Good products are important to good business of course. What happens when you are reselling a product that people can get elsewhere? Look at supermarkets. They all sell roughly the same things and yet people will stick their necks out to say that OK, TM/Pick n Pay, Bon Marche, Spar, Food Lover’s, Food world or something else is the best supermarket. This boils down to what we call customer experience. Yes, they are all selling the roughly the same thing at roughly the same prices but the process of buying those things and the experience they go through makes the difference. You can use this to your advantage in your business. Curating the customer experience through the following things;

Onboarding

Onboarding is the process of welcoming customers to the business and sometimes to the product. If you are selling a complicated product like a car for example you may have a client who is not aware of just how much goes into taking care of a car. Cleaning, maintenance, service, diagnostic checks and indicators. There’s a lot of information you will need to make them aware of to have the best experience. The whole point of onboarding is to welcome the customer to their new life. This works better with bigger purchases but there is space for all types of businesses to onboard.

Blog

A business blog serves many purposes and one of the more important ones is improving customer experience. Blogs are useful at any stage of the customer journey. People considering your business will find value if there’s information that helps them know how your products perform. Posts that tackle frequently asked questions (FAQs) help those with questions about the business or product. Explainers on products can help people choose the right one for them. Blogs on care and maintenance or ongoing use of a product help those who are already customers. The blog is versatile.

Education

Education is another thing you can give to customers to improve their experience. Education about the product and perhaps issues around the product. Education about the business or the general industry you operate in. Consider the lengths businesses that operate in environmentally friendly or sustainable ways go to educate people about how they are sustainable and why it matters. There are so many approaches to education and you need to find the one that works for your business and product.

Video

Video is powerful in improving customer experience. If you have a cleaning product for example showing a video of your cleaning product in use can improve customer experience. Teaching the customer ways to use the product they may not have thought of before. Showing is always better than telling so you could tell them how to use it but you would much rather show them. Video can be used for much more than product demonstrations of course. You can use video to educate, support causes or generally just engage with customers and stakeholders.

Community

This will not work for every single product but it will work for many if not most. People love the idea of interacting with like-minded people especially when it makes them feel special. So it makes sense for people like dog owners, retail investors or fitness junkies to want communities where they can interact with like-minded people. It’s not just about bringing people together and hoping it will work for the best. A little guidance and moderation will be required to get the community going in the right direction.

Newsletter

Newsletters are another great way to improve the customer experience. Newsletters are aggregators in nature and they could be an amalgamation of all the things we have discussed thus far. The newsletter can make customers aware of new blog entries, refresh on some onboarding topics, give industry news updates, educate, show the newest social media videos and celebrate members of the community.

Thinking in terms of the product alone is flawed and you need to think in terms of the complete customer experience. You cannot take a person’s experiences from them nor how they made them feel. What sort of experience are your customers going to remember?