The Customer Experience Challenge: Can You Adapt Fast Enough?

In America, millions of business owners are holding their breath. They hope to survive the COVID-19 pandemic and return one day to business as usual. Meanwhile, other business owners aren’t waiting to reinvent themselves. They realize that customer experience drives sales, and they are ready to revolutionize their experience in order to survive and thrive in the new economy.

In times like these, those businesses that adapt prevail. The customer experience is crucial, yet these touch points are changing drastically each day. Where can you make the difference? 

Brands are evolving to survive. This requires embracing new experiences to reach and serve consumers. It’s hard to pivot a carefully crafted customer experience from what it was to a completely new experience. Hard, but not impossible. Each new customer experience you provide and tailor to the new business landscape takes effort. It’s worth it, as you will see value added to your brand now and in the future. 

There’s so much we can’t control right now. You must try to build an experience that gives customers a sense of normalcy and control in a rapidly changing world. Here are some suggestions for realigning your customer experience for the current times.

FIND YOUR PEOPLE

Who are your customers, and where have they gone? If you have been paying attention to customer experience, you likely have a good idea of who your customers are (or were). If not, you should start using Customer Relationship Management software to track your customers and their purchasing patterns. Studying this information can lead to new insights about how to improve the customer experience.

Make it convenient. If your customers live in clusters, it may be profitable to offer free pickup and delivery. Chipotle, for example, has saved jobs and earnings by quickly converting to a take-out/delivery service and communicating this frequently with their customers.

Ask your customers what they need. Mailing list software such as Constant Contact, Emma, or MailChimp make it easy to stay in touch with prospects, customers, and suppliers. If you ask for suggestions, you’ll be surprised how many of your contacts are willing to share their views. This is a time to listen to your customers. Do it early, often, and without assumptions.

Try out new channels. Most of us have probably heard the expression “what you got you here won’t get you there”. During times of economic change like the one we are all experiencing now, take time to reassess the factors that contributed to your early success. What might you try again or try for the first time?

BREAK DOWN ANY BARRIERS

Once you have collected information on who your customers are, where they are, and what they would like help with, you have to eliminate any obstacles that try to hinder your new customer experience.

Find your new business as usual. Just as many restaurants have shifted from dine-in to take-out or delivery, so schools have been forced to rapidly adopt distance-learning capabilities, and entertainers have opted to perform online using a variety of electronic tip jars to get paid for their performance. “Artists have shifted their focus to livestream performances or ‘quaranstreams,’ says the Pensacola News Journal. “Artists are attaching ‘electronic tip jars’ or their Venmo and PayPal accounts to their streams to generate donations.”

Is now the time for innovation? Find ways to ensure your consumers can access your brand’s goods and services with ease. Book publishers are using vending machines to sell books. In Christiansburg, Virginia, you can get drone delivery from Walgreens. Every hurdle you minimize makes you more valuable in the new marketplace.

A seamless experience is critical. Are you able to take orders through your website? Can you create an app that makes doing business with you simpler? Do you offer live customer service on your website? Are you being alerted every time a new person accesses your website, and do you know what they are looking at? Behavior Analytics Retail has a concise review of 17 customer tracking systems for monitoring all sorts of behaviors.

Get creative with customer experience. Small businesses are especially vulnerable in this downturn, according to Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge blog, because they have less reserve cash on hand. Microbreweries in Virginia that faced an abrupt halt in business adapted to offer home delivery. This required working with the state to change the law. Consumers miss the routine of visiting a local haunt and are now looking to replace part of that experience in their homes. 

Delivering great customer experience is a lot more than just offering delivery. You have to love this chance to break routines and create new rituals. A company now forced into using a delivery-only model could create a unique experience by using packaging that brings joy to customers.

Ten years ago only 36 percent of businesses said they competed mainly on customer experience. According to a Gartner survey, that number jumped to 90 percent in recent years. Today, customer experience is a lifeline. It gives us a way to think about unprecedented changes and uncertainty in our current business models. Use each customer touchpoint well, and you can thrive in survival mode. 

Eliza Winston Evans is a senior brand strategist with Brand Federation specializing in finance and technology accounts. You can follow her on Twitter @ElizaWinston.

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