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Customer experience remains one of most exciting marketing opportunities for every business, regardless of industry. Here are eight things that must be true to fulfill customer expectations every time they do business with you.

Customer Experience: 8 Ways You Could Fail to Meet Customer Expectations

No matter what unique novelty you build into your customer experience marketing strategy, if you fail to deliver when it comes to what the client expects from you in the first place, it might all be for naught. Use this eight point checklist to ensure that you don’t miss the mark with your customers.

Meeting customer expectations is the baseline from which a truly compelling customer experience can be created. But if you don’t know what customers expect to be true each and every time they do business with you, you run the risk of failing to deliver for some customer must-have’s.

A study released by the EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit) called Creating a Seamless Customer Experience reveals the areas that customers say represent the experience they want to have with the brands they do business with. In the study, respondents were asked to select up to three basic customer expectations which they considered most important relative to “the ideal customer experience.”

One note of caution: In this case, “Ideal” is not the ideal.

The word ‘ideal’ has more than one meaning. Most often it’s used to describe something that is perfect, as in: “existing only in the imagination; desirable or perfect but not likely to become reality.” But as it relates to this study, the definition that is more applicable is, “satisfying one’s conception of what is most suitable.” As you think about the customer experience your business provides relative to these eight customer experience baselines, remember that these are elements that customers want to be true of each and every interaction when it comes to the brands they do business with.

You might also like: 3 Ways to Improve the Customer Experience at the Point of Sale

In other words, you’re going to have to do even more to exceed customer expectations. That said, it’s also worth noting that many of your competitors may be missing the mark when it comes to providing an ideal customer experience in one or more of these areas. If your business gets them all right, you could be giving your business a competitive advantage and improving the way customers perceive your brand.

CHART - baselines for meeting customer expectations

8 Baselines for Simply Meeting – Not Exceeding – Customer Expectations

1. Fast Response Time – 47%

Whether you are being asked to provide information, a quote or proposal, or you must deal with a customer complaint, consumers said that providing a fast response was critical.

2. Simple Buying Process – 47%

Equally important to buyers is that the purchasing process be simple. Our marketing director often paraphrases this concept as “Marketing 101: Make it as easy as possible for the customer to buy.” Any time the customer has to jump through an unnecessary or unexpected hoop, it represents something that might interrupt the buying journey and stop the sale.

3. Knowing Where My Stuff Is – 34%

Whether it’s buying a commodity online or a service that takes months to complete (such as website development), your customer wants to know where their items are in process and when they can expect them. They want to know that their stuff isn’t lost, stolen, or forgotten along the way.

4. Omni-Channel Experience – 25% and 14%

Your customers want your business to “feel” the same whether they are interacting with you in person (or in-store), on your website or blog, one fourth of the consumers surveyed said that clarity and simplicity across channels was important to them, and fourteen percent said that consistency of product information across channels was key to their perceiving a customer experience as ideal.

5. Being There When I Need You – 22% and 14%

Whether it’s having the ability to engage with a brand over multiple channels (in person, by phone, via email, social channels, etc.) or wanting to know they can reach a brand representative at a time most convenient to them, customers want to know that your business will be there when they need you.

6. Giving the People What They Want – 12% and 7%

Buyers increasingly expect that brands will personalize their buying experience, and that means much more than an auto-fill field that inserts their name after the word ‘Dear’ in an email message. Keeping track of customer purchases, preferences, and interests and creating better buyer profiles in the spirit of predictive marketing can help ensure that you don’t waste your customer’s time with irrelevant offers.

7. An On-Going Relationship – 10%

One out of ten survey respondents said that their ideal customer experience included brand engagement after the sale. If you aren’t checking in with customers post-transaction, you run the risk of failing to identify dissatisfaction or giving customers the impression that your business simply doesn’t care about whether they were satisfied with the customer experience. Plus, checking in after the sale is a great way to encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews, ratings and testimonials for your business online, and lay the foundation for referrals and repeat business.

8. A Place Where Everybody Knows Your Name – 7%

Fans of the popular sitcom Cheers will instantly recognize this reference to the show’s theme song, referencing the fact that people want to go where everyone knows them (and is glad that they came). In the survey, seven percent of respondents said that their ideal customer experience would include a brand that recognized them (and their preferences) as a customer, regardless of the channel they used to interact with the brand. In addition, seven percent of respondents also said that they expect brand engagements to reflect their preferences and interests as revealed on different channels.

These customer service stats pave the way for turning point-of-sale customer happiness into increased revenue, repeat visits, positive reviews and new customer referrals.

Turn point-of-sale customer happiness into referrals, reviews and repeat visits.

GrooveHQ.com published a list of 22 customer service statistics that got us thinking about how, specifically, these stats can be turned into actionable point-of-sale marketing insights. After all, the point-of-sale is often one of – if not “the” – last moments in a customer’s buying experience. Making it a more positive one can lead to all kinds of actions that you want the customer to take next:

  • Recommending your business to someone they know
  • Posting a positive review about your company
  • Giving your brand a shout out on social media
  • Deciding to come back again soon
  • Feeling good about their decision to do business with you

Customer happiness can lead to all these actions and more. If your point-of-sale marketing strategy is inadequate or non-existent, it’s doing nothing to contribute to customer happiness. Now is the time to take a closer look to see what you can improve.

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6 Ways to Improve Your Point-of-Sale Marketing Game

  1. Ask and Answer

Think about how hard you work to attract customers. Now imagine being able reach nine new prospects every time you made just one customer happy. Happy customers tell an average of nine people about their experience with a brand. One simple thing that you can do at the point-of-sale is to ask the question: Have we made you happy today?

Conversely, For every one customer who voices a complaint, twenty six other unhappy customers might not even speak up and give you the chance to make things right. When a customer complains they are doing you a favor! They are giving you a chance to improve the customer experience in a way that matters. They are giving you a chance to show that you really do care, that the customer truly is #1 with your company.

Customer happiness can lead to 9 referrals, customer dissatisfaction could cost you 16 potential customers. (American Express)

  1. Upsell and Cross-sell

Making recommendations for comparable items or suggesting add-ons, accessories and so on can produce an immediate return on investment. Why do you think waitstaff are trained to ask if you want dessert even while they are handing you the check? Why do you think ecommerce sites show you “you might also like…” and “customers who purchased this also bought…” items when you add something to your cart or prepare to check out?  Even if your happy customer doesn’t take action right away, you’ve also planted the idea, planting the seed for return visits and future purchases.

You’re 14x more likely to sell to an existing customer than a new one (Marketing Metrics)

  1. Get the Sign Up

Getting that email address should be an essential part of any point-of-sale marketing strategy. That email sign up represents a happy customer giving you permission to:

  • extend offers
  • tell them about events and sales
  • invite them to leave reviews
    • on your website for products/services they would recommend to others
    • on review websites such as Yelp, Google, Facebook and others
  • suggest add-ons and accessories
  • give them more reasons to like your brand
  • encourage them to share your content with friends, family and co-workers
  • invite them to follow you on social media

A 5% increase in retention rate can produce profit increases from 25% to 95%. (Bain & Company)

  1. Roll Out the Red Carpet

Have you stood in your customers’ shoes to know where they experience pain at the point-of-sale? Long queues, clunky processes and a general feeling that they don’t matter to you at the point-of-sale undermines any claims you make about customer service.

The happiest customers spend 140% more annually than the unhappiest customers. (Medallia)

Not only do you have to eliminate unnecessary hurdles at the checkout to make things faster, you also need to go slowly enough to give the customer your full attention and let them take all the time they want.

86% say they’re willing to pay more when the customer experience is better. (American Express)

  1. Say Something, See Something, Do Something

When a customer is gracious enough to say something went wrong in their experience, it’s up to you to see what you can do about it, then do it. Whether their dissatisfaction arose from something that happens to every customer or it was a fluke that just happened to them, whether it’s something that occurred inadvertently or on purpose, when the customer says something, your reaction is everything.

Customer happiness increases 37% when compensated with something of monetary value after a brand makes a mistake. But when the brand adds an actual apology, customer happiness increases 2x as much – to 74%. (Carey School of Business)

  1. Be Human

Are some customers in a hurry? Sure. But even more of them want you to remember that they are people, first, even at the point-of-sale.

“Human service” was ranked more than 2x as high as any other factor (number of channels, rich content, web assistance, social communities) when 9000 consumers ranked the most important aspects of customer support. (Genesys)

Taking time to make a personal connection that has nothing to do with the transaction itself can be a powerfully positive moment at the end of the customer experience.

Bank customers were 6x more likely to feel engaged when they got help quickly, but they were 9x more likely to feel engaged when the bank’s rep offered empathetic service (courteous, willing to help, expressing an understanding of how the customer felt, etc.) (Gallup)

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Are you ready for a point-of-sale credit card processing solution that will work with – not against – your efforts to make the customer experience better? We can help! Reach out to us for a free, no-obligation quote for merchant services including payment processing and point-of-sale customer loyalty programs:

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