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Customer expectations are skyrocketing, as the pace of digital shopping has grown immensely in recent years. Today's retail customers can easily research and buy from dozens of competing websites. That means brands have to work harder to maintain and develop each customer relationship.
One of the best ways to engage with potential customers and increase customer retention across digital channels is by delivering emotional experiences. Offering a memorable experience that taps into customers' positive emotions can differentiate brands from competitors. In a world where customers have an array of choices, standing out in customers' minds is essential to secure conversions and boost loyalty.
The challenge is that it can be really difficult to personalize the user experience across all the various platforms, whether that's email, chat, or social media. Customer service teams need to be trained properly and be ready to service each request that comes in at every customer touchpoint, and that can get very complex and costly.
Understanding the different ways brands can create emotional experiences for their customers and how to solve the customer service bottleneck challenge is essential to position your brand to compete in the digital era.
How Brands Can Use Emotional Experiences as a Differentiator
The consumer landscape is changing with people preferring experiences over physical products. After all, a brand is made up of the sum of experiences people have with the particular company. People remember emotional experiences with brands, whether they are positive or negative.
According to a study conducted by Expedia, 74% of Americans prefer experiences over products. Another recent consumer study affirmed that 76% of consumers stated that they would rather spend money on experiences than physical goods. That study also showed a 200% increase in consumers seeking "inspiration and meaning" from brands. Customers increasingly seek experiences that are deeply personal and memorable. One way brands can tap into positive emotional growth is through personalized keepsake creations. For instance, many customers now try an online photo book creator to immortalize their cherished memories seamlessly.
A study by Capgemini found that emotionally engaging with consumers could drive an uplift of 5% in annual revenue. In fact, 70% of emotionally engaged consumers spend two to three times more on brands they are loyal to, compared to 49% with low emotional engagement. Eighty-six percent (86%) of consumers with high emotional engagement say they always think of the brand they are loyal to when they need something.
What's the takeaway? When a brand cultivates emotional experiences and personalizes them across its various support channels it can dramatically increase its earnings.
Digital Support Helps Cultivate Positive Customer Emotions
Brands need to use customer support effectively to increase convenience, empathy, and personalization across all channels.
Convenience / efficiency
Brands need to show customers that their time is valued. They need to have the right tools and customer service team to respond to customers in a timely manner via email, chat, and social media platforms. That could mean an enterprise-level inbox or ticketing system that integrates with all the various customer service channels and helps improve the quality and response time of each ticket.
An aspect of providing more efficiency is utilizing new technologies to better service the customer. For example, home decor brands are adopting augmented reality (AR) technologies to help customers visualize the furniture pieces in their homes. The same is done in the beauty industry where customers are able to virtually try on different beauty products.
Fashion companies use AR and data to take customers' measurements and show them how a certain item of clothing will look and fit on their body. While AR technology may decrease returns, improve customer satisfaction, and help provide a unique personalized experience for each customer, users will stay need to reach out to brands with product questions. That's why it's crucial for a brand to be able to offer that omnichannel customer support on every channel the customer may use.
Empathy
A well-trained customer service team should be able to walk each customer through complex or sensitive problems and be helpful and courteous. This especially applies to B2B and SaaS products where customers are more likely to get stuck using the user interface or software. It's not only important to show the customer that their issue matters but to also be able to solve it efficiently.
Personalized attention
Loyal customers care about the product or service they're buying and want to be heard. They often have suggestions, comments, or constructive criticism for the brand and if they are taken seriously they will likely remain loyal to the company.
Brands need to show customers that their ideas and opinions matter and the customer support team needs to have a variety of skills to create this kind of loyalty with each customer experience. These skills include:
- Communication. Agents should be adept at communicating across a variety of platforms.
- Listening skills. Representatives need the ability to listen carefully to determine exactly what a customer's issue is and how to fix it.
- Product/service knowledge. Each rep should be trained on the product or service and know their offering like the back of their hand.
It's hard to build and train a customer service team from scratch to have all the necessary skills to provide that kind of experience to customers. That's why brands are outsourcing their customer service to better meet their customer experience goals and achieve higher levels of service.
Deliver emotional experiences by outsourcing your customer service
Brands need to deliver personalized emotional experiences to each customer and the way to do that is through the right customer service team. The team needs to be well trained and have all the product information available to actually help the customer. Additionally, representatives must communicate with empathy and make the customer feel heard and important. They need to give personalized attention to each customer across every communication channel the brand uses.
That's quite a challenge and often internal customer support teams aren't trained to do all of that. That's why an even better solution is to outsource your customer service to a trusted partner like Helpware. We have professionally trained staff that can handle a variety of technologies, platforms, and modes of communication. Our customer service experts are versatile, excellent communicators, and have proven experience in many industries and niches.
Ready to deliver the positive, emotional experiences that your customers will remember? Learn more about how Helpware can help elevate your digital customer experience.
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