Social Media and Innovating and Streamlining the Customer Experience
Most efficiently run and intelligently guided businesses and social media strategies have some form of customer response system in place so that when a customer complaint occurs, or when issues arise that they must solve, they aren’t completely befuddled as to how they should handle it.
But what about positive feedback. Or standing in line? Or ordering? Or contacting? Although these elements are often inherently part of most businesses typical routines, the act of streamlining them with more efficient and effective alternatives is often not a consideration. Yet creating more effective means for customers, fans and followers to provide feedback, contact your business or even order from your business, are all excellent ways to truly innovate and streamline the customer experience and create organic, unique methods through which customers can interact with your business.
Innovating ordering is an excellent way to allow your business to stand out amongst the crowded field of often lame, typical ordering methods. Say you run a small takeout shop, yet the only way customers are able to order is either directly in your storefront, or over the phone. It’s simple sure, and easy to keep track of for the most part, but not necessarily intriguing, and certainly not taking advantage of your online resources.
So how about allowing them to order simple items via Twitter or Facebook? CoffeeGroundz, a cafe in Houston, Texas, innovated their own ordering process by allowing customers to place orders via Twitter direct message. Not only did it result in huge coverage from their fans on Twitter, it resulted in a significant boost in business due to the increased coverage that it received through the media. By innovating how they allowed customers to order, they essentially created a new, extremely effective means of developing more business.
Streamlining your business’s feedback and contact forms is also another excellent way to better integrate the social media, online and offline presences of your business.
But you might be wondering how, exactly. Well, for one, creating a universal, integrated solution as to how you will respond to that feedback and contact across all of your different presences is an excellent way to start. Who will you relay that information to if it is through e-mail, social media or your website? How will that person respond to that information whether it is positive or negative? How will you reach out to those that had a negative experience in order to quell their dissatisfaction?
Better yet, think about how you can innovate your online and offline presences in order to encourage feedback and communication amongst your customers. How about offering them a free gift for reviewing you on Yelp, or for providing feedback through Twitter, e-mail or social media? Better yet, how about creating a streamlined app experience for them to provide that feedback through social media or offline? The more inventive you make your customer experiences, the more willing people will be to participate in it.
Being inventive is easily one of the most important steps in innovating and streamlining the customer experience. After all, rarely will customers be compelled by antiquated and unexciting methods of interacting with your business. People want to see intuitive and innovative strategies because that is ultimately what makes businesses stand out from one another.
By creating new ways for customers to interact with and communicate with your business you appeal to their curiosity, and, to some degree, their inner child. Just imagine how cool it would be to place an order online by posting on someone’s Facebook page.
But also think about all of the other ways in which you could possibly innovate your customer experience. Are reservations typically only made over the phone? Are customers waiting in boring, uninteresting waiting rooms with little to do? Think, and figure out how you can help turn that mundane, boring experience into something different. Something fun.
Source: MSM DesignZ, Inc. is a Westchester NY Social Media company specializing in advertising, web and graphic design, and SEO.