Make or Break Your Company with Customer Experiences - The Choice is Yours
In the marketing world, we talk a lot about customer experiences. Customers not only want great experiences with your company. They expect them. And I can tell you personally, the way you handle your customer experiences can make or break your company.
My husband and I are in the middle of building a house. Let me tell you - good experiences have been hard to come by. We have moved our orders from one company to another multiple times. On one occasion, we even ended up buying materials from a more expensive company because the salespeople were extremely helpful and easy to work with. They provided a great customer experience, and because of that, we spent our money with them.
Another example of the importance of customer experiences comes from a completely different industry – health care. It seems as though many doctors, at least the ones I have been visiting lately, have forgotten or ignored the increasing amount of competition out there, especially in specialized care. They act as though they are the only choice, or like there are so many patients out there that it doesn’t matter if they lose one because of a bad patient experience. Therefore, they don’t put much effort into making sure the patient is satisfied and wants to come back. It’s just a matter of time before this kind of mentality can potentially diminish a practice.
People have more options than ever before. This is true not only in health care, but in nearly every industry. They don’t have to do business with you. So, if you want to keep your existing customers and bring in new ones, you better create great experiences every time. The customer experience is one of the most important parts of your marketing mix.
As consumers become more skeptical and resistant to traditional marketing and advertising, excellent customer experiences have a unique opportunity to encourage word-of-mouth marketing and referrals. However, just because a customer was referred to you once does not mean they’ll come back if the experience is poor.
As marketers, our goal is to communicate positive brand messages, using everything from external and internal media to customer experiences. All of these work together to create your brand image. When customers see your external messages, expectations are created. If they decide to do business with you and those expectations are not met, your brand image will suffer. It’s very difficult to regain customer trust when they’ve had a poor experience.
So before you spend big bucks on a new advertising campaign, you may want to double-check that your customer experience matches what you are saying in your advertising. Otherwise, you may be wasting your money. And if you have money to waste like that, feel free to give it to me. After all, I do have a new house to pay off.
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