The Best Advice on Providing an Extraordinay Customer Experience

The Best Advice on Providing an Extraordinay Customer Experience
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Seriously, why is it so hard to earn and keep clients?

I mean, it seems like other businesses make it look so easy.

You provide an awesome product or service. You constantly show your customers why they need what you offer. You do your best to manage the relationship you have built.

And then...they decide to go elsewhere. And you’re left wondering what you could have done better.

You work too hard for this to happen, don’t you?

As entrepreneurs and solopreneurs, we’ve all experienced this.

But there has to be a way to keep this from happening, right? Yes, there is. For this post, I interviewed Amas Tenumah, founder and CEO of BetterXperience. He’s a well-known customer experience expert who specializes in helping businesses build stronger and more profitable relationships with their clients.

What is BetterXperience?

There is so much confusion about what customer experience means. BetterXperience is really a belief that the best organizations obsessively focus on delivering better experiences for everyone it touches. Our firm, BetterXperience helps organizations improve customer experiences through our workshops, thought leadership & consultancy.

Tell me about the moment you decided to start this business. What made you take the step to create your own company?

There were times when I would go out to give a speech about customer experience, and someone in the audience will reach out to me about helping them make sense of customer experience. They would ask me to help turn the ubiquitous term customer experience into meaningful actions that make sense.

Pretty soon, I was spending my time helping people in my free time, then that turned into the book - The Curated Experience. Then we started doing workshops, and eventually consulting.

How would you describe your company’s brand?

Our role is to help customer experience professionals and business owners connect emotionally with customers, transform customer service and grow their business.

What exactly is an “Intentional Customer Experience?”

The days of spray and pray is over. The idea that you can make random changes in the hopes that customers will like you better doesn't make much sense. Intentional customer experience is about curating the customer experience, engineering every important part of your customer journey in a way that makes things seamless.

In your opinion, why do customers decide to stop doing business with a particular company?

Customers leave because they are exhausted with your brand. If you make customers jump through hoops to get service, they will leave. If they have to work hard to understand your pricing, your phone system, your policies, they will leave.

Customers are humans, and humans are attracted to ease, not necessarily the best products. Whoever provides simplicity, clarity and low effort wins in the long run.

How do you help business owners inspire customer loyalty?

We have a proven framework that helps organizations connect emotionally with their customers. We start by helping them understand their customer’s emotional state along their journey, then identify moments of truth and then re-engineer those moments so that they resonate emotionally with customers.

What’s the ideal customer type for an entrepreneur? Why?

I think finding customers who naturally believe the same things you believe is ideal. For example I tend to look for organizations who already think a better customer experience is how to grow and thrive but want inspiration or expertise on how to make it meaningful.

What advice do you have for entrepreneurs who want to keep their clients?

Clients are people. Loyal customers are emotionally-connected customers. The most loyal customers are not loyal because of rational, data-driven reasons.

They are emotionally connected first, then look for data to support their decision. The exciting thing is the fact that there is a proven framework to create that bond and we get excited to teach people about it.

Conclusion

I totally get it. Getting clients isn’t easy. Retaining them can be tough. It’s a challenge we all face as entrepreneurs.

However, Tenumah gives great insight into the mindset of customers. Our customers want us to make their lives easier, not harder. So we need to make sure we’re making it easier for them to get what they want.

Also, we need to make sure we’re connecting emotionally with our customers. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that intelligent arguments will influence your clientele, because it won’t. It’s the emotional bond that humans want.

Make your customers’ lives easier, and connect to them emotionally and you will gain greater success.

What do you think? How do you connect with your customers?

Jeff Charles is the founder of Artisan Owl Media, an Austin-based content marketing agency that specializes in helping entrepreneurs earn more clients and multiply their sales by becoming better influencers. You can check out his blog for actionable advice on influence, persuasion, sales, and marketing.

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