Delivering enhanced and personalized customer experience as a Cloud Solution Provider

Customer experience plays a critical role in the growth of any business. Prioritizing customer experience will help you develop long-term relationships with your customers. Customer perception affects their behavior and drives loyalty. Like any other business, the key to scaling and expanding your Cloud solution Provider business is providing an enhanced and personalized customer experience.

Through the course of this article, we will understand how customer experience will impact your CSP business and ways you can leverage feedback and sentiment analysis to reduce customer churn and create a customized experience.

How does customer experience help businesses?

Customers today are having greater control over the sales cycle. They are aware and educated about the product and services they wish to buy. Based on their experience, they can choose whether to do business with you or choose a competitor. Every interaction a customer has with your business affects their perception of you. As a CSP, providing an enhanced customer experience will help you increase:

Customer advocacy

Delighted customers can help do the marketing for you by advocating your brand. Word-of-mouth can be an effective form of advertising and can help you attract new customers. Potential buyers will trust the reviews of the existing customers more than they will trust the salespeople.

Competitive edge

With the same products and services being offered by multiple CSPs, having a competitive advantage is crucial to capturing the market. The buying decision is not dependent solely on comparing the prices, but it is influenced by the experience of the whole purchase journey as well. A superior customer experience can help you differentiate yourself from the rest of the competition.

Customer lifetime value

Customers who are satisfied with your service will spend more as compared to the ones who have had an unpleasant experience. By being dependable and delivering what you promise you can have highly satisfied customers. These customers will not only choose you over your competitors but might be willing to pay more for your services.

Customer loyalty

A good customer experience makes your customers feel valued and respected. This will make them continue doing business with you. This leads to long-term relationships with your business and reduces customer churn. By retaining existing customers, you can save money on customer acquisition and use that to provide better service and experience for your buyers.

How to deliver an enhanced customer experience?

The power of customer experience in achieving long-term CSP business growth and improving your bottom line has been recognized above. However, many businesses still struggle with providing an enhanced and personalized experience to their customers.

As per research conducted by Adweek and Accenture, 80% of brands think that they provide superior customer experience but only 8% of their customers agree with this. Let’s take a look at how to improve the customer experience for your CSP business. 

Understand your customers to predict churn

To understand what your customers need, you must connect with your customers and understand what issues they face. Look at the service you provide from a buyer’s perspective. You must map out your customer’s purchase journey and try to address any pain points they might face.

However, understanding your customers is not limited to influencing their buying decisions. As a CSP, you need to also focus on gauging which customers are likely to be your advocates and which ones are more likely to move to some other provider. Based on this analysis, you can predict potential churn and then divide your efforts towards retaining some, while nurturing others to become stronger advocates.

Capture customer feedback

Improving customer experience is not a one-time task. You must measure customer satisfaction in real-time and deliver an experience that matches the expectations of your customers. As per Microsoft’s State of Global Customer Service Report, 2018, 90% of the respondents feel that organizations should allow providing feedback.

Customer feedback will help you judge the level of customer experience being provided by you. Here are a few tips to make sure you gather user feedback effectively:

• Use the right channel to gather actionable feedback, including live chats, feedback forms, follow-up emails, calls, surveys, polls, reviews,
• Collect feedback at the right time, preferably, immediately after transaction and a few months later as well, to gather more insights
• Analyze the feedback comprehensively and augment your customer experience strategy based on the results
• Leverage advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning to monitor feedback continuously and generate expert insights

When you collect feedback, customers feel that their opinions matter, which will strengthen their bond with your business. And when you act on the feedback and come back with improved services, the customers will provide you with more valuable input in the future.

Use customer sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis can help you understand how the customers feel about your brand. It helps you know whether the overall perception of your CSP business is positive, negative, or neutral. Monitoring customer sentiment and quickly acting on the negative sentiments can help build better relationships with your customers. Real-time sentiment analysis allows fixing the problems with your products immediately so that the other customers do not have an unpleasant experience.

You can use Sentiment Analysis tools to extract customer sentiment from various sources such as online reviews, social media posts, news articles, blogs, etc. Based on these insights you can recognize the customer pain points and become more customer centric. Sentiment analysis for customer experience can help you to:

• Identify customers with a negative experience to direct efforts towards addressing their challenges and improving satisfaction
• Celebrate customers with a positive experience to garner greater loyalty and stickiness
• Create specific segments for different customer sentiments to create positive experience across all aspects, including marketing, sales, etc.

You can use sentiment analysis to identify potential problems, personalize interactions, categorize the perception of various products and services, have a deeper understanding of customer feedback, and track the perception of your competitors as compared to you. Sentiment analysis can help you resolve customer complaints and queries faster, which improves customer satisfaction and in turn customer experience.

Personalize customer experience

Research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience. The days of one size fits all are long gone. Today, customers want solutions and experiences which are tailormade to their expectations. As a CSP, if you are unable to personalize your offerings and servicing to the needs of your customers, you will have a tough time in providing an exemplary experience. Based on insights from predicting churn, gathering user feedback, and performing sentiment analysis, you will understand your customer exceptionally well. Consequently, you can personalize the customer experience for them by:

• Leveraging the right channels to reach out to them.
• Marketing the right products and bundling solutions that make maximum sense.
• Providing custom pricing, discounts and offers based on customer needs.
• Offering extensive reporting, customized for each user, to facilitate better decision making.

By leveraging the right data, you will be able to personalize the entire customer journey as a CSP, right from the time you start creating awareness to post sales and recurring engagement.

Empower customers through self-service

Finally, you can augment your customer experience as a CSP by providing self-service capabilities for your customers. Offering your customers, a self-service portal to track and manage their orders, billing, payments, complaints, etc. creates a positive customer experience. Self-service portals empower customers to manage their licenses and adjust their subscriptions as per need. It also simplifies the billing and invoicing system. The ability to monitor the pricing of different cloud services using the self-service portal will help your customers build trust.

Enhance customer experience with C3

As a CSP, you can enhance and personalize customer experience for your users by leveraging the capabilities of C3. With automated invoicing, a shop cart experience, self service capabilities, an integrated customer portal and much more, you can focus all your energy into personalizing the journey for each customer by leveraging our extensive reporting as a basis for sentiment analysis and capturing feedback. Book a demo today to learn more.