‘Delivering an optimal customer experience is, without a doubt, one of the most critical aspects of building a successful business. It is what directly influences the relationship between customer and brand, and helps drive loyalty.‘ BARE shares an article by Diana Serrano for Customer Think on “Want to Build Positive Customer Experience? Start with Your Employees.“
Tag Archive for: Customer Experience
‘Shoppers will go into the holiday season with high expectations this year. They’ll want great deals, custom offers, on-time delivery, and a little something for themselves—no matter what channel they’re using to work through their gift list.’ BARE shares an article by Danielle Savin for Digital Commerce 360 on 6 Steps to Elevate the Customer Experience this Holiday Season.
Companies organized along traditional functional lines tend to be slow to change and inflexible, unable to respond to customer demand. But how innovative companies are built? BARE shares an article by Brad Murphy for Forbes on The New Manager: How Organizations Can Thrive In The Experience Economy.
CX Day is October 2nd!
How are you celebrating Customer Experience Day? Enter our sweepstakes and you could win $100!
It’s not just ‘back to school’ for kids; businesses all over the world are spending their time looking for more ways to grow customer loyalty. ‘Longevity’ is no longer synonymous with ‘guaranteed business’. What worked fifty, twenty, or even just a year ago are, well, “so last year.” Here, BARE International shares an article by Zeynep Ilgaz for Entrepreneur on how Old-School Industries Require New-School Customer Experience. Read more
‘Business coach and consultant Dan S. Kennedy and customer retention expert Shaun Buck present a systematic approach to help you keep, cultivate, and multiply customers so you replace income uncertainty with reliable income through retention and referrals.’ Here, BARE International shares an excerpt by Dan S. Kennedy for Entrepreneur on 5 Ways to Grow the Value of Each of Your Customers.
‘Businesses that fail to fully monetizing their customers often fail outright, and many more will in the challenging years ahead. This is so because nothing is more difficult or costly than new customer acquisition.
There are five specific ways to create the maximum possible customer value:
‘Business coach and consultant Dan S. Kennedy and customer retention expert Shaun Buck present a systematic approach to help you keep, cultivate, and multiply customers so you replace income uncertainty with reliable income through retention and referrals.’ Here, BARE International shares an excerpt by Dan S. Kennedy for Entrepreneur on 5 Ways to Grow the Value of Each of Your Customers.
‘Businesses that fail to fully monetizing their customers often fail outright, and many more will in the challenging years ahead. This is so because nothing is more difficult or costly than new customer acquisition.
There are five specific ways to create the maximum possible customer value:
1. INCREASE TRANSACTION SIZE
At soda fountains during the Depression, “soda jerks” were trained to ask, “In your milkshake, would you like one egg or two?” The same basic at-counter upsell is familiar to all fast-food restaurant customers. Unfortunately, what’s supposed to be happening often isn’t. One major chain recently found via mystery shopping that eight out of 10 employees weren’t doing a simple upsell.
This is just one method of many to be creatively applied then strictly enforced for bumping up transaction size. A few dollars more per visit or purchase may not sound like much, until you apply it to the multiyear tenure of a customer and then to all customers. If you can get $5 more per transaction from a customer who engages in 18 transactions a year, that equals $90. Multiply that by a five-year retention term equals $450. Done with 222 customers, that’s an extra $100,000. Done with 2,222 customers, an extra $1 million. You can get rich on the extra money made just from small upsells.
Up-selling and cross-selling are the two best ways to bump up transaction size, but every possible method must be considered. And you have to know your customer to get this right. My dry cleaner, for example, has a tailor, and he constantly finds little things to fix on the clothes I take there for cleaning: a jacket lining coming loose or bunching up, loose buttons, a frayed pant cuff. These things are fixed and added to the bill without any discussion. He knows I’ll welcome the service. I’m betting he’s adding $10 to $20 to a lot of transactions for his affluent customers this way.
2. DECREASE RANDOMNESS OR DIVISION OF SPENDING
Customers are easily seduced by other companies. In most categories, they divvy their spending. The same person may go to Walmart and Target and Walgreens all in the same week, even though all three stores sell the same things. The same thing happens with nonchain, independent businesses of many kinds.
Airlines invented Frequent Flyer Programs to curb this, but once they all had virtually identical programs, the power was lost. Very frequent flyers accumulated points in every airline’s system, so we still divided our spending, mostly based on convenience of flights for our personal needs. This doesn’t negate the role of a good loyalty rewards program, but it needs constant marketing to customers. For instance, Barnes & Noble mails its loyalty cardholders monthly discount coupons, with deadlines, and it often triggers an extra trip or three for me during the year. The independent Learned Owl bookstore I also occasionally patronize never sends me anything even though I’m in their loyalty program, too. I’d wager my spending at Barnes & Noble was 20-times what I spent at Owl last year.
Customers divide their spending in various categories for a multiplicity of reasons — convenience of a moment, a heavily advertised big sale, a friend’s influence, boredom, and casual shopping, as well as feeling neglected and underappreciated. It’s up to you to reduce these temptations and make customers think of you and at least feel guilty about their defection. The amount of divided spending going on in your category, the casualness with which the customer views it, and the loss of rewards it causes all affect both retention and referrals. In other words, the customer with the least divided spending is most likely to stay with you forever and is more likely to refer others to you. Conversely, the customer engaging in the most divided spending is most susceptible from being seduced away and dropping you out of the random rotation altogether, and is less likely to refer. When you reduce divided spending, you automatically boost retention and referral likelihood.
3. INCREASE PROFITS FROM EACH CUSTOMER
Achieving maximum possible profit with each customer can be micromanaged. Somebody should do so, and marketing to each customer should be varied by use of this information. For example, if Walmart has a customer who very prudently and penuriously buys only staple commodities like toilet paper, paper towels, and a few supplies but never buys its much higher-profit margin toys, games, apparel, electronics, or seasonal gift merchandise, that customer is a problem. There’s almost no profit value in that customer. If you were micromanaging that business, you would identify and isolate those customers and concoct a customized sales program just for them, designed to tempt them into buying high-profit goods, hopefully being surprised and satisfied, and then changing their habits.
Most businesses have different products and services with different profit margins. The task is to direct each customer into purchase of high-profit items.
Most businesses should have three different kinds of marketing going on with their existent customers. One would be generic messages and promotions everybody gets. These are very suitable to mass media, like email and websites. Two would be segment-specific messages and promotions crafted differently for different groups of customers. For example, when I’m working on seminar marketing for a client, I want to deliver different campaigns to a) customers who attended in prior years but skipped the most recent year, b) customers who’ve been around long enough to have attended but haven’t yet done so, c) customers who’ve attended one kind of event but not another, and d) customers located in easy driving or “puddle jump” flying distance of the event’s location. Three would be customized and personalized messages and offers different for each individual, based on what we know about that person.
4. RECOVER LOST CUSTOMERS
Lost customer recovery and reactivation campaigns are rarely the highest return-on-investment activities a business can do, but that’s no excuse for not doing them. Deciding what you’ll spend is relatively easy; the lost customers have individual and averaged purchase history. Don’t write them off without a fight.
The best lost customer campaigns include the following:
- Acknowledgement, if not an apology, that something must have gone awry causing them to wander off
- Reminding them of the core reasons they were a customer
- Introducing “Exciting News” about how you’re “new and improved”
- Presenting an exclusive, extremely generous, irresistible offer and/or
- Offering a very appealing free gift just for stopping in, calling, etc. to see all the “new and improved” firsthand
- Imposing deadlines on the offers
5. GET REFERRALS
Let me just say a word about creating a referral culture in your business. Whatever you want from people, they have to know you want it before they can give it to you, they have to know it’s expected of them before they can live up to your expectations, and they have to know they’re capable of doing it successfully. So there are actually 11 things that customers need to know for there to be a referral culture in play:
- Our customers refer.
- Our good customers refer often.
- Our best customers refer often and a lot.
- Referrals are expected. From you.
- Referrals are genuinely appreciated.
- Referrals are well taken care of. (You’ll only get happy reports and thanks from those you refer.)
- Not referring is weird and inappropriate. You should feel bad about it.
- There are a lot of different reasons people do business with us—not just the reason that brought you in. Keep all these reasons in mind . . .
- Most people don’t really know how to find a good, trustworthy provider of what we do, so you’re doing others a great service by telling them about us
- There are easy ways to introduce people to us and to get our information into the hands of people you think we can be of service to.’
You can and should, see your business through your customers’ eyes. Using calls, clicks or in-person visits, the common thread of our services is always revealing the moment of truth when your customers interact with your brand. Capture their feedback to drive meaningful change in your business. Explore our services.
Read the full article at the source here.
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The more technology advances, the more it’s integrated into our daily lives. As people change their behaviors, marketers, salespeople, and customer support reps will need to react. Instead of thinking of a desktop experience, a mobile experience, a tablet experience, we’ll need to pursue one, holistic approach — an omni-channel experience.
‘The race to own customer experience is on! Companies are recognizing the importance of delivering an experience that makes them stand out from their competition. Some are learning the hard way. Here, BARE International shares an article by Shep Hyken for Forbes on Customer Experience Is The New Brand.
Bare Interview – Part 4
Parlaying yesterday’s achievements into a thriving tomorrow.
A few years ago I was surfing on the internet when I saw the ad: „Get paid for shopping.”
Hahaha! Could it sound more like a scam? I am not falling for this. Or am I?
It somehow still made me thinking… Well, I heard about this guy who does mystery shopping and he never complained. Checking out the company’s website won’t hurt. I started exploring the page…
I saw logos of prestigious clients, I even discovered some brands I liked. I remembered, last time I went to that shop, the salesperson was really rude and I had the feeling I was ruining her life by asking for a smaller size of that shirt. How funny it would be to go to that very same shop and leave feedback about her. I will register.
What? Why on earth do they have to know how tall I am?
Later a friend told me that her boyfriend had registered for a mystery shopping company. They called him to offer him a mystery visit including a test drive with one of the world’s smallest car. They asked him how tall he was. After he said he was 1.92, the agent kindly apologized for having called him. He would not even fit in the tiny car.
And also my bank account number?
OK, they have to pay me somehow. I guess if it is only the account number, not the credit card number and my PIN, it is pretty safe. After I registered, I was checking my job-board regularly, but there were mostly visits which required owning a car, so I didn’t apply for any of them. As a funny twist in life, I came across another mystery shopping company when I was looking for a job. BARE International hired me as a recruiter. My job is to look for people in several countries, who are interested in doing mystery visits. I thought it would be beneficial to try mystery shopping, so that I can answer the people’s question and I know exactly what I am offering them
Mystery shopping, here I come! But how is it all done?
How could I learn it? I am so confused…oh, there is an online training! Sounds good. I went through the slides and the test, I have to admit it took a lot of time and I wanted to give up at some point. But I remembered, every time we start something new, we have to invest time and energy into learning it.
I visited my job-board and found some mystery calls.
Before the visit I had to read the long guidelines but at least I was confident on what to do while on the phone. When I finally dialed the call center, my knees were shaking like jelly and I thought they knew instantly that I was a mystery shopper. I was shivering and stuttering. It took at least 5 minutes to feel normal again. I will never forget that rush of adrenalin in my body. Fortunately, the customer service representative on a the other end of the line was doing a very decent job and I was happy to leave a feedback about him in the online questionnaire. I hope his boss will read it and he will get promoted! Since then I have done several mystery calls. Sometimes it was a pleasant experience.
Yet, other times I received terrible customer service.
First I felt very bad reporting about it in the questionnaire. I felt like I betrayed the customer service representative. But I developed this theory, that if they do not have the necessary communication skills and inner motivation to behave recpectfully with the customers, they should change jobs and do something they really like.
I can say that including the good and bad aspects, I became a fan of mystery shopping.
I like the adrenaline rush, when I start an assignment. I appreciate working in such a „green industry”. There is no production, no printing, everything goes online. Last but not least I like the moment when I receive the notification that my shop fee was transferred to my account. Some say the payment is low, but usually it’s enough to cover a good dinner in a restaurant. Money best spent.
Author: Szintia
Szintia is an employee of Bare International.
Besides her work in the Social Media and Recruitment team, she loves sports, travelling, and she is learning her 6th language. She is a Couchsurfer. She has a master’s degree in Strategic HR Management and she is a professional pastry chef.
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