Providing an excellent customer experience and retaining customers is one of the most critical aspects of creating a successful business. In this article, I am going to expand on the ways a business owner can adopt some straightforward yet powerful strategies to create an excellent customer experience – 4 Steps to Retain Customers Through an Excellent Customer Experience…
Before I begin discussing about 4 Steps to Retain Customers Through an Excellent Customer Experience, I want to ask you to have an open mind and to put aside the thoughts you currently have about what comprises an ‘excellent customer experience’.
Let’s go on a journey of discovery and start to unpack what it means to both ‘create’ an excellent customer experience, and ‘enjoy’ a unique customer experience.
So, let’s think about what does ‘excellent customer experience’ actually mean to you?
Is it a customer going through the motions of buying from you and happily handing over their cash?
Is it a customer going through the sales process and not putting up any resistance to buying from you?
Is it a customer going through the sales journey and willingly asking for additional products to buy?
Here’s what I want you to consider…
An ‘excellent customer experience’ should have the possibility of any or all of those things.
More importantly, it needs to be a journey for them, that is:
a) Meaningful
b) Enjoyable
c) Repeatable if possible (some products may be one-off purchases in a lifetime, but for all others, they should be repeatable)
d) Engaging
If your customer experience doesn’t contain these four elements, then it doesn’t fall into the ‘excellent’ category.
So, let me explain what those four key elements of your excellent customer journey are:
STEP ONE – Creating a Meaningful Journey for Your Customers
Here is my definition of a meaningful journey:
A meaningful journey is one that creates an important connection for your customer. It answers their needs and creates a sense of importance for them so that they feel connected to your business and grateful. It leaves them with a positive memory.
How do you do this? You need to ensure that your customer has positive experiences during their journey to buying from you by:
STEP TWO – Creating an Enjoyable Journey for Your Customers
So, what is an enjoyable journey?
Quite simply, it’s an experience that brings them joy, some happiness, some contentment and positive outcomes.
The most crucial aspect here is creating joy for them. So, think about what is most important to them and what their most significant issues are that keep them awake at night and how solving those issues will bring them joy!
STEP THREE – Creating a Repeatable Journey
So, what do I mean by a repeatable journey?
This is a journey that you can ensure is repeatable for all customers. Creating consistency in your meaningful touch points along the customer journey is something that will create efficiencies in your business, and also assurances to your staff and everyone involved in delivering the overall customer experience.
You also want to ensure that the journey is repeatable because it is so meaningful and enjoyable that someone WANTS to return and buy from you all over again!
STEP FOUR – Creating an Engaging Journey
An engaging journey is one where a prospect or customer is committed to the process, is excited by it, and has an emotional connection with your product offering. The critical thing here is that they have made a conscious and a sub-conscious decision to move forward, as they have an emotional connection to your voice, words, actions and everything you are telling them.
This is what it means to be engaging! The potential customers want more from you, and they are willing to keep going down the journey path until they become a customer, and beyond.
So, these are my four steps to retaining customers through an Excellent Customer Experience.
If you are confused by one or more of the steps; I suggest you go back and reread it until you resonate with it logically and internally.
I guarantee that if you are willing to put in the effort, these four steps will positively change your sales process and create happy customers who stay with you for a very long time
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