When Wurk Services was founded, we made sure to focus on customer experience. Here are the top 3 tips to making sure that a customer has a good time with your company. 1. Create Memorable Customer Experiences Unique customer experiences are a key element of getting people to trust your brand and buy from you. A Wunderman study reveals that around 79% of consumers prefer to only do business with a brand that shows it actually cares about them. Moreover, by 2020, customer experience will have an even bigger impact on customer satisfaction, given that it will overtake price and product as the main brand differentiator, meaning it’s best to start focusing on offering amazing experiences to your clients. Here are some tips to how you can create more memorable experiences. a. Address Your Customers by Name One of the best ways to offer a more personal customer experience is using the customer’s name when talking with them – in person, over the phone, through email, or when coming up with customer surveys. A friendlier approach that doesn’t feel forced humanizes the consumer-business interaction. Keep in mind that, according to research, people normally become ecstatic when they hear their name called. And let’s not forget Dale Carnegie’s famous advice from his book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (a very popular book on business communications skills): “Names are the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” b. Always Send Personalized Messages/Replies When a customer signs up for your free trial or purchases your product, do you reach out with a personalized email or send a generic onboarding sequence? Automated onboarding sequences are fantastic for helping users become familiar with the product, especially if it has a steep learning curve. But they’re far from personal, and they don’t welcome users as a personal message can. When a customer purchases your product, signs up for your free trial or sends an inquiry, reach out personally to ask how you can help them. Even if most customers don’t take up your offer of help, they’ll appreciate the gesture and form a more positive impression of your business. Research led by Rami Consulting Group shows that personalized emails: Have 29% higher open rates; Have 41% higher click rates; Deliver 6 times more transaction rates. Also, around 96% of marketers say that this kind of personalization improves customer relationships. So, how do you personalize messages you send to customers? Obviously, first of all, is to use the recipient’s name when addressing them. You could also send the message in the customer’s native language if you know they’re based in a different country. Though, you should only do that if you’re sending out a message the customer isn’t expected to reply to, or if you have a resident translator at your company. Other ways you should consider: Using a friendly, informal, or familiar tone and style of writing; Using a personalized email to send the message instead of a generic corporate one (“john@business.com” instead of just “brandname@business.com”). 2.Turn Customer Mistakes Into Unforgettable Experiences Sometimes, it’s not the company that makes a mistake, but the customer. It happens, and even though it’s the client’s fault, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to come up with a solution. It shows people how much your brand cares about consumers, and it really takes the customer who made the mistake by surprise in a pleasant way. Warby Parker is a great example of turning a customer mistake into a great customer success story. Basically, a client forgot their pair of glasses on a train, and the person who sat across from them recovered the glasses. That person – Anjali Kumar – also happened to be a Senior Executive at Warby Parker. Besides just retrieving the glasses, Anjali went the extra mile and sent over an extra pair of new glasses (saying they noticed the original lenses were a bit scratched), and a personalized note. The result? The customer in question wrote about this event online, and it got so popular it ended up being a hit story on Forbes. So, let your employees know that if they ever see an opportunity to fix a client’s mistake in a way that would really benefit the company’s image, they should go ahead and do it – even if it’s not during work hours. Just be sure to set a budget for things like that. 3. Reward Loyal Customers Modern consumers want personalization. It’s what drives more sales and customer loyalty. Generally, the best way to offer them a personalized experience is to run a loyalty program since it makes it easier for you to collect relevant data. And if we analyze data from client loyalty programs, we shall find out that around 79% of consumers are more satisfied with programs that offer a high degree of personalization. So, the idea is to wow loyal clients with an experience they won’t forget any time soon, something that is really relevant to their tastes. For example, say you run a brewery. You could reward long-term customers who promote your brand online with free beer shipped right to their doorstep, but why not surprise them with a tour of your brewery instead? Alternatively, you could offer them free beer, but you could make the whole experience more meaningful by customizing the labels with each customer’s photos, names, or other relevant information. The end result would likely be the same in both cases – you’d get to enjoy word of mouth advertising online that would greatly improve the image of your brand. That’s just an example, and you can approach this however you think it’s more suited to your business.