In 2024, customer experience is emerging as the key differentiator for businesses across all industries. With evolving consumer expectations, advancing technology, and an increase in competition, customers have come to expect a great experience every single time they shop. A recent study suggests that a staggering 73% of customers will leave a brand after just one bad experience. The impact of this in the long term is even more significant: 60% of customers who leave a company never return.
Your company simply can’t afford to miss the mark on creating great customer experiences. So, how can your business stand out and create exceptional customer experiences that will get people to stick around?
What Makes a Good Customer Experience Great?
Creating an excellent customer experience involves planning beyond a single transaction. It requires thinking about every interaction a customer might have with your brand during the buying process, and then trying to create a consistent and positive experience at each touchpoint. This requires a deeper understanding of your customers’ needs, preferences, and challenges—and a willingness to listen to their feedback.
How to Create Great Customer Experiences
Here’s how you can create a great customer experience that keeps people coming back again and again.
Embrace personalization
Customers appreciate it when businesses take the time to understand their preferences and tailor interactions accordingly.
According to Epsilon, 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences.
So, today’s customers expect you to do better than just using their name in an email. Try taking it a step further: Offer tailored product recommendations based on past purchases, or build a website that uses dynamic content to change its appearance based on how people interact with the site.
Social media platforms offer sophisticated targeting options. Use these to deliver personalized content that resonates with your audience.
For instance, use Facebook’s audience segmentation to show different ads to different user groups, ensuring relevance and engagement. And with Agorapulse, you can even target your LinkedIn and Facebook posts to be shown to a specific country.
Be consistent
This is something you hear all the time on social media, but the same concept applies to your customer interactions, too!
Just think about any time you have been to your favorite restaurant franchise. It doesn’t matter which location you are at because the experience you will have is going to be basically the same. The menu will be the same, the food will taste the same, and the service will be the same. You get the idea.
Whether a customer interacts with a brand via email, phone, social media, or in-person, the experience should be consistent. This includes consistent messaging, consistent branding, and consistently high quality of service.
This is no small feat to accomplish with just a team of one or two people. But it’s especially difficult if you have a team of people all over the world managing your social media accounts. How do you have any hope of keeping things consistent, then?
You can definitely make this easier by using a social media tool that has features which help your team work better together.
For example, Agorapulse allows you to assign items to someone on your team for them to review or respond to. And then it’s just as easy for you to quickly see which items have been completed by your team. You can also tag conversations or add custom labels to keep track of everything.
(These are just some of the time-saving team collaboration features you’ll find in Agorapulse … If you want to see what else we’ve got, why not grab a free trial and give things a test drive?)
Use the right tools together
Implementing CRM systems, chatbots, and social media management tools plays a huge role in streamlining customer interactions and ensuring timely responses.
And if you connect these powerful tools together, you will be even more effective in your customer communication.
For example, you can connect Agorapulse’s Social Inbox with your Salesforce or HubSpot data. This helps to centralize your data and gives you some additional context when interacting with a potential customer or lead. That way, you can quickly view information such as lead status or contact email while engaging in social media conversations.
Integrating your CRM with Agorapulse allows for seamless data flow between social media interactions and customer records, enhancing the effectiveness of your customer service.
Be proactive
It’s also important that you don’t sit around waiting for customers to come to you with their problems.
Go the extra mile by anticipating their needs and reaching out proactively to offer solutions or support post-purchase. Simple actions, such as following up after a purchase to ensure satisfaction or offering tips on using a product, can significantly enhance the customer experience.
Be responsive
Customers value when a brand responds to their inquiries quickly. A lot.
According to Forrester, customers are 2.4X more likely to stick with a brand when their problems are solved quickly.
Many of those problems will surface on social media, by the way. An increasing number of customers prefer using social media to engage with brands over any other customer service channel like email, phone, website chat, or visiting a physical store.
Using a centralized inbox for your social media accounts is so important. It makes handling the never-ending messages from your customers so much easier, since you don’t have to constantly switch tabs from Facebook to Instagram to YouTube. You just keep up.
Agorapulse also helps you identify any negative comments or messages even faster, as it will automatically identify the sentiment of each item and apply a label.
Agorapulse’s automatic inbox sentiment rating
But your customers don’t always just slide into your DMs either. That would make things simple. But the reality is that complaints or unhappy customers can happen anywhere online.
Sometimes, it is a negative comment on one of your Facebook ads, or maybe you are tagged in a tweet complaining about your product, or worse, maybe you don’t even get tagged in the complaint at all! No matter how your customers voice their concerns, they still expect a response.
That means you need to have a solid social media listening strategy if you want to have any hope of responding to customer problems quickly.
Using Agorapulse’s social listening add-on, you can set up listening searches for your brand and any branded terms, so that you never miss what people are saying online about your company. It also means you can jump in to conversations on social media faster, which will help you keep an eye on the general public sentiment surrounding your brand online.
In Conclusion
Creating exceptional customer experiences requires a strategic blend of personalization, consistency, and responsiveness. Agorapulse offers the advanced features needed to excel in each of these areas, helping your business meet and exceed customer expectations on social media. In a world where one bad experience can lead to losing a customer forever, staying ahead of the curve and delighting your customers at every touchpoint is not just important—it’s essential.
Ready to transform your customer experience strategy? Try Agorapulse for free and see how it can help you delight your customers and drive growth.
