Improving the Customer Experience Post-Purchase

Customer experience, while being a new term for businesses to use, is not a new concept. Since the dawn of time, the experience of a customer has been the sole thing that inventors and businesses have sought out to improve. Horses too slow? Here’s a car. Hate losing documents? Cloud services. Hate carrying your wallet? Mobile pay.  Customer experience is key, so make sure your business prioritizes that at all stages of their buying process, including post-purchase. 

Before we address the title, we must first try and define what customer experience is. The customer experience with a product or business starts when a customer first becomes aware of the product (or service) and goes well beyond the purchase. It is the entire journey the customer goes through, positive or negative, with your product, brand, and company as a whole. Post-purchase care can have the most impact if someone genuinely enjoys the product, if they’ll buy again, or if they’ll pass the word on to their friends. That’s why customer service agents need to fully understand what a good customer experience is, so they can strive for that with every interaction.

Steps

1. Communicate the beliefs and values of the company to your agents.

Agents do more than just read off a script so they must thoroughly understand why their role is important. Customers come to them seeking help and guidance so they can better enjoy their goods, so they must be helpful and reflect the brand. Aligning their values with the business is essential because the customer journey has to be consistent throughout the various stages of buying. One misaligned agent can derail that post-purchase for the customers they deal with. 

2. Look beyond agent performance metrics.

The majority of service agents have Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as average time to answer, call resolution time, and other metrics that only look at the agent’s contribution. If agents were to focus on this alone, sure you might deal with call quicker, but that doesn’t guarantee a great customer experience. To improve the experience, ensure your agents are listening to understand, not to reply. This means staying on the phone longer and giving the help necessary, not just closing the ticket ASAP. This seems rather intuitive but is less common than you’d think. 

3. Remember: Customers are human.

Remind your agents that there are people on the other end of the interactions, not just a ticket number. Another intuitive thing, but often times customers are treated identical to the last, despite having specific needs that need to be met. Tell your agent to ask their name, use it often, and genuinely be there to support. Be kind, be appreciative of their time, and most importantly make them feel human. Those are the kind of experiences that customers will remember about your brand.

4. Learn from your mistakes.

We learn at a very young age to not touch the stove when it’s hot. Most of us probably learned the hard way. Companies receive complaints about various things on a daily basis, so treat those complaints as your hot stove. Instead of waiting for everyone to call in about the same issue, learn from your customers and fix what the problem is. This could be anything from a product tweak to saying your website looks funny, use it. Ultimately your customers know best what they want, so take the time to listen.

Having a great customer experience is a staple of a successful business and is rendering other businesses obsolete. Make sure your business is part of the better half of this shift by spending time to evaluate your customers’ journey. These tips are all things you can implement today that will have long-term results.

Of all the points, the most elusive is the final tip. We all know it’s great to listen to our customers, but that’s often easier said than done. We at Summatti aim to help companies improve the customer experience they provide. We offer the ability to listen, analyze, and report on 100% of interactions using AI, so that you can spend more time improving your offerings based on your customers’ feedback. For more information on our solution check out our website here, or reach out to us here if you’d like to chat more.