Top B2C Habits That Your Business Must Follow in 2020 A careful evaluation of your customer strategy can help you identify your weak points and chart a path to boosting customer retention.

Every new year comes with unique challenges, and with the rapidly changing consumer expectations, your business has to be on its toes when it comes to your overall customer experience.

Customer experience has graduated from being an important part of every business to its most critical success mantra. Let it be c-suite executives, departmental heads, or team leads; every leader is aware of the importance of customer experience for their business.

A recent survey involving executives from multiple organizations finds customer experience to be the most exciting growth opportunity for companies in 2020. These expectations are not baseless. A PWC research indicates that 86 percent of customers are willing to overpay for excellent customer experience and are ready to indulge in impulsing purchases after a great experience.

If you run a business or are trying to take it to the next level, customer experience is one thing you can never run short on.

Let's find out what customer experience is and how you can take your business to the next level by boosting your B2C experiences.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience is the total of all the interactions that a customer has while moving through different phases of a business relationship. It involves awareness, discovery, advocacy, conversion/sale, and customer service.

Research indicates that leading, competitive customer experience teams can grow a company's revenue by 17 percent within five years as compared to a growth rate of only 3 percent for their non-competitive counterparts.

However, customer experience comprises different stages, and in order to excel in it, you must understand the need to upgrade your B2C game.

Phase One: Why do you need to evaluate your B2C strategy?

Boost customer satisfaction, the bottom line.

Do you know that it's 5x more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one? How do you keep your customers? By prioritizing customer satisfaction and experience above everything else.

A careful evaluation of your B2C strategy will help you identify the culprits in your overall business relationship. The next step is to create a strategy to handle the issue, and you'll notice a boost in customer retention.

It is critical to understand that satisfied customers are likely to spend 140 percent of their original budget post a good experience, thereby helping you grow your revenue.

Improve brand loyalty and customer retention.

American companies lose over $1.3 trillion because of customer switching brands because of a miserable experience. On the contrary, loyal customers are 5x more likely to repurchase from your company and tend to refer their friends to your firm.

These figures indicate the massive impact of brand loyalty and customer retention on your bottom line. The number one reason customers leave your brand is because of poor service, and over a third of customers leave your firm after a single bad experience.

A careful evaluation of your entire customer experience funnel can help you find out channels or phases that lead to maximum churn. A business can improve its revenue anywhere between 25 percent and 95 percent by merely boosting their customer retention by 5 percent.

Gives you an edge over the competition.

Are you looking for a competitive advantage over your competition? More than 39 percent of CEOs feel customer experience to be among the most effective methods of gaining the upper hand over their competition.

Implementing something as simple as a feedback form or survey will help a business identify the primary factor customers seek in a service provider. Additionally, a customer feedback survey will help you stay aware of the changing customer requirements and areas of improvement for your business.

A careful analysis of your competition is another way to identify their unique offerings or key differentiators and leverage the principles of reinforced learning in your business practices.

High trustworthiness among customers.

Trust is perhaps the most crucial reason a customer interacts, engages, and makes a purchase from you. A successful business never compromises on the trust factor.

Find out how your firm is doing when it comes to consumer trust. Always remember that there are multiple stages of building and maintaining customer trust, starting with your brand message, consistent marketing efforts, your understanding of your customer, and your ability to run co-op marketing initiatives with your partners.

Companies that establish an emotional connection with their customers generate 85% more revenue in comparison to their competitors.

Phase Two: How to evaluate your B2C practices/strategy?

Choose a customer experience matrix.

The first part of the puzzle is to identify relevant metrics to measure, analyze customer experience.

There is most than one way to do it. You can choose among popular customer experience metrics, such as NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), customer churn rate, or CES (Customer Effort Score).

In some cases, you may want to combine more than one metric or create a custom one that works well throughout your organization.

It is important to note that these metrics can provide critical insights about your overall customer experience. Still, since every business is different, you have to give equal importance to human instincts and expertise.

Build real-time feedback systems.

One of the easiest ways of finding out the quality of your service or interaction level with your customer is to implement real-time feedback systems.

There are multiple methods you can use for real-time feedback. For instance, GoDaddy places customers' call on an IVRS feedback system, providing it instant feedback about the quality of its services. Similarly, most of the enterprises send a followup email after a live chat session, trying to capture authentic feedback in real-time.

It is important to note that employee engagement can boost your overall quality of customer experience, and tying feedbacks with individual employees will help these representatives realize the importance of their role.

Pay attention to every data-driven report.

We live in a data-rich world, with every single customer transaction generating a significant amount of data. Having the right tools to collect and make sense of this data is critical for your business. At least nine out of 10 executives give credit to data analytics tools for creating a better customer experience.

Start by investing in data collection and data analysis tools. Keeping your department leads and c-executives in these exercises will help you deduce desirable outputs out of these reports.

It is critical to note that companies with a turnover of $1 billion or more can boost their gains by more than 70 percent by investing in customer experience.

Have your entire team work with you.

Having your entire team, especially executives, onboard is critical not only for achieving desirable outputs but to motivate the rest of the staff as well. It will indicate the significance of the meeting and improve the quality of brainstorming.

Also, since your entire business relationship is divided into multiple phases or stages, having executives, as well as teams responsible for these individual phases, will give you a clear picture. You will be able to diagnose the issue within the entire customer map and find a solution or at least march towards one in the meeting.

Create a strategy to address concerns.

As with any other business strategy, the reports concerning individual customer stages throughout your business will change with time, and so should your strategy. Always be willing to take into account any new trends and developments to stay efficient.

Above everything else, you should be ready to implement a strategy that addresses all the problems or concerns revealed during this evaluation phase. Nothing is going to change without implementation. Ideally, you should create a time-bound implementation strategy for all of these problems and review progress periodically.

Phase Three: Identify top 3 B2C habits for 2020

Develop an omnichannel strategy.

The world is growing increasingly interconnected, and so are your consumers. Nothing works in isolation anymore, and your business, branding, marketing strategies must follow the same principle. One of the first habits, strategies you need in 2020 is to devise an omnichannel strategy.

It's quite common among customers to access online content, your business website, or social media channels before speaking with your representatives. Your brand message and content should be consistent across all of these channels.

Here is what you must do:

• Make all your content teams or multi-channel teams work together and create a consistent customer experience.
• Your offline and online teams must coordinate well to deliver the same message.

The user should feel the same when moving across different channels.

Focus on a personalized experience.

8 out of 10 customers prefer working with a business that offers personalized experiences, and two-third of the consumers are willing to share data with brands in return for added value.

It starts with a clear understanding of your customer, including details such as demographic details, preferred communication channels, and products or services of interest. Having in-depth insights allow you to create a personalized experience.

Post that, a brand can use different strategies to offer personalized services. A client looking for B2B services should receive information emails about your enterprise solutions, whereas a client seeking personal solutions should receive information about individual solutions.

Another strategy is to segment customers into different categories and create solutions for these individual categories. Netflix is a leader in providing individual subscription packages across different customer segments.

Offering services and products that your consumer requires will help them feel appreciated and result in higher conversions and lifetime customer value.

Use technology for your benefit.

Technology has worked as a critical enabler over the past two decades.

As a business, you must tie technology with the above two practices. Digital transformation is reshaping entire business models and operational practices.

Digital transformation is nothing but utilizing technology across all the segments of business, thereby driving higher efficiency and improving business processes to improve customer experience.

Digital transformation is allowing companies to create engaged customers, who are 6x more likely to experiment with a new service or product, 2x more likely to stick with your business even if a competitor offers better pricing, and have three times higher annual value.

• Start by creating an IT environment that's both agile and flexible. The only way to offer personalized services is to monitor customer interaction across your business, so it only makes sense to combine different modules, such as Big Data, customer database, into a single system. It'll help you create a holistic view of your customers.
• An omnichannel marketing strategy is a part of your digital transformation journey.

Conclusion

Today's connected world has given rise to a new generation of customers. These customers have access to unlimited knowledge, require instant or speedy solutions, and are aware of the power of digital platforms when it comes to brand-related experience.

The widescale adoption of smartphones has mutated customer experience, putting mobile channels above other mediums. The only way businesses can stay relevant is through rapidly adapting to these changing consumer perceptions and upgrading to systems that can handle new customer expectations.