What Makes Customer Empowerment the Ultimate Strategy for Brand Growth? | #customersupport #supporticket

Customers no longer want to be held back. Rather, customers want businesses to inspire a sense of independence in them.

So, to retain your customers in contemporary times, you need to make them feel empowered. And focussing on customer empowerment is the way to go. If you’re looking for customer empowerment ideas, then you’re in the right place.

This resource covers everything you need to know about customer empowerment – the what, the why, and the how.

What does customer empowerment imply?

If you look at the dictionary meaning of empowerment, it is the idea of rendering more power, authority, and liberty to others. The implication of customer empowerment works on similar lines. When you empower your customers, you make them feel far more valued and influential.

Customer empowerment is about enabling your customers to make more thoughtful and well-informed choices. When you show greater willingness and effectiveness in empowering your customers, you attract their undivided loyalty.

What are the essential elements of customer empowerment?
Listed below are the most significant elements of customer empowerment that are crucial to its importance and relevance as a business growth strategy.

1. Customer self-service

Service queries, product doubts, and technical issues are common among customers. Each customer desires the quickest possible resolution whenever they encounter a problem. However, most customers (80%) like the idea of solving problems on their own.¹

Self-service tools such as a knowledge base, AI-enabled chatbots, and community forums give customers the incredible opportunity to resolve their inquiries independently and swiftly without having to reach out to customer support executives to raise support tickets. 

Customer self-service can promote a sense of empowerment and independence among your customers. They will foster the impression that your brand values their time and empowers them in a way they have always wanted.

2. Social media

Be it employee engagement, customer engagement, or even customer empowerment, social media’s immense prowess is helping businesses take things to extraordinary levels. In this virtual age, customers can interact and share information with brands in real-time via social media.

It is interesting to note that 1 billion messages are exchanged between brands and people or customers every month. To add on, more than 60 percent of customers prefer messaging a business on social media rather than calling.² This proves that customers feel empowered and at ease in leveraging brands’ social media customer services.

So, you must adopt social media service tools in the best interest of improving customer relationships. Focusing on delivering timely social media customer service can caution your business from vulnerabilities of social media outrage against your brand. Even a tiny wave of criticism or rumors doing rounds on social media can doom a business.

3. Customer reviews and testimonials

Customer review sites are impartial and go a long way in making customers feel empowered to make well-informed decisions. You can use marketplaces and third-party websites like Google to collect reviews and testimonials from customers to their advantage.

Or, you can simply ask customers — they are expressive when it comes to sharing their experiences. The privilege of offering reviews and testimonials can give customers a sense of authority too.

If there are negative reviews on these sites from your customers, you can respond to their comments with courtesy and look to resolve the reasons for the same. You can engage in meaningful discussions with them even on third-party sites as well and get a clear idea of what’s making your customers unhappy.

4. Customer feedback collection

Feedback collection is another practical and direct way in which you can empower your customers. Through feedback, customers have the opportunity to help you with improving your product or service.

You can use different surveys to gather feedback from your customers and determine their satisfaction with customer service, products, and pricing. You can choose from a broad spectrum of feedback collection tools to assess customers’ level of satisfaction with your brand. Moreover, when you incorporate customers’ suggestions, you should inform customers and be grateful for their feedback. In fact, by doing so, you can also foster a greater sense of belonging in them to boost retention.

5. Customer onboarding

Just like your new employees need thorough onboarding to meet the organization’s priorities and work culture, your new customers also need to be onboarded. Customer onboarding comes into the picture after you sell a product or service to an individual or group. 

If a product or service is complicated to use and promotes skepticism among customers, onboarding will empower customers to have a clear idea and effective guidance on operational details. It helps customers save time and use the products and services to the fullest for their benefit.

On the contrary, ineffective onboarding services can cause trouble for customers and even drive them to ask for refunds. In that case, you could lose valuable customers as well the potential referrals they would have made.

Now that we have covered the elements of customer empowerment and their relevance, let’s move on to explore the relationship between customer empowerment and the empowerment of a brand. A brand can become far more powerful by offering more authority to its customers.

Let’s see how that works in real scenarios.

How can customer empowerment help a brand grow?

There is a direct relationship between customer empowerment and the growth of a brand. When brands empower customers in many ways, it inspires greater loyalty in them. And it’s easier to sell to existing customers than acquire new prospects and convince them to buy your product. 

Thus by empowering customers, brands can offer better experiences and build their own tribe. Once you build a community of happy customers, they will always look forward to new products and services from your brand. In fact, as per American Express, customers are willing to pay even a 17% price premium in lieu of excellent experiences.³

Besides, empowered customers will also refer your business to others and significantly help you to have more leads. Their positive reviews and testimonials on social media and unbiased sites will attract more customers, helping your brand grow.

The key is to be consistent in your approach to customer empowerment and experiences. To substantiate, 60 percent of millennials desire consistency in brand-customer experiences.⁴ It’s also important to note that consistency in excellent customer service can augment businesses’ revenues by 23 percent.

How can customer empowerment prevent customer churn?

Customer empowerment aids in upscaling client retention and brings down churn rates. Different insights and credible statistics reveal that customer service is paramount to retention. To further validate, 70 percent of customers stop purchasing from a business because of poor customer experiences, among other reasons for customer churn.⁵

Customers love to be empowered, and they relish the feeling of independence that brands give them. Incredible customer experiences driven by empowerment can be more effective than any other strategy to pull down customer churn rates.

As explained by Nuance, 59 percent of customers have a high preference for self-service options offered by brands. This confirms that customers are more likely to stay loyal to a brand that empowers its customers through self-service mechanisms. Customer empowerment adds to customer success, and that is what drives overwhelming allegiance in them. 

What is the relationship between customer empowerment and customer service?

The relationship between customer empowerment and customer service is direct.
A business can use different approaches to understand what keeps its customers happy and satisfied. Customer empowerment is one of them.

In other words, customer empowerment is a subset of customer service and perhaps the most promising of all. Customers are delighted to be at the receiving end of such customer service, giving them a superlative feeling of powerfulness.

How can you empower your customers?

Given below are some proactive and worthwhile ways to enable your employees to empower customers.

#1 Leverage technology and invest in state-of-the-art tools to help customers troubleshoot their service issues, find answers to their service questions, and save a great deal of time.

#2 Have a dedicated support desk and contact center to cater to customer queries and onboarding issues in a time-effective and intelligible manner.

#3 Discover innovative ways and advanced tools to collect customer feedback and inform them when you act on their feedback.

#4 Pay heed to customers’ concerns, reviews, and testimonials submitted on review sites or in comments on social media posts. You need to prioritize negative comments and reviews and offer dissatisfied customers the best possible solutions.

#5 Offer complete security to customers and maintain confidentiality around their personal information at all times. The more secure and hassle-free the experience of customers is, the more empowered they would feel.

In a nutshell, the norms of customer service and customer retention are changing at a swift pace. Customer empowerment has now become a tactic for brands to gain a competitive edge over others. Shortly, the success of brands will be defined in terms of how triumphant they are in empowering their customers as well as their employees. Brands that assist their customers in being successful will have the edge over their competitors.

Sources:
1 – https://www.cxtoday.com/contact-centre/freshworks-studies-the-evolution-of-customer-experience/
2 – https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-customer-service/
3 – https://emplifi.io/resources/blog/customer-experience-statistics
4 – https://www.bulldogreporter.com/channels-are-now-irrelevant-to-consumers-new-sdl-study-reveals-60-of/
5 – https://www.customerexperienceinsight.com/the-no-1-reason-why-customers-stay-or-leave/