Five thoughtful tips for customer experience: get engaged and happy users

‘How can I get customers? How can I make them loyal? Should I give the best customer experience ever? How?’ If you’re a startup CEO I bet you ask yourself these questions kind of million times a day (not exaggerating…)

Acquisition and retention are some of the most challenging issues that startups have to face. Most of the times, people haven’t heard about them before (well, if you’re really lucky, maybe your Fools Family and Friends know what is your startup about).

So this is the situation: you have to get new customers (acquisition) and after that, they have to be loyal (retention). How the hell are you going to do it? I have no idea, but I really think that offering the best customer experience can help.

We would like to share with you a selection from the posts we’ve been reading during September about customer experience, and the conclusions we draw from each of them. Enjoy!

1.- Customers have the power.

How to go above and beyond with customer service. What I like of this post is that the author, James Olden, points out one of the most important things and the biggest changes in customer service: consumers are empowered. It doesn’t matter if the customer is wrong or right anymore, because if they’re not happy, they can just switch and look for better deals. So, keep always an eye on this, and read these advices to offer the best customer experience.

2.- Use the right tools.

How to Engage on Twitter. Ok, now we know about the importance of giving the best customer experience, but, how can we do it? We need tools! Twitter can be a great tool, if you know how to use it. David Ring gives us 3 general tips to use twitter to engage our users: Use hashtags, search phrases, find followers. I would like to add a new one, if David allows me: shake your creativity! There are hundreds of millions of users on Twitter, so build creative campaigns using those 3 tips, and get the attention of users.

3.- Be quick.

Hold Time is Killing Your Customer Experience. One of the most important problems in customer service is having customers waiting. It makes really clear on this post, where we can see that ‘long wait on hold’ is the third biggest problems for them. This post is focused on call experiences, but we can apply it to support via Internet. What happens when you have a problem, and you write a message on the chat, but nobody answers? That’s not cool. Customers will appreciate having answers in short times, so think about all the things you could do in order to give quick answers to your customers.

4.- Involve the team.

6 Tips to Improve Your Customer Service. As Mike Kappel says on this post, the team is going to have a relation with your customers, how do you want the team to treat them? Encourage your team to give the best service, to smile, to be kind, to get in the customers’ shoes, and above all, to be decisive. Customers will like a team if they’re kind, but they’ll love them if they’re not only kind, but professional too.

5.- Think about long-term.

The big debate: do Ice Bucket Challenge-type campaigns produce long-term engagement? How many ice buckets have you seen during summer? Probably even you have been encouraged enough to take one of this and spill it on you (well done if it’s for a good cause!) But, for me the real question is: how many ice buckets have you seen AFTER summer? One? Two? None? Ian Griggs  shows a very interesting point of view on his post. Launching big campaigns to get new customers is great, but don’t forget to make something sustainable on time. Remember that most of the times, acquisition means nothing without retention. (Saving distances of course, the Ice Bucket Challenge was a campaign to promote awareness of the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and encourage donations).

Did you like this list of posts? Then remember that every first Friday of the month we’ll be publishing our monthly selection based on the posts we’ve been picking for you.

Do you miss any other post about customer experience? Please, share it with us.

Can’t you wait to read more about Startupxplore? Follow us on Twitter or Facebook.