How to make customer experience translate to revenue growth

Customer experience is the impression you leave with your customer.

By Raheem Adebayo

Quick Facts

• Advertising is losing its power of persuasion.
• Businesses are directly affected by customer review, which in turn is driven by customer experience.
• Companies with better customer experience outperform others.
• A fantastic customer experience is an advertisement in itself.

“Customer experience is the next competitive battleground. It’s where business is going to be won or lost. In today’s era, the customer is the king and the biggest game changer for any business. In fact, companies who deliver an exceptional consumer experience achieve higher customer satisfaction rates, decreased customer churn and enhanced revenue.”

The best way to define customer experience is as the impression you leave with your customer, resulting in how they think of your brand across every stage of the customer journey.

There is a lot of chatter in the business circle about customer experience (CX) as a potential stimulant for revenue growth and one may wonder why has it become such a hot topic today – It is simply because consumer expectations are higher and the digital world we are in makes customer reviews and word of mouth travel faster. Purchasers have now become empowered like never before and great customer experience drives this loyalty and revenue that every business owner so much desires. Downplaying its importance is no longer an option for businesses, as the voice of the customer continues to get louder.

Because businesses do not focus that much on these end-to-end customer journeys, you end up with an extremely cumbersome experience for customers, which is actually not optimised for the customer but optimised for the business. What businesses should be advocating now is this shift in perspective, so that the customer becomes the center of attention again.

A fantastic customer experience is important for the following reasons:

Improves customer satisfaction

Customer experience is key to exceeding your customers’ expectations. The opportunity lies in the ability to deliver what you promised and surprise your customer with extra care and support. By keeping an eye on the entire customer journey, you’re making sure that the promise of a positive experience is kept and that you’re offering a superior service.

Turns new customers into loyal customers

Creating an experience really impresses purchasers and ensures that they will keep doing business with you in the future. A superior experience becomes a valued and unique asset for any type of business. There are a few things that impact a brand’s reputation more than the way it responds to complaints. Customer service is an important part of developing brand loyalty, and the way you respond to unhappy consumers will determine what they say about you afterwards.

Increases customer advocacy

Word of mouth is one of the most powerful tools a company can wish for today. The truth is that a lot of consumers do not trust adverts anymore. People are now seeking third-party validation when making purchases.

By focusing on creating amazing customer experiences and embodying the desire for your business to go above and beyond, you’re creating an advocate out of every consumer. Hence, making your customer experience an advertisement in itself.

Helps you stand out from competition

In today’s business world, it is getting difficult to differentiate yourself from other businesses when everyone is sharing the same thing online: great content. But a competitive advantage is huge, and customer experience is the perfect tool to help you stand out from your competitors.

As Jerry Gregoire, CIO at Dell, says, “The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.”

This way, your consumer will no longer compare only products and prices, but also service and user experience. Embrace a customer-centric strategy, and stand out from your competitors by making sure today’s customers become tomorrow’s brand advocates.

Builds trust and creates personal relationships

In a world where we are being touched by hundreds of brands and adverts every day, how can you build a strong relationship with your consumers?

Personalized content and experiences are key. Making each one of your customers feel special and unique will send a positive message: they are cared for and important to your business. By doing so, you have a better chance at building trust with them, and therefore at creating a strong, long-lasting relationship.

A positive customer experience not only results in making your customer happy, but it can also lead to additional revenue. The best marketing money can buy is a customer who will promote your business — because they’ll refer their friends and family to you, free of charge.

 

Simple ways to prioritize customer service for your small business

In order to capitalize, small businesses and startups looking to grow must build a culture that cares about the customer.

The question is simple: “Are you taking time to make sure the customer is at the heart of your brand experience?’’

Customer experience has to be a part of your company’s DNA. Great customer experiences are what set companies apart in crowded marketplaces because they create passionate and vocal customers. This competitive advantage is hard for another business to break down because they have to battle that existing business-to-customer relationship first.

Whether via service interactions, product quality, or overall brand, experience has become the deciding factor that determines whether or not a customer will do business with a company. In order to capitalize, small businesses and startups looking to grow must build a culture that cares about the customer. And to really succeed, there can be no fake-it-till-you-make-it.

Here are a few ways small businesses can realize tremendous success by putting customer success at the heart of their companies.

Care about your employees

If you want to build your brand through satisfied customers, you need to start by ensuring satisfied employees. When employees are happy and actualized, it compounds their desire to help others. Besides, a “culture of caring” has no limits: You cannot legitimately care about customers if you don’t care about the people serving them.

Develop a rapport with all of your customers

When you’re running a small business, it’s easy for your team to get to know its customers. Your customer demand is small and support agents can spend plenty of time diving into service inquiries. As you scale, however, that extra time will shorten. When your customer base grows, your agents will need to focus on efficiency as much as they focus on customer satisfaction.

Before this happens, be sure to take advantage of early opportunities to bond with customers. Your first users are probably your biggest fans and they’ll likely become customer advocates if you build a rapport with them.

Hire employees who are great communicators

Small businesses tend to have small service teams of about three to five people. And, in many cases, customer service isn’t the rep’s only job. For many small businesses, employees find themselves wearing different hats and performing a variety of tasks, including service and support. This structure can work, but it depends heavily on your employees’ skills.

You need to be sure you’re hiring people who are stellar communicators and great at working with people. They need to be able to understand customer needs and flexible enough to adapt to sudden change. Good customer service is an effective way to grow a customer base, but you need excellent support reps for it to work.

Focus on customer retention strategies

If you’ve just started running a small business, you may want to write this stat down. It can cost up to 25x more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. This means improving customer retention is your key to increasing profits. You can develop a customer retention strategy that delights customers and encourages them to return to your business.

One commonly used method is a customer loyalty program that rewards people every time they buy from you. This incentivizes them to return to your business and avoid your competitors.

Define customer service vs. customer success

While these two things are related, they’re definitely not the same. Customer service is a support functionality, designed to answer questions and help customers through specific issues. Customer success, on the other hand, is a proactive movement designed to solve overarching challenges and build long-term success. Customer Success might seem like a nice-to-have for small businesses, but both functions are vital to a customer’s hierarchy of needs.

Let customer service shape your sales and marketing efforts

No small business can afford to take customer relationships for granted, and the best way to avoid that is to build them right into your sales and marketing strategies. Consistently excellent customer service gives you a unique selling proposition, repeat business, and most importantly, trust.  You have a 60-70% chance of getting business from your existing customers compared to only a 5-20% chance of selling to new prospects. Customers have no idea how many channels a brand offers, and really don’t care. They just want to communicate on the one that’s most convenient for them.

Take advantage of social media for customer service 

Social media is one of the rising stars of customer service mediums. Customers love using it for support because they can instantly report problems and automatically receive notifications on updates. Additionally, popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter offer in-app customer service tools, including live chat and AI. These automation features streamline the support process and improve the customer experience.

Collect customer feedback after each interaction 

Customer feedback is incredibly valuable when a service team is first starting out. Negative feedback shows what customers are trying to do and the roadblock that’s preventing them from reaching their goals. Positive feedback reveals your customers’ values and the aspects of your business they admire most. Analyzing this feedback can help you make important business decisions that extend beyond customer service. Marketing teams use this information to create effective campaigns that attract your target audience’s attention. Sales teams will identify timely opportunities to upsell and cross-sell, optimizing your odds for a repeat purchase. And, finally, product development can use this data to fine-tune products and address common customer roadblocks.

Always be asking

Customer engagement is an uphill battle. So when a customer comes to you for help, that’s an opportunity—they’re already listening, so now’s your chance to talk to them. At that moment, you have more of your customers’ attention. You can use that opportunity to not only provide great customer service or support experience but to make progress on other goals.

In summary, customer service is a team-wide effort. Don’t view it as a chore—view it as an opportunity to learn more about your own product.

 

Why Nigerian economy may not recover soon – Experts

The reality is that the nation lives above its means, and borrows in a way that is not sustainable.

By Abiola Odutola

Nigerian economy may not recover as soon as several people expect it to, as some economic and financial analysts have projected that it may take a longer period for it to survive the lull, which was birthed by 2016 recession and worsened by the Coronavirus pandemic.

This was disclosed by some experts at the just-concluded third quarter Economic Outlook organised by Nairametrics tagged ‘Projecting Nigeria’s Economic Recovery.’

At the webinar, the experts argued that the recession would take a longer time to fizzle out, as it has a less-clearly defined shape. According to them, the recovery will take a U-shape. The panelists were Partner & Chief Economist, PwC Nigeria, Andrew Nevin; Group Executive, Energy & Infrastructure, FirstBank, Bashirat Odunewu; Head of Research, Coronation Asset Management, Guy Czartoryski; Chief Commercial Officer, Mixta Africa, Rolake Akinkugbe-Filani, and Senior Vice President & Head of Financial Advisory at Africa Finance Corporation, Fola Fagbule.

What is V, U, W and L shapes?

The V, U, W and, L shapes are the major recession shapes that are used by economists to describe different types of recessions. They are informal shorthand to characterize recessions and their recoveries. The shapes take their names from the approximate shape economic data make in graphs during recessions.

While the V-shaped recession means the economy suffers a sharp but brief period of decline with a clearly defined trough, followed by a strong recovery, a U-shaped recession is longer than the former and has a less-clearly defined trough.

The W-shaped recession, which is also known as a double-dip recession, means the economy falls into recession, recovers with a short period of growth, then falls back into recession before finally recovering, giving a “down up down up” pattern.

An L-shaped recession or depression occurs when an economy has a severe recession and does not return to trend line growth for many years, if ever.

So, why did they choose a U for Nigeria?

Nevin projected that there will be a lot of pressure on the economy due to states taking over the responsibilities of their economic destiny and the forced nature of the COVID-19 disaster. To break forth, the PwC boss insisted that a great level of investment, unlocking of idle assets must be considered.

“I am not trying to be an alarmist but if the country does not take advantage of the period to accept some truth, there will be pressure. So, I will call it a U shape recovery or Rocket shape,” he added.

For Odunewu, some factors would hinder the nation’s recovery as desired by the government. Some of them are oil price that hovers around N$40-$45 PB, 90% of the national revenue still comes from the commodity and low compliance of Nigeria to the OPEC cut deal, which forced the nation to reduce oil production for the next few months.

She said, “If you look at the combination and the fact that the economy is also opening up now globally and by the end of September, we believe Nigerian economy will be better. I will say it is a U-shape recovery. But the second wave of COVID-19 could be a threat. I hope that never happens but if it does, we may end up in a W shape, which will be worse. If vaccines are available as promised by some nations by the end of October, the recovery may change from U to V shape.”

Akinkugbe-Filani chose a different part. According to her, the reality is that the nation will run out of the letters of the alphabets of the recovery. Why? It is because she sees the nation as one that lives above its means like seeking to borrow in a way that is not sustainable and seeking an economic construct that may not be sustainable.

She said, “I wonder the type of recovery we are looking at when the fundamentals of the economy have not changed. Regardless of the pandemic, we have always been a cyclical economy because of the oil price and the export-driven oil and the lack of value creation.

“The recovery for me, in order to be sustainable, we have to learn from the past. The overall spending of the nation is about 7% of the GDP. There is still a lack of integration and focus strategy in terms of infrastructure. For recovery from the pandemic, we need to create local demand for our consumption, so that we are not so vulnerable. I will love to see a U-shape recovery but the reality on the ground will lead me to say that the recovery is between U-shape and W-shape.”

In his own case, Czartoryski is an optimist. He voted for a U-shape recovery. His reasons: “On the foreign exchange, it is not as bad as it was in 2016. By the beginning of 2017, we had an official rate of N317 and a parallel rate of over N500 but today is not so bad with an interbank rate of about N388 and the parallel rate was N477 last week. That is not even 30% away. The forex distortions are not as large as they were.

“There is light at the end of the tunnel though with some complications. Foreign Portfolio Investment is massively down due to the oil price and we should not have to rely on the FPI at all. We are also living beyond our means. We need to create domestic savings like looking into the pension funds, money market, and fixed income funds.”

To Fagbule, AFC is optimistic about Nigeria’s recovery. “I would love to be on U-shape. Based on fact, Nigeria never came out of the last recession, as it was only at the beginning of recovery, which never held.”

According to the Senior Vice President of AFC, the nation cannot recover without working on her Trade and investment, as it is the only way out from the economic lull. He emphasized that government expenditure is never going to be sufficient to take Nigeria out of the woods and it is time for the West African nation to emulate countries like Gabon, China and India, whose Investments contribute 30%, 40% and 31% to their GDPs when Nigeria only does 14%.