While the summer months can bring a lull in business for some small enterprises, it can be a great time to get hands-on with getting to know your customers better and make sure their customer experience is everything it should be.

Being up to date with wider consumer trends in customer experience is a good place to start. For example, when asked about customer service experience in 2021, UK consumers said:

• 45% - think companies need to listen more to their feedback
• 47% - say businesses need to care more about them
• 40% - would spend more if businesses treated them better

So, how can you use these consumer trends to influence your own ideas of what makes a great customer experience for your business?

 

Consumer Trends 2024: How to Use Them

If you want to boost your reputation for giving great customer experience, these are the key consumer trends to pay attention to.

 

 

1. Put customer experience at the heart of your business

Gone are the days of being loyal to one supplier. It costs nothing for customers to switch to another company who will treat them as they want to be treated.

Bad customer service experience can put 6.5% of your revenue at risk, as consumers refuse to spend their hard-earned cash with businesses that don’t meet their expectations.

The risk for businesses who tolerate bad customer experience is huge, but there’s an even bigger opportunity for companies to get it right.

If you want to get ahead in this area, put customer experience at the heart of your business — make everything from your culture to your technology customer-centric.

Research says consumers are:

3.5 x more likely to buy from a business after a good customer experience

5.1 x more likely to recommend an organisation after a good customer experience

 

2. Remember that different customers want different things

Since the pandemic, the way customers shop has changed — and it will continue to do so.

There’s now a huge gap between what customers expect and what businesses deliver. Listening to your customers and making improvements based on what they say is key to getting ahead of your competition. Customers want an optimised omnichannel experience.

An action you could take is tailoring your customer experience by channel.

A blanket approach to customer service just isn’t going to cut it anymore. If you can develop a deeper understanding of where and how your customers prefer to engage with you, you can tailor your customer experience for them on the channels they want to use.

 

3. Act on feedback, or lose engagement

It’s frustrating to see no response after being asked for feedback. Consumers are clear on this, with nearly half saying that businesses need to listen to them better.

When customers give you feedback, they expect a response — and they’ll stop engaging if they don’t get one.

However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask for feedback. Demonstrating that you’re listening to your customers is important, but think about how you could change your listening strategy to fit with the channels your customers use.

Including indirect feedback as part of your strategy can be a great step-change — noting what your customers are saying about your business, wherever they’re saying it, could be the prompt you need for some important customer experience improvements.

 

4. Treat customers as people, not commodities

Your customers’ tolerance for bad customer experience is as low as it’s ever been. They want to be treated as individuals. They want their needs to be put first. And the good news about this is they’re willing to pay more for it — if it’s done well!

Listening and acting on feedback is a good start here, but you’re going to have to go one step further. Do the hard work and create some genuine relationships with your customers — interpret their signals, understand what they need, then tailor your response.

You might not give everyone one-to-one service, but they need to feel like they’re getting it!

 

 

What makes a great customer experience?

Another great way of improving your customer service rankings is by letting technology do some of the heavy lifting.

At Parcel2Go, not only do we offer the cheapest shipping in the UK to help you keep your parcel delivery budgets low, we’ve also got some clever technology to let you manage all your deliveries in one place - check out Smart Send, our free shipping management platform, to find out more.