[5-minute read]
By guest writer and Truevo’s Customer Insights Specialist, Lindsay Hardie
Enter the age of personalisation. What a time to be alive! From our Netflix page to our news feeds, we’re living in a world where businesses know their customers, their preferences, and their behaviour in more detail than we ever thought possible.
And it’s not just big corporations that are able to learn more about their customers in order to better serve and support their needs. All businesses, with the tiniest bit of empathy, are able to adapt to a customer-centric approach. And there are so many reasons why it’s important to make the change:
According to Deloitte, businesses that focus on customer centricity are 60% more profitable than those that don’t. Another study found that employee retention is higher in customer-centric businesses — 82% of employees in customer-centric businesses see themselves working there in two years’ time, while only 66% of employees in non-customer-centric businesses feel the same way. And Microsoft found that 96% of customers say that great customer service is important to them when deciding on their loyalty to a brand.
But I don’t want to spend this article trying to convince you why customer centricity is so important. Especially when Forbes has already put this neat list together. I want to show you some tools and techniques to better understand your customer. Let’s dive straight in, shall we?
Know your process
An easy first step to understanding your customer experience better is to build your customer journey flow.
The idea is to follow the steps your customer has to take to start using your product or service — from how they find you online, all the way through sign-up, purchasing, delivery, and eventually using your product.
Once you have that whole process mapped out from your customer’s perspective, it’s easy to spot the moments where your business can improve. Perhaps your website is unclear and you need to make some changes to the content? Is your delivery process taking two weeks when it could take a few days? Or maybe your payments plugin is a little buggy and you need to find a new one (hint hint)?
Whatever the hiccup, the slow process, or the confusion might be, the whole point of this exercise is to walk a few steps in your customers’ shoes. It will help you identify moments your customer may need support, or opportunities where you can go above and beyond to make their experience exceptional.
Building a customer journey is the first step to finding ways to improve the customer centricity of your business.
At Truevo, we use Miro to map out our customer journey flow in a visual way. Miro also has a great template to fill in as a starting point for any business. We’ve expanded ours by including screenshots of our website, application, and products to help us find ways to improve our customer experience.
Ask a lot of questions
There are only so many improvements you can identify by going through the process yourself. Eventually, you’re going to need insights from real customers. And a lot of them. At Truevo, our go-to for quantitative feedback is the simple survey. We send out surveys to learn more about products, to gauge customer loyalty, and to measure customer satisfaction.
You don’t need a super complicated and expensive system to run these surveys. Typeform has all the functionality you need on their free account. But if you want to get more automated, AskNicely is a fantastic tool to help you measure your Net Promoter Score (NPS) and overall customer satisfaction.
We use NPS to measure the loyalty of customers who have been using our product for more than six months. By now, these customers know the product well. They have great insights on the things we’re doing well and the areas that need improvement.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a great survey to put in place at the end of each major step in your customer journey flow. You can send out a quick survey immediately after the customer applies, after delivery, or after a support call. And you can use those answers to measure which moments in your customer journey need attention or which moment you can use to ask for referrals or positive reviews.
Nothing beats a good ol’ chat
Now that you’ve got some quantitative feedback coming in, you understand how people feel about your product. But you need to understand why they feel that way in order to make the right decisions to move your business forward.
And there’s no simpler solution to finding out why than talking to your customers. A quick phone call, a short Zoom call or (dare I say) sitting down together for a coffee. Nothing beats having a candid conversation when it comes to learning about your customer experience.
You don’t have to get fancy here, a phone call is really all you need. But if you’re struggling to find people to talk to, or if you’re still in the research and development phase, take a look at Askable, UserTesting, and Usability Hub — they can help you find people to interview in your target market so you can test your product with real people.
And it’s as simple as that — understand your customer journey flow, ask questions, and talk to your customers (and then listen to what they say). Implementing these simple steps, paying attention to the results, and making changes needed, will lead to massive growth in your business.
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P.S. Want a payment solution that does what it says it will do? Get Truevo. We can’t wait to connect with you.
