Also, remember that an organization has more chances of getting repeat business from existing customers than it endeavors to acquire new ones. Understand that customers do not bother about the several channels that a brand offers, as they just want to get in touch with the handiest one. This is why social CRM software solutions are gaining a decent amount of attention from businesses of all sizes and verticals worldwide. As we know that social media is the most preferred means for people to contact a brand today and thus, having a good customer relationship management software with excellent social integration functionalities will not only help a business help its customers, but would also assist in knowing and understanding them better.

5. 360-degree view of customers in the pipeline

A business ought to merge its service, marketing and sales data on a unified platform. Understand that customers are least bothered about who they contact in an organization when looking for assistance. All they seek is answers and solutions to their concerns. This is the reason you need to bring together all the interactions and data into a unified system. This is where a CRM system comes into picture, because it bridges different teams and departments thus, making sure that everyone stays on the same page. Now this is of great help to customer reps and sales reps, since they can provide personalized and efficient customer service. Yes, a CRM software makes it possible for a sales rep to access customer data on the go.

Conclusion

In today’s era of connected and smart customers, owning a great product line won’t do the job for you, as you ought to go beyond the usual to win new customers whilst retain the existing ones by providing them with award-winning customer experience. Having the right set of brains combined with the most apt strategy and a robust CRM software will set you up to offer satisfactory and excellent customer experience.

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