If you want to deliver a strong, effortless customer experience, you should ensure that it saves your customers time.
Sounds obvious, right?
If so, why is it that some companies still deliver a rudimentary customer experience, and not a “blink and you’re done” process?
Customer experience is not only about keeping our customers happy, though that is important. To build customer loyalty, we can’t just add nice features to their experience; we need to help them save time. In the end, this is what customers want because they appreciate their time, and it makes them more efficient.
Netflix’s customer experience can be navigated in a fraction of the time it used to take us to go to Blockbuster’s retail store and pick up a movie.
A few pushes of a button and our mode of transportation arrives through Uber.
Shyp allows us to accomplish a painful task, going to the post office, in a quick and easy manner by simply taking a picture of what we want couriered.
ZenPayroll saves payroll professionals and small business entrepreneurs countless hours through their slick UI and UX.
These four companies are succeeding because they save their customers time, which is a valuable resource, and make their experience effortless. You might not be a large tech company with millions in funding, but that doesn’t mean you can’t establish processes to make your experience smoother. If you don’t, it’s only a matter of time before an entrepreneur notices your industry’s basic experience, shakes things up, and starts to take market share from you. It’s not a question of if this will happen; it’s a question of when.
Your business’ customer experience must save your customer time if you want to create a competitive advantage for the long-term. Your competitors may try to copy your strategy, but your customers will always remember who was the first to save them time.
So how do you go about creating systems to save your customers time? You must first create a customer journey map with your executive team. If you are a small business owner, you can do this on your own. Map out each and every customer touch point, then identify the rudimentary interactions your customers are having with your company. From there, you can start building operational improvement strategies to “increase the good and reduce the bad.”