Creating a good customer experience is always an essential goal for a startup business. After all, satisfied customers are a boon to your business and attract more patrons. But finding the right path towards that can sometimes be a challenge.
Here, a more holistic approach is something you might want to consider. Let’s look at how it works and how you can effectively implement it with Virtua Solutions’ help.
Understanding The Holistic Customer Service Framework
In most customer service strategies, you approach engagements using a linear model. You get people to go through predetermined steps. In theory, this helps you respond faster to customers since you already have a specific procedure to follow.
But there is a problem with this approach. It only works if every customer follows that same path. In reality, however, customer journeys can vary significantly. One person might get to your brand through your online site, while another can take a more conventional route through your physical store. From there, they can take very different paths towards purchase.
In a holistic customer experience, you consider that uniqueness. As such, you build the CX strategy to fit individual journeys. That means that you will follow customers in each direction they take instead of forcing them to follow your predetermined path. That provides you with a more optimized means of serving those customers.
A holistic customer experience also takes it further. Instead of just focusing on interactions customers have with you, it also encompasses their interactions with other relevant businesses. The idea here is that these external engagements also impact their interactions with you. With that, you create a more nuanced experience that serves customers better.
The Benefits Of A Holistic Customer Service Approach For Your Startup Business
Now that you have an idea of what a holistic customer service approach looks like, let’s explore the benefits that it offers. These benefits highlight how you can better serve your customers and generate greater profits for your startup business.
Better Support Resolutions
One of the advantages of a holistic approach is that it lets you get a clearer picture of the customer experience. You can see how their past support issues affect their present ones. This helps you devise a solution that not only resolves their current concerns but will also help them deal with future ones.
Discover Points For Improvement
For your part, a holistic approach will help you discover opportunities for improvement. By accompanying customers through their purchase journey, you can find out which areas you are weak in. On the other hand, this also allows you to experiment with customer service strategies and refine them for wider use.
Inspires Strong Customer Loyalty
You already know the importance of good service in building customer loyalty. A holistic approach can take this further. With it, customers can get more out of the products they buy. You also help them get more long-term benefits. All of these come together to convince them not just to stay but become avid fans of your brand.
Building A Holistic Customer Experience Framework For Your Startup Business
The first thing that you need to have when developing a holistic customer experience strategy is a framework. This might seem odd, given that we already mentioned that customer journeys vary greatly. However, they still go through four broad stages.
- Researcher: The customer is gathering information about different products and services.
- Evaluator: This is where the customer starts assessing the options they have.
- Shopper: This is when the customer gets closer to making an actual purchase.
- Experiencer: The customer starts using the product or services and sharing their experience.
Note that these stages are not necessarily sequential. Customers can change from one stage to another fluidly. There might also be varying emphasis for each of these stages.
For instance, consumers might spend more time researching an expensive item they want to buy than with smaller items. That is to make sure that their money is well-spent. Predicting how they would respond to your brand can help you build the experience around their habits.
Improving Your Startup Business Purchase Channels
Another important factor when building your holistic customer experience is developing your purchase channels. One thing that has made this challenging is that there are now more channels than it used to. This has also increased the type of shopper behaviors you have to consider when developing your customer experience.
However, you can still plan out how to deal with these increasing touchpoints. Here are some useful strategies.
- Connect the “why”: Understand the customer’s purpose for using each touchpoint. You can then create deeper connections to the actions they take at each touchpoint.
- Identify the themes: You can categorize the journeys into different themes. These themes indicate the customer’s intent. You can then use this to determine what actions to take and prioritize.
- Understand motivations and triggers: Look into your past engagements and see the reasons behind people’s various purchase decisions. Note that these different motivations can affect the buying decisions for even the same products.
With these steps, you can create a general map of the touchpoints a customer uses for a given situation. You still need to be flexible here, as the customer can still go outside of the touchpoints you have mapped.
Helping Your Startup Business Deliver A Holistic Experience
A key for your startup business to succeed in delivering a holistic customer experience is being able to accompany customers at every point. However, it can be challenging for a small company like yours. Virtua Solutions can help you here in more ways than providing additional personnel.
To start, we can help in refining your overall strategy. Our agents have years of experience with different customer service situations. With that, we can readily adapt our tactics to fit your particular customer engagements.
Furthermore, we can help you formulate new engagement strategies. That is crucial, as customer behavior can shift significantly. Your customer experience strategy should be ready to change the moment customer behavior changes. Our expertise helps us predict these changes based on various factors.
With us by your side, you can go beyond just implementing a holistic customer service approach. You will be able to turn that into a cornerstone of your startup business strategy. Sign up with us today and we will show more of what we can do for your company and customers.