The global pandemic that gripped the entire world back in 2020 supercharged the rate through which businesses underwent a digital transformation and as a result, a lot of how businesses interact and conduct transactions with their customers is now performed digitally. Businesses can gain a substantial competitive advantage by providing exceptional levels of customer experience, which have become extremely important to customers given the expectations they have of how good the customer experience needs to be for the businesses they engage with.

Understanding Customer Expectations and Preferences

Before developing ideal customer experience methods, businesses should first try to learn more about their customers by getting to know:

• Who are the main customers
• What they are buying
• The frequency of their purchases
• Their likelihood to recommend your business (Net Promoter Score)
• How your product or service meets their needs
• What service improvements would help them

Tools and Techniques

There are plenty of options that businesses can utilize that can help improve their customer service and encourage their customers to have a greater experience with their brands. Here are a few notable examples:

• Live Chat – As more business transactions move online, customers are continuously looking for online support. A live chat feature can help businesses institute a good online experience for their customers as they are able to allow for the provision of important information that may influence a customer’s purchase decision, or allow them to resolve an issue that they may be experiencing with a business’ product or service.
• Phone Support/Automatic Callback – Although this option is offered by many companies, many of them are reinventing how they use the phone service with their customers by requiring them to go through online support channels before they can either obtain the phone support number, or be placed in a virtual line to receive a callback so they don’t end up being placed on hold for longer periods. The automatic callback option helps improve the customer experience as the customers’ time is not spent listening to hold music and they are able to get assistance on an issue that they were calling to get resolved.
• Self-Service Support – Businesses can offer self-service options such as knowledge base articles that clearly written and designed to provide customers with access to guides that contain information they need, which are available 24/7. This option increases customer satisfaction because the customers do not have to wait until the morning or the following business day to speak with a customer support agent. Self-service support also plays a crucial role in helping reduce the number of customer-related inquiries into a business.
• Proactive Customer Notifications – For a business to stand out from the competitive landscape, reactive customer service techniques are no longer enough to earn a customer’s brand loyalty or good reviews because customers expect more than just having their existing problems resolved. In recent years, techniques such as proactive customer notifications have become an expectation to a point where an absence of these notifications could result in customers severing ties with a business.The future of exceptional customer experience lies in businesses switching from reactive to proactive customer service. More than two-thirds of customers want businesses to reach out and engage with proactive notifications, and this proactive experience directly ties into the customers’ needs to be recognized, and in turn, generates customer engagement and strengthens loyalty (Microsoft Corporation). Apdated is a company that is a leader in this space and offers a SaaS solution that enables businesses to monitor and proactively communicate status changes directly to their customers thereby reducing customer service-related inquiries, improving the customer experience, and boosting operational efficiencies (apdated.co).