The experience a customer has with your business can either make them lifelong fans of your company or cause them to go looking elsewhere for IT services.
Customer experience includes any time someone has an interaction with you in any way, whether in person, on the phone, or online.
Finding ways to improve customer experience by using your blogs and content marketing strategy can promote customer retention and lead conversions. We’ve got several ways you can do that below!
What is “Customer Experience?”
The term “customer experience” is fairly new in the marketing lexicon. It started around the time of Amazon and online shopping as a whole to describe more than just a company’s customer service. It included what a customer experiences digitally as well.
What’s the difference between customer service and customer experience?
Customer service is just one part of the entire experience a person has when they interact with your business.
Customer experience is defined by Wikipedia as: The product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship.
Customer experience has three key areas:
The Customer Journey
This includes what happens when a person is in your sales funnel, when they purchase services, your customer service, etc. Is your branding consistent throughout the journey? Can they get answers to their questions easily?
The Brand Touchpoints the Customer Interacts With
This would include your emails, blogs, social posts, follow up calls, etc. Basically, the content you send out as fuel for your marketing engine designed to get a response or interaction. Is it targeted to their needs? Relevant to them?
The Environments the Customer Experiences During Their Experience
This includes things like your website, how your shop looks when a person comes in, and the experience they have when submitting tickets or receiving remote support. Is the experience easy or cumbersome for them?
Why is customer experience so important?
Because, based upon someone’s experience with your IT business, they’ll either be a loyal client for years and recommend you to others, or be unhappy and look elsewhere for their technology needs.
Just one bad experience can cause a customer to jump ship!
Here are some statistics from Forbes that illustrate the importance of paying attention to your customers’ experience with your business:
- 73% of customers say a good experience is key to influencing their loyalty to a company.
- Loyal customers are 5x more likely to purchase again and 4x more likely to refer someone.
- Businesses with a superior customer experience earn over 5x more revenue than those that lag behind.
- US consumers will pay 17% more for a service if the company has a great customer service reputation.
Customer experience can be enhanced in a number of ways. I’m going to focus on how you can use your IT business blogs to boost how customers feel about their experience with you.
Creating Strategic Content That Enhances Your Value to Your Customers
Whether you’re writing blogs yourself or having them written for you by an MSP blog writing service, you want your content to be interesting, relevant, and promote engagement from your target clientele.
Think of your blogs as a two-way street. While the main focus is to generate leads and sales via SEO and direct interaction, you’re also providing a helpful resource.
For example, your blog about “new coronavirus phishing scams” may just give a company a handout that can be sent around to employees.
So, you want your blogs and the content marketing generated from them (videos, social posts, etc.) to be seen as valuable by your leads, customers, and website visitors.
By taking the customer perspective when you post blogs (i.e. “what’s in it for my customers?”) you’ll have a much better chance at creating valuable content that will enhance a customer’s experience with your company over the long-term.
Here are several ways to use your blogs to boost your customer experience and improve sales, loyalty, and more.
Use Blogs to Build a “How To” on Your Site
When people have a computer problem, they often turn to Google first. But you know how problematic it can be when people aren’t sure which answer is relevant to them. Often it can lead to more problems than they started with.
Take advantage of people’s natural urge to search out “how to” do things by making some of your blogs instructional content. You can add a call-to-action at the end to “save yourself time and get help from a pro!” to promote interaction.
If your content shows that you know what you’re doing, someone is more likely to trust your IT business with their tech needs.
You can tag all your “how to” blogs and link them together into a “How To” page on your website.
This enhances the customer experience by giving them a helpful resource they can trust for tips on common questions like:
- How to install memory
- How to migrate data to a new computer
- How to know when a hard drive is in need of repair
- How to troubleshoot Windows boot issues
Involve Your Entire Team to Brainstorm Content Ideas
It’s easy to get in a vacuum when going through your day-to-day computer support activities. Sometimes a fresh perspective can help you with generating content that will be particularly valuable to your customers.
For example, if you have a front desk receptionist, they may know the biggest questions being asked by people that call in. Your service technicians that handle remote support, may have some ideas about blogs that could make the experience easier for new clients.
Widen your “idea” generation net for blog topics to help you better address areas of value to a lead or customer you may not have considered.
Create Blogs That Can Double as an FAQ
51% of customers expect a business to be available 24/7. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean they expect a live person at midnight, but they expect to be able to get some type of help from a website during off hours.
Trying to create a robust FAQ for your site can take time. But you can build one strategically, little by little, and improve your customer experience at the same time by using your blogs to answer frequently asked questions.
Adopt a workflow like this:
- Customer question happens (on phone, by email, on social media)
- Write a blog to answer that question
- Push blog out on your content channels (email newsletter, social media, etc.)
- Tag these types of blogs as “FAQ” and pull them in on an FAQ website page
You’ll be improving your ability to help website visitors 24/7 and enhancing the experience all leads and customers have with you by answering common questions they may have.
Tell Customer Stories (aka Case Studies) in Your Blogs
Customers are big on reading reviews before they interact with a business. You can use this to your advantage and improve your customer experience by using some of your blogs to tell customer stories.
Discuss an experience you had with helping a customer upgrade from manual processes to automate to save money or that time you got someone out of a technology jam.
This will provide more value to a lead or customer by giving them a real “behind the scenes” of your business without a lot of marketing or sales speak.
81% of consumers read customer reviews, and 36% of them ALWAYS read them before doing business with a company.
Messages delivered as stories can be as much as 22x more memorable than just facts.
Write Blogs as a Resource
Ask yourself what kinds of resources your customers may find helpful and write blogs specifically designed to be printed out saved into PDF and shared.
For example, a blog on “Top 6 Ways to Secure Your Router When Working from Home” may be something that a business gives out to all their remote employees.
By positioning some of your blogs as free resources, you enhance your value to a customer and let them know they can expect proactive tech help from you to make their life easier.
Here are a few resource ideas for blog topics:
- Business:
- Tips for Remote Worker IT Security
- How to Protect Your Password
- Setting Up the Perfect Video Meeting Background
- Residential:
- Tips for Family Cybersecurity (for Kids & Teens)
- Steps to Protect Your Tech When Traveling
- How to Properly Clean Electronics (Without Ruining Them)
Address Technology in Specific Industries
You’re bound to have certain industries that you serve that would appreciate some industry-specific technology guidance.
Use some of your blogs to focus on a technology topic related to one of those industries (manufacturing, accounting, doctor’s offices, etc.). This lets customers know that you understand their unique needs and may give them insight into a use of technology for their business they hadn’t thought of before.
This is another way that your blogs can add value to customers, enhancing your tech business reputation, and giving them yet another reason to stay loyal and continue working with you for years to come.
Highlight Customers in Your Blog from Time-to-Time
Once or twice a year, think about doing a blog promoting your customers’ businesses. This can be a way to thank them for their loyalty and create a spirit of community that centers around your technology services.
A customer highlight blog can generate excitement and business for your clients. For example, one client may have been thinking of getting landscaping for their property and see that you’ve highlighted a landscaper client in a client “shout-out” blog and give them a call.
Both will of course remember that it was you that connected them.
That kind of great mojo just can’t be purchased, it comes through being thoughtful and asking yourself how you can help your clients and continue enhancing their experience with your business.
Generate More Customer Loyalty Through Blogs
Expanding your idea of what a blog topic can be and focusing on the value to the reader can gain you more loyalty, more customers, and improve customer experience.
Do you have a customer experience-focused blog story? Let us know in the comments!
