As a professional speaker management company, we’re privy to emerging trends and topics for conferences and meetings. How to improve customer experience continues to be a popular request – and more importantly, the depth of this topic is creating new ideas and opportunities for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Improving customer experience should be an ongoing mission for any business, and this topic is resonating with a variety of audiences – sales, marketing, leadership, and customer service folk alike.
Customer Experience (CX) is defined as the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. A positive customer experience occurs when all points of contact matches (or exceeds) the customer’s expectations.
Simply put, it’s how we make our customers feel. The customer’s experience is what they will remember – and what they will share with others.
And shouldn’t we all want our customers to feel amazing? After all, without customers, there would be no business.
The reality is that customers today are changing and evolving faster than ever – thus, creating new opportunities for companies to provide memorable experiences. But before you can provide that experience, you must identify what your customers really want [in terms of your products and services]. Keynote speaker and author Mark Schaefer says, “Instead of ‘selling’ to people, we need to find innovative strategies that will help us be invited into the organic customer conversations where the real work is being done.”
Personally connecting with your customers is more important than ever.
When Colette Carlson spoke at a recent Dominos Pizza conference, the focus was on how they acknowledged their customer feedback, changed their recipe after 50 years, implemented new technology, and made an astounding comeback.
The new technology Dominos implemented allowed them to engage with a younger demographic – as they discovered young people dislike talking on the phone. Pizzas can now be ordered using popular social media apps. Along those same lines, Jay Baer identified texting as an example of a new customer experience in this article. He says, “The open rate for SMS messages—99 percent—is simply staggering. In a world full of endless traffic and noise, texts seem to be one of the few ways to break through consistently. They’re certainly harder to shrug off than an email or voicemail.” Jay’s article goes on to provide specific ideas on how to leverage texting (or SMS messages) into your business.
Whether you book meetings, make pizza, or offer financial solutions, the customer experiences you provide will ultimately determine your reputation and your long-term success. We’re making customer experience the topic of the month and will share more ideas and examples in the articles that follow.
Let us help to ensure a memorable customer experience at your next company or meeting here.
