To create ongoing positive word of mouth marketing for your business takes time and persistence and most of all ‘buy in’ from everyone in the business.  Your whole business needs to become customer focused and to do this requires many things but firstly you need to make an ongoing commitment to starting a customer experience improvement program. 

Here are SpySee’s top 7 must do tips to create a customer experience improvement program and word of mouth marketing that costs you nothing.

1. Create a Customer Experience Taskforce

Create a taskforce that will become the driving force behind your customer experience improvement program. The idea is to use this group to innovate, improve and keep front of mind the customer experience, they will need to meet regularly and have a team leader. Depending on the size of your business you could have one person from each department or in a smaller business with under 10 people include everyone.  Ideally you will want between 5-10 people and it will typically include a HR and marketing manager. Your taskforce can start out by incorporating the following things.

2. Create a customer focused culture

To create the results you want you need to change your culture to become customer focused.  A culture is needed to help align the attitudes, values, goals and practices of your organisation.  A customer focused culture means that everyone and everything in the business first looks at what the customer wants and then decides how to go about it to give the best experience possible for your customers. 

3. Know your customers

To know how to align your customer focus you need to understand your customers, you need to know the problems they have with using your business, you need to know what they like and dislike about your products/services and you need to constantly capture this information so you know if changes you make are working.  Start and finish with your customer in mind.  To capture this information you could use surveys, mystery shopping or focus groups.   However the key here is to create a benchmark of your current customer experience on which you can improve upon.  At SpySee we suggest conducting monthly mystery shops on your business to make sure the changes are working and to keep customer experience front of mind constantly.  Mystery shopping provides a constant and thorough check up of your business’ performance.  Focus groups are used less frequently, usually when you are incorporating new products or services or deciding on making bigger changes.  Surveys are used generally to capture larger quantities of feedback or to survey your current customer database.  Your taskforce should use the results to guide them in their decision making. 

4. Create a customer experience mission and vision

Having a customer experience mission and vision is just as important as abusiness mission and vision and should be looked at seperately.  It will give your team direction and goals to work towards and to understand how the business wants to treat its customers.  A customer experience mission and vision should be distinctive and clear so that it creates enthusiasm and inspires your team to do great things.  They are your goals for your customers in one single short statement. 

5. Know your customer touch points

Understanding all your customer touch points is vital in improving your business.  If you know what they are then you can improve them.  Every customer touch point no matter how small leaves an impression on your customer sometimes this is subconsciously other times it is more noticeable.  The important thing to realise is that it leaves an impression and all these impressions add up to an experience of your business.   A customer touch point can include everything from your website to your email to the lighting, ambience, cleanliness or feel of your business and much more.  List all of your customer touch points then one by one look at each one align each touch point with your customer experience mission and vision and then find ways of exceeding your customers expectations at each one.  This is how you will create a consistent customer experience.

6. Exceed your customers expectations

You need to be doing more than just meeting your customers expectations. Customers are the lifeblood of your business they have choices and they are savvy, they will walk away if you don’t do enough to keep them coming back.  Only by exceeding expectations consistently will you create true word of mouth marketing.  You need to swim out of the sea of sameness and create extraordinary experiences so your customers want to tell others how great your business is.  An ordinary experience won’t get people talking a bad experience will only create bad word of mouth, it is only the extraordinary experiences that will have your customers singing your tune everywhere.

7. Reward and recognise

Keeping your employees happy is crucial in customer experience success, happy motivated employees will cultivate a desire to do their best for your business and your customers.  A rewards and recognition program should be a part of the culture of your business.  However alongside rewards you need to provide personal fulfilment on a daily basis by providing great work benefits that appeal to your team, flexible working conditions and finding ways to keep your teams engaged, challenged and focused on an ongoing basis.  1 in 3 people will leave an organisation because they don’t feel appreciated or recognised and that is wasted time and money for you to recruit and train new staff.  You need to retain employees just as much as you need to retain customers.  To be successful in your R&R program you need to make the rewards personal, you need to provide experience based rewards and you need to be clear on what your staff need to do to achieve them.  People are drawn to companies that have a great work/life balance and are committed to rewards and recognition programs, so a great program will attract and retain the right employees.

There is no doubt that creating word of mouth marketing will propel your business forward to success, use these strategies to guide you and you will be way ahead of your competition.