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Customer excellence: successfully strengthening customer loyalty
The competition is fierce, customers are picky and flexible - if you want to retain your customers in the long term, you have to give them good reasons to stay with your brand. Or you can provide them with optimal customer experiences through customer excellence!
What is customer excellence?
Customer excellence is a marketing model that focuses on the customer. The aim is to create individual and appreciative customer experiences along the entire customer journey and thus build long-term customer relationships. Customer expectations should not only be met, but systematically exceeded. In this respect, customer excellence is a decisive factor if your customer experience management is to be successful.
The following three core components form the foundation for successful customer excellence management:
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Customer journey mapping & touchpoint optimization
A well thought-out customer journey is at the heart of customer excellence. The first step is to identify all relevant customer touchpoints with the brand - from initial contact and information gathering through to purchase and customer service. Each of these touchpoints must be optimized and offers must be constantly adapted to provide a smooth and consistent experience for prospective customers. The processes must be designed to be as user-friendly as possible in order to minimize frustration. This creates a positive, uninterrupted interaction that accompanies customers through every stage of their journey and makes them feel valued.
Omnichannel strategy & consistent communication
In today's digital world, customers interact with companies via various channels - be it online, offline or mobile. To ensure an excellent customer experience, it is important to create a consistent experience across all channels. An omnichannel strategy integrates both online and offline channels to provide a consistent brand experience. The use of chatbots and artificial intelligence can help to offer personalized customer interactions in real time and avoid communication breaks between different departments. This ensures that customers have the same, high-quality experience on every channel.
Feedback & continuous improvement
Customer excellence management is a dynamic process that requires continuous development and a willingness to improve. An important aspect of this process is the regular collection and analysis of customer feedback. Knowledge about the needs and expectations of customers makes it possible to continuously optimize existing processes and offerings. While customer experience refers to the overall perception and experience of customers, customer excellence aims to constantly improve these experiences and keep them at the highest level. Companies should develop a corporate culture that sees customer experience management as a strategic success factor and not as a one-off project. Only by making regular adjustments and continuously striving for improvement can the customer experience be maintained at the highest level.
How can customer excellence be measured?
The abundance of data sources should actually make it easy for companies to gain insights into the customer experience. However, the exact opposite is often the case: "data overkill" prevents a focused view of the relevant data. Reports, diagrams and dashboards only make sense if they lead to the right decisions being made. A data model gives structure and direction to customer experience management. An important step is therefore the selection of suitable KPIs that map the customer experience in the form of data. They also show whether the budget is being used in the right places and make the impact of customer experience measures quantifiable. The pool of possible KPIs is large and depends on the channels and touchpoints under consideration as well as the individual goals.
The most common customer excellence indicators include
Net Promoter Score (NPS): The percentage of customers who would recommend a brand or company to others.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): The average satisfaction level for specific interactions, e.g. ratings for call center phone calls or returns processes.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The average value that a customer has for a company over the years and in the future.
Customer Retention Rate (CRR): The indicator of the percentage of customers who have remained loyal to the company over a certain period of time.
In addition to these specific indicators for customer satisfaction, key key figures from online marketing and e-commerce and e-commerce, for example ROI, the conversion rate, newsletter registrations, website traffic or the click-through rate of ads.
Practical insights: 5 steps to customer excellence
Even companies that have so far given little thought to customer experience or whose initial customer excellence initiatives have come to nothing can still easily catch up with their competitors. Our experience shows that many companies simply lack tangible concepts and best practices to get their customer experience management off the ground.
Customer experience management concepts are as individual as customer journeys, but the following 5 phases provide a good guide:
Step #1: Understanding customers
In order to know what needs to be optimized, companies need to understand their customers. To do this, information needs to be collected that maps customer expectations and compares them with the current state of the customer experience - for example via touchpoint analyses, persona workshops or interviews.
Step #2: Prepare data
In order to be able to work with the data, all relevant data is then stored, structured and processed using suitable tools.
Step #3: Design the customer journey
Once the deficits and goals of the customer experience have been defined, the future customer journey can be designed based on the findings: What needs to be sourced, developed, digitized, changed internally? Collaboration, skills, channels, processes, technologies, culture? How should progress be measured?
Step #4: Implement the customer journey
Now insights and ideas are being turned into concrete actions: Teams are formed, responsibilities defined, tools implemented, content edited or newly produced and processes adapted - always with the medium-term goal of intelligent automation.
Step #5: Measure performance
Customer experience management is highly transparent. Most of the data is available in real time and is visualized in the form of selected key figures on dashboards. This allows companies to react dynamically to changes in customer expectations and continuously adapt the customer journey.
Our conclusion
Customer experience management is a decisive competitive factor today. Companies that make targeted investments in customer excellence not only gain loyal customers, but also strengthen their market position. The key lies in the strategic design of the entire customer journey, the use of modern technologies and a consistent focus on customer needs. Now is the ideal time to establish customer experience management and customer excellence as an integral part of your corporate strategy and create a seamless, inspiring customer experience. We are happy to support you in setting up, expanding or optimizing your customer excellence management!
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