Amazing Customer Experiences Are Worth The Investment

Did you know...?

While we all know a great customer experience when we witness one, many marketers have yet to make this critically important aspect of branding and marketing a key focus of their efforts. I continue to be baffled by marketers that have been doing marketing and advertising essentially the same way for the last 50 years, as if fashioning oneself after Mad Men's Don Draper will reverse the trends of the last 20. Not only is this a wildly inefficient way to spend limited marketing dollars, it ignores some of the most compelling new data on the profitability of customer experience engineering.

Did you know that consumers will not only demonstrate dramatically higher customer loyalty, but will also pay more for a great customer experience?

According to a study from RightNow Technologies, 8 in 10 consumers will pay a premium for what is otherwise the same product or service, if it is accompanied by an amazing customer experience.

In “Customer Experience Report North America”, researchers determined that 55% of North American consumers became a customer of a company because of that company's reputation for great customer service, and 40% switched to a competitive brand purely because of that company's reputation for great customer service.

A whopping 85% of consumers say they are willing to pay more for a product if a great customer experience comes with it. In fact, the findings show that 76% percent would pay 5% more, 55% would pay 10% more, 27% would pay 15% more, 18% would pay 20% more, and 10% would pay a mind-blowing 25% premium to receive a great customer experience.

So why on earth would companies NOT invest in creating an amazing customer experience?

What's the holdup?

While we all appreciate a great customer experience, there are only a few reasons why businesses don't pursue them.

1. They don't fully understand the difference between customer service and customer experience.
2. They don't realize how increasingly important customer experience engineering is to their future.
3. They have no idea how to go about designing a customer experience.
4. They fear that the cost will outweigh the return.

But let's look at just a few of the benefits of a thoughtfully-engineered, extraordinary customer experience: 

1. Increased customer loyalty
2. Increased likelihood of existing customers to refer others
3. Increased ability to attract new customers as reputation grows
4. Increased margins because customers are willing to pay more
5. Increased employee morale
6. Increased ability to recruit top-tier staff

The bottom line

So, the bottom line is that creating amazing customer experiences has the potential to dramatically improve your bottom line. A focus on your inbound customer experience alone can produce dramatic increases in lead generation and lead-to-customer conversion. By producing incredible content as part of a content marketing strategy, by optimizing your landing pages and website pages for conversion, by identifying and targeting the personas that make the best customers with your marketing, website and blog content, your inbound customer experience can flourish.

So... what's keeping you from realizing the impressive benefits of an amazing customer experience in your business?