10 signs you need to embark on a Customer Experience Improvement Program

4 min read
26/02/18 11:57

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few years, you’ll have noticed that Customer Experience (CX) is an increasingly popular topic of conversation in every industry. 

Here at Tharstern, we've been working on our CX program since 2017 to make sure we're not only meeting our customers’ expectations, but exceeding them.

If you’re not sure whether you need to look into CX, here’s a quick test – read through the 10 points we've put together below to see if you suffer from any of the problems. If you do, you may need to embark on your own CX improvement program in your print business.

1. Employee morale is low OR you don’t know how employee morale is

One of the key considerations for providing a good customer experience is your staff. Happy staff = happy customers. Low retention rate can also be a problem, customers like to try and speak to the same person about their orders, they don’t like being passed around, they like to feel like they are talking to someone who knows their account inside out.

2. You have very little or no customer complaints

Unfortunately, no business can manage to keep all their customers happy all of the time. So if you haven’t received any complaints for a while, it might be that you aren’t giving your customers the platform to air their issues, or the platform you’re using is too hard to use. See complaints as a positive – become aware of the issues and use them to improve

3. You’re not measuring customer satisfaction or experience

Measuring how happy your customers are, is very important and doing it regularly is important too. Small and often is preferred by customers and make the questions as easy as possible to answer, you could even use emojis or star ratings so all they have to do is click. 

You can fix this by adopting a survey tool - you can see more about this in our CX survey article.

4. You don’t know what your customer retention rate is

Measuring your customer retention rate is essential in determining how satisfied your customers are. As the saying goes, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it! 

5. You don’t reward customer loyalty

In such a competitive landscape, it’s a good idea to do whatever you can to reward your loyal customers and make them feel loved.  

This could be something simple like sending a personalized notebook or calendar on a special occasion. Or it could be a more formal points scheme that results in discounts.  

6. You don’t get referrals

Referrals are a fantastic way to win business - they have a high order conversation rate and a low sales cost. So, if you aren’t getting any referrals, then you need to find out why! Survey your customers and ask them if they’d recommend you. If not, why not? If so, why aren’t they? You may just need to create a formal referral programme.

7. Employees aren’t empowered to solve problems

Giving your team the authority to solve problems is important – this will make the customer journey quick and easy. Speak to your teams and find out what problems they face that they know how to fix, but don’t have the authority to do so. Use this feedback to help decide which responsibilities they should have.

8. You don’t use social media to engage with customersHand touching tablet pc, social media concept.jpeg

Social media is becoming the most popular way for customers to get in touch with companies. It’s a platform where people can generally expect to get an instant answer and they know that because it’s open for anyone to see, the company want to deal with it as soon as possible.  That puts a lot of companies off using it, but isn’t it better to see what people are complaining about and have the opportunity to deal with it, than be unaware?

9. You don’t know what problems your customers are facing

Don’t be oblivious to the problems that your customers are facing, this can damage your reputation. Speak to your customers and find out what issues are bothering them, and how they feel you could help.

10. You don’t have a CX team or CX improvement programme

team of successful business people having a meeting in executive sunlit office.jpegIf you don’t have a team, or at least someone dedicated to CX then it’s time to change. According to a Walker study, by 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. 

So you need to get ahead of the competition and start working on this now. You can find out a bit more about some of the activities we carry out as part of our own CX program

 Here are a few articles to help you get started:

Get Email Notifications