Do you know how to win back your customers after a bad brand interaction or poor customer service? If the answer is no, fear not, we'll tell you all in this post.
Today, your business can’t brush a bad customer experience under the rug. You might choose to ignore less than stellar brand interactions, but the customers won’t! They’ll post about negative CX, on Facebook, Twitter and even write a blog about it. And unfortunately, we can’t stop people writing negative reviews.
But there’s always a silver lining that can save your brand, even if you do happen to experience a customer that's disgruntled about the CX they received. According to an Applied Marketing Science and Twitter Study, resolved negative tweet leads to 3x more revenue potential than a positive tweet. That means you can, and should, win people back. To successfully turn things around, you need to be proactive in understanding what customers are saying about your brand and let insights guide your customer experience strategy. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be superhuman and read thousands of tweets a day, the right media monitoring tool will give you relevant insights into how customers feel about your brand. For example, media intelligence can help you with keeping an eye out for brand mentions which feature negative keywords or check the sentiment of your brand to identify customers who have had a bad CX.
By using creative CX strategies to retain customers, you also increase your probability of higher conversions, and at the same time, safeguard the integrity of your business. So how do we win back your customers?
Win Back Your Customers by Encouraging Feedback
Asking questions is one of the best ways to start an interaction with your brand. Why was the customer unhappy with your service? Find out what’s gone wrong beforehand so that you are in a better position to ask relevant questions. People are much more willing to discuss a negative customer experience than a positive one. In fact, studies suggest we will tell 8-10 people if we have bad customer experiences in comparison to only 2-3 people if we have a good customer experience. Therefore, dissatisfied customers are likely to give you all the information you require. Simply allowing a customer the chance to express themselves might contribute to winning them back. One word of advice, try to take your questions out of the public eye. If someone is complaining on Twitter, discuss it with them via direct message. After all, you don’t want to air your dirty laundry to competitors!
Top Tip: Find more negative talk surrounding your brand by using customer experience software. Discover trending themes with negative sentiment as well as measure overall sentiment surrounding your brand. If you notice a spike in negative sentiment, chances are something is wrong.
Win Back Your Customers by Improving
Media monitoring helps you gain quality feedback. These genuine opinions help improve the business foundations by identifying and addressing elements that are affecting customer experience. Making continuous improvements to poorly performing parts of your business and customer experience strategy is one of the best ways of dealing with angry customers. Use media monitoring to keep on top of brand mentions, this way you can discover pain points of customers and where your business/ CX can be improved. It’s good practice to communicate these changes to your customers so they know you take their feedback seriously
Don’t over apologise
To apologise for a mistake is good, but overdoing it might be counterproductive. You don’t want to keep reminding customers about the mistake made.
Win Back Your Customers by Creating a Campaign
If you’ve experienced a surge of negativity, it’s wise to try and rebuild value for your customers. A good way to do this is with a marketing campaign surrounding the changes you have made, with hope this will spark positive interaction. Storytelling is a really powerful way to grow engagement. We'd highly recommend you showing that you’ve gone the extra mile to please your customers. A bit of a throwback example for you here – back in 2009 Domino’s Pizza used this principle to address the CX pain points of their customers. They received a lot of negative coverage after customers complained about the quality and taste of their pizzas.
After monitoring social media, they decided to work with their customers and staff in creating a better brand experience. This was conceptualised into a campaign called as The pizza turnaround. Today the Dominos brand is many people’s number one choice of Pizza takeaway, which teaches us that unhappy customers don’t have to mean the end of your brand and you can infact turn a poor brand interaction into something that attracts new clientele while keeping your current fans.
How Digital Transformation Drives Customer Experience
While the above tips are there to support you winning back clients from negative CX experiences, the following tips are here to guide you in the direction of ensuring it never has to come to that in the first place.
In 2020, brands simply have to be customer-centric and this means putting CX strategies at the center of the company. The fact is, customers are making more use of technology, and in turn, changing the relationship between businesses and customers. As technology continues to evolve, so will the digital transformation that businesses will experience; the most significant impact that this will have on businesses is on customer experience.
It’s in 2020 where customer experience will overtake price and product as a key differentiator. So, from gaining better customer insights and personalisation to automation and easier access to information, here is how digital transformation can drive customer experience for your business.
Making Information Easily Accessible
In our past webinar on ‘How to Create a Captivating Experience’, Certified Customer Experience Consultant, Julia Ahlfeldt, mentions how we are in an age of the customer, who are highly informed and have shifted the power from businesses and brands to them – the customer. On top of this, the digital age comes with Generation Z, who are a set of consumers that grew up with technology and access to information right on their fingertips. Because of digital transformation, businesses have found it beneficial for CX strategies and wider business needs to have the ability to store information online. With advancements in online storage and security, businesses have made it more convenient for customers to access the information that they are looking for.
For example, if you look at Superbalist or Takealot, customers have the ability to easily access information like their order history or tracking their current purchases. For customers, this is convenient in helping them to make comparisons with other brands on the things they’ve bought. For a business, this helps you see the patterns in brand interactions, spending habits of your customers as well as giving you the ability to optimize for a better customer experience strategy based on what your customer is interested in.
An Automation Age
Gone are the days when a customer experience strategy hinged on manual processes. Now, instead of customers dialling into a call centre to get in touch with a business, chatbots and computer-based programs that provide 24/7 availability are the way to go.
According to Forbes, 80% of people who use chatbots do so for customer care. It’s thanks to digital transformation that has helped with making simple customer service requests easier, like updating personal details or navigating through an app. For the financial industry, FinTech applications have helped customer CX by allowing them to set up their own bank accounts or investments, and provide step-by-step guides on transferring money. This all eliminates the need for customers to physically go to a bank to speak to a consultant, and gives you the opportunity to focus on more complex customer needs.
If you aren’t using automation for enhancing customer experience strategies in your business, 2020 is the time to start implementing it. One of the first and simplest tasks that your business can begin automating is email marketing.
Jason Bagley, Founder of Firing Squad, shares how automation can better your email marketing strategy by not only being more personal but sending out emails on specific dates based on the customer’s behaviour (like their birthday) or business milestones (like celebrating your 100th customer). By reducing the amount of time that you spend on basic business processes, you now are better able to service your customers efficiently.
It’s Time to Get Personal
CX strategies involve more than just positive customer service or trying to win back customers after bad customer experiences. While this is a large and important component of the experience your customer has with you, it’s not the only one.
Relevant product or service offerings are also important to customer experience strategies. In this age, businesses and brands have access of much more data, which can provide insights into your customers and help you personalise your offerings and content according to each of your individual customers or customer segments.
Online shopping and e-commerce stores already feature a list of recommended items that aren’t tailored according to what’s popular for larger groups of customers, but rather to individuals and their own browsing history. Of course, collecting data like this means that you need to be transparent about it otherwise this could lead to bad customer service.
This is a strategy that can easily be adapted according to what your business has to offer but ensuring that you take a personalised approach will more than likely encourage a user to become a buyer.
It’s time to let digital transformation positively drive the customer experience of your business. Request a free demo now to see how media intelligence can take you to the top!
