Customer experience is more important than ever for digital marketers struggling to find balance after the seismic changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this week, we published a post called 5 Timely Ways To Optimize CX in a Post-Covid World.
Due to an abundance of ways to optimize CX post-Covid and popular demand, we decided to release another post on this engaging material. Here are five more timely ways to optimize your CX.
USE SITE NAVIGATION, CONTENT TO MAKE IT EASY TO FIND PRODUCT DETAILS
Make the process of locating information that customers and prospects can use dead simple. Pay special attention to navigational structure and flow. Ensure the most requested/visited content on your website is featured prominently and found easily; consider multiple entry points if that will spare your visitors’ time. In short, take out the friction.
PUMP OUT THE HELPFUL CONTENT
If there’s one thing the pandemic taught us, it’s that none of us can do too much. We can and should help our customers and prospects, either directly by supporting their business needs, or indirectly by not wasting their time. From content development to delivery, we should be exploring ways to share helpful ideas, recommendations, suggestions, tips and tricks, and gotchas that will make our businesses more useful to those we engage with, EVEN IF they don’t ultimately become customers.
WHEN CUSTOMERS INQUIRE, GIVE THEM A RESPONSE
Sounds pretty obvious, doesn’t it? Then why do so many businesses fail to respond when customers reach out? When we give customers the tools to communicate with us — ‘Contact Us’ buttons, inquiry forms, feedback forms — there’s nothing worse than not responding or taking too long to do so. When they’re interested enough to fill out and submit our forms, we must answer in a timely way that keeps the selling to a minimum. They’ll appreciate the good will and remember that when they are ready to buy.
GIVE TIMELY UPDATES ON OPERATIONAL STATUS
We’ve all been disappointed at times over the past year when Google indicated a favorite restaurant, venue, or business is open, only to find it closed when we called or arrived there. It’s worth taking time to verify, on a daily basis, our status on the web, Facebook and other outlets where customers will come looking for us. And we should answer the phones, in a welcoming fashion, while we’re at it.
KEEP OUR COMMITMENTS
Stick by commitments or policies, even when it’s inconvenient or costly to do so. It’s the right thing to do and customers will appreciate that they can depend on us.
Pre-pandemic, many of the items above may have been no brainers or (hopefully) standard practice for many of us. But there are two key lessons I’ve learned in the last 15 months: 1) take nothing for granted and 2) double down on the basics — in this case, the basics of CX. If we do all of these things — that is, being good marketers and good partners — our CX works well for our customers and pays off for our business.
