Billionaire and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos predicted that customer experience would overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

Business success, he said, is more than ever inclined on your relationship with the customer.

His remarks come after a Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report 2019, which showed that 88.3 per cent of companies consider customer experience as a competitive differentiator.

The customer experience (CX) encompasses every interaction a customer has with a company and its products.

Since COVID-19, a growing number of C-suite executives have been prioritising investment in customer experience as a critical component of their strategy.

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This is because research has shown that companies who prioritise future investment in customer experience gain a range of benefits over those who don’t.

Improved customer attraction and retention are cited as the primary benefit of customer experience globally, which further translates into increased sales volumes and better customer satisfaction.

Hence, Human Capital International cannot overemphasise the core importance of having a grasp of a good customer experience journey in the success of businesses.

The principles we are sharing in this article should be practised so that you can satisfy and retain your valuable customers.

Train staff to be polite and friendly in all communications.

Future-minded companies are strengthening their relationships with their customers to grow and sustain their businesses.

What such businesses are doing is to develop the capacities of their employees, particularly, the customer-facing staff to ensure better communication and interaction with their customers.

Being polite is one such ingredient of excellent customer-led communication.

With politeness in your communication, staff can build a good rapport and respect the feelings of a client.

No customer entertains a rude attendant.

The small gesture of politeness and friendliness will endear and retain your customers. Satisfying a customer is a strategy for maintaining and making them ambassadors. Make sure this strategy is attained in your business.

Dawn L., (2015) warned that many customers no longer have time to complain. Instead, they terminate their relationship with you if you were rude to them. 

Agility in their daily business.

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Imagine you buy a product, and you need guidance on how to use it. You contact your service provider, and for hours or days, you do not get a response. Will you do business with such a company again?

I guess you will not.

And this is what Ford B, in the 2018 study found. The study indicated that 62 per cent of companies don’t respond to customer service inquiries.

When you do not respond to a client, it means you do not value them. If you do not appreciate them, they will equally abandon your business, and therefore you will cease to exist.

What this means is that if you sharpen the skills of your staff in customer experience, you can reduce your operating cost, and lower your customer acquisition cost.

Digitalising but maintaining human interface.

Many brands have automated their business processes, including responses to clients.

This is a more comfortable and faster way to respond to the tons of inquiries that sometimes tend to overwhelm responders.

In reality, however, brands need to balance technology and human touch experience to build compelling customer engagements.

Customer experience, which includes digital and in-person channels is essential in today’s customer experience journey.

According to the PWC customer experience survey 2017/18, over 65 per cent of the customers value professionalism as the core for customer satisfaction.

When a brand interacts with a customer physically or by telephone, the conversation is more intimate. Tap into this psychological satisfaction that comes with human to human interaction with your customers.

In all your dealings with a customer, maintain a positive attitude if you are to succeed.

In his book, Customer Service is Attitude Not a Department, highly rated trainer Emmanuel Dei-Tumi emphasises that “change your attitude and you improve your customer service.”

Attitude will help you to be polite, professional, and result oriented in your execution of good customer service. You can get this book here and widen your understanding of how to satisfy customers.