How Customer Experience Strategies Fuel Lead Generation
Lead generation, whether in the B2B or B2C space, is more complicated all the time. With the adoption of ad blocking technology and sophisticated ISPs blocking email considered spam before it ever reaches its intended audience, marketers strategies and tactics need to evolve. And no matter what your business, audience, vertical, etc., finding leads and turning those prospective customers into new customers is what it’s all about. So how do you do that?
Well, this is where customer service experience can play a significant role. According to ThinkJar, 55 percent of customers are willing to pay more for better customer experience. Reaching these prospective customers will be easier if you thing about five key things you might do to generate leads as a results of the customer experience you provide. Let’s take a look at how customer experience strategies fuel lead generation.
#1: AI and Chatbots
We’ve got to start here because of all the hype surrounding the widespread use of AI and chatbots in the online business environment. Even SMBs now have access to different alternative solutions such as AI that provides another mechanism for providing better customer support that helps to solve a lot of pesky issues.
How is AI and chatbots being used for improved customer experience? For example, your FAQ can be handled through social media bots, who are there to resolve common questions that prospective customers (read that: leads) face as they consider making a purchase. Chatbots have evolved so far that through use of NLP they can discern meaning in different context and not break down with simple issues that have been phrased differently. Through the integration of AI, chatbots are also able to learn on their own and get better over time. When you can employ AI and chatbots to help answer questions from prospective customers and move them deeper along their path to purchase, that’s a win in the lead generation category. And even if a prospect doesn’t make a purchase at that moment, the fact that they’ve gotten a little bit deeper allows you to nurture them and continue to build a relationship, so that when they’re ready to buy, you’re there for them, which helps your customer experience strategies fuel lead generation.
#2: Establishing an Emotional Connection
The problem with bots is that they’re not human. As a result, bots can’t build an emotional connection with customers. Many times, when customers can’t find something they want to purchase, or if they run into a problem with your service or product – they get riled up, they get frustrated. The only way to get their customer journey on the right track is to provide customer service by way of some well-trained agents and provide live help through chat.
When it comes to developing great customer experience strategies, the bottom line is empathy. In an interaction with a frustrated, confused, or upset customer, the first thing an agent will do is assess how dissatisfied the customer is with the situation. After that, he or she will work to calm the customer or prospective customer down, answer their questions or resolve the issue, offer an apology and, if the situation is particularly grave, they will provide some recompense to the customer.
Through these steps, it is ensured that the customer or prospective customer understands that their interests are crucial to the business they are dealing with, making them feel safer and view the brand as a reliable option to develop long-term loyalty to. Loyal customers recommend brands to whom they are loyal to people close to them, which helps customer experience strategies fuel lead generation.
#3: Understanding Customer Vision
While it is quite impossible to create a web presence that will fit every prospective customer’s vision 100 percent, some general marks need to be hit. When you are thinking about your customer journey, pay a lot of attention to focusing it in a way that isn’t frustrating or time-consuming for them. Try to give them logical and easy to use paths to the thing they came to find. Give them the information they need, when they need it.
One of the most basic things is to keep your search bar visible and your website optimized for these searches. Not all users like to be guided by the hand through their entire journey, and you need to make sure you are not bugging them at every step.
#4: Providing Value
There are a lot of ways you can provide value to prospects in order to attract their attention. This approach is especially prominent in B2B experiences, but can be applied in B2C as well.
Knowledge is usually an excellent way to go. Offering white papers, calculators, case studies, tutorials, analyst reports, webinars, and other assets designed to inform and assist as a customer is working to gain the information he or she, and likely their team, needs in order to consider making a purchase is critically important as part of the customer experience in the lead generation process. Help customers wrap their heads around complex services and products. This very important when selling high-end products and services, since they are on the more expensive end of the spectrum and most people want to know what exactly they are getting for the buck and why it costs so much.
#5: Feedback and Customer Reviews
One advantage that online sales has over offline sales is that prospective customers can generally get easy access to feedback and customer reviews.
Customer reviews, testimonials, and ratings can help prospective customers make purchasing decisions, and the more you can provide an environment and a customer experience that invites customers to provide reviews, the more beneficial it will be for you. Remember that not all reviews are five star reviews, and that’s fine. Prospective customers are smart and they can smell fake, flowery reviews a mile away. Invite customers to leave real reviews, and to provide feedback that can help you make your product or service even better. Know that not all reviews will be rave ones, and when you respond to all reviews in a prompt and courteous manner, it goes a long way toward creating a great impression in prospective customers’ minds. You can definitely turn negative customer reviews into positive experiences! For more on that, check out: Negative Customer Review? Turn It Into a Positive Opportunity.
Customer testimonials are another powerful way to provide social proof for your brand and give people who never deal with you insight into how you handle your business. Customers tend to trust other customers’ experience with a brand more than what the brand has to say about itself, so invite your existing customers to provide you with testimonials and make sure you go the extra mile and appreciate them when they do. This is another way customer experience strategies fuel lead generation
Bottom Line: Customer Experience Strategies Fuel Leads
Customer experience is what sticks in the minds of your prospective customers and when you’re focused on lead generation, that’s important. Prospective customers like to see that your existing customers like you, that you’re a good and credible company providing a good and credible product or service. They like to see that you have good relationships with existing customers and that you treat them well. Your customer experience strategies can be very visible to prospective customers from the outside looking in, and when you do that well, it might well the thing that will set you apart from your competition. Your customer experience strategies fuel lead generation, so give some of these things a try and let us know how they work.