CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IN OUR MODERN ERA

Customer experience is a service that companies provide to communicate with their clients and better meet their needs. It consists on the management that every worker does when in contact with clients, advising them and producing high-quality solutions for their problems. In that sense, it allows them to attain extraordinary results.

Managing to establish these quality links adds a differentiating value to your establishments. In an ever-connected world, it’s essential to understand that customer experience is a critical competitive advantage that we cannot and must not ignore.

Omnichannel Customer Experience

Of course, customer satisfaction is subjective and very complex. Hence, this highlights the importance of working this aspect of retail in all its forms, from the moment the client steps into the shop to weeks after they finished their last purchase. In our era, customer experience must be omnichannel. We have many channels through where we can communicate with our client: face to face, through email, phone, through our web… and it’s vital that our message is both homogeneous AND personalized through all these channels, to offer a cohesive image. This way, we increase our chances of the client returning and of them recommending our stores, increasing our NPS (Net Promoter Score) and our CLTV (Customer LifeTime Value).

Customer care and experience

One of the most influential variables in customer experience is customer care. Please let us share this small fragment of one of our reference books, The Connected Salesperson.

The purchase experience is not only an emotional connection, it is also a sensorial one, engaging all five senses. The transaction generates a neuronal resonance.

What does a customer see, or hear, touch or feel when they buy a baguette at the bakers, a coffee in a café on the corner, or the silk blouse they have always dreamed of from the boutique?

What three things do customers remember when they leave your store?

[…]

Firstly, scoring 10 out of 10 should be company policy. Creating followers is not something that is down to chance. To score a 10, the service must be beyond excellent, and it must be personalized. The image of the store needs to be professional (this concept varies from sector to sector) where required, or warmer and closer where this is preferable. No chewing gum while talking to a customer. No glancing away as our attention wanders. No answering phone calls while attending to customers.

The objective, then, is clear. To score a 10, it is fundamental to go even beyond non-negotiable standards. We must produce personalized attention. The client is actually looking for emotional intelligence in his interactions with businesses, aside from an excellent service.

The goal of customer care in your business must be to show emotional intelligence in every sale and every transaction.

Customer experience and mirror neurons

Mirror neurons are a specialized kind of neurons that activate when we execute an action, or when we see another person (or animal) execute the said action. The most salient example is that of the yawn: when you yawn, look around and you will probably see more than one person yawning too. Even more, it’s possible to get an urge to yawn just by thinking of other people yawning.

The power of mirror neurons cannot be undervalued in customer experience. For example, if while dealing with a customer we smile, this client will feel happier and more prone to smile. This very simple effect can have an enormous effect in income and sales: on Relay newspaper kiosks, where the average transaction time is of twenty seconds, the smile of the vendor has produced an extra 30% in sales.

The beautiful thing about this effect is that it propagates: when the customer leaves our shop smiling, he will activate the mirror neurons of other city neighbours, and this happiness will spread wherever he goes.

With all of this we want to highlight the importance of taking care of even the minimal details of customer experience in our business. From keeping a cleaner and more open shop, all the way to dressing well, smiling and talking with a happier voice; all of this has an extraordinary effect on how our clients feel. And the best thing about this is that it’s a win-win situation: the client wins, because they feel better treated and more satisfied; this happiness is spread throughout society and helps improve our world; and last but not least, our business increases.

Benoit Mahé.