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Do you know the saying: “Money is lying on the streets“? This is what happens if you have lousy customer service. So let’s tackle it by improving your customer experience.
Before we jump in, here is a short term clarification so that everyone can follow:
- Customer experience: all kinds of interactions customers have with your biodiversity venture (e.g., in-store visits, phone support, FAQ, mail exchange).
- Lifetime value: crucial indicator you should know. Basically, how much money the customer, on average, spends with you over their life (e.g., Netflix doesn’t make 10$ on a customer, they make easily 1000$ because the customer is staying for a longer period and subscribed to their service).
- Word-of-mouth: When people talk about your environmental business or NGO.
- Market share: There is a total market for your product, how much of this market to you capture.
Lately, I made a couple of experiences with nature organizations that had horrible customer service. In some cases, I still haven’t heard back from them.
Needless to say, I stopped being a customer/donator or didn’t even start.
And I am not alone in this. Companies are losing 10% of their revenue because of this + consumers are 4x more likely to buy your product if they had a great experience1.
I worked in a tourism company during the Covid crisis, so I learned quite a few things that I would like to share with you.
So let’s dive into how you can make a great customer experience for your biodiversity company and environmental NGO.
Why it is essential to have an outstanding customer experience?
I keep this brief here because there is a lot to say about this. In the future, I will write another post about this. So, if the above stats were not convincing enough, here are my 3 main points:
- Excellent customer experience ensures that your customer stays with you, increasing the lifetime value.
- If potential customers encounter a flawless customer experience, they are more like to support you.
- Customers get very annoyed when there is a problem, and they don’t get your help to fix it. This quickly leads to negative word of mouth.
Now here are 8 hacks on how to ensure the best customer experience.
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How to create the best customer experience for your nature organization?
Do you remember that I told you that the money is lying around? All those tips are no-brainers and easy to implement. Yet, many companies and NGOs fail here. Execution matters.
Perfect opportunity for you to grab some market share.
1. Answer within 24h
We can order a pizza, and it arrives in 30 minutes. We order a book, and we get it the next day.
People nowadays get spoiled with instant fixes for their desires. You need to be able to answer them within 24h. Otherwise, a competitor will swoop in, or the customer will get impatient.
That being said, you don’t have to work on the weekend, but the average reply should be 24h. So during the week, you need to be quicker. A great tool to ensure this is Intercom, which is powered up by AI.
Try to reduce the waiting time even further. Every hour less of waiting time means an increase of your market share.
2. Collect feedback & quantify it
Now, this feedback, questions & co. you are receiving are the best possible insights you can get for your nature organization.
There is someone who either bought or wants to buy your product. These people provide you with valuable insights into what is troubling them.
So track this feedback, quantify it, and act on it. My favorite tool for this is Canny.
3. Create an extensive FAQ
After some time, you will realize which questions pop up the most. Make sure to create a space that is easy to find and navigate.
Put all the most common questions in there and come up with clear steps by steps on how to overcome their problem.
If you get a question repeatedly, check if you can improve your communication or product. Because ideally, the customer should never encounter any problems.
4. Provide a telephone number
The customer doesn’t find any helpful content and is just blocked. That is when they would usually stop buying your product or supporting your NGO.
A telephone number can be your cheat code to avoid this happening. Ensure that people can always find this on your website.
This doesn’t need to be obvious immediately, but it should appear when people clicked a couple of times to get help.
Tools like Aircall can help you massively to streamline this process.
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5. Keep everything up to date
Now that you created all sorts of helpful resources, keep them up to date.
Nothing is more frustrating for a customer than being in the right help section, but the support articles are not up-to-date with the latest product or website features.
This is one of the most frequent mistakes I see in nature organizations.
6. Make it as easy as possible
The fact that the customer is having a problem with your product or your service is already an issue. Now, your goal is to make it at least as easy as possible for them to help themselves or to get your support.
A few examples of you can improve your customer experience on that topic are:
- providing Whatsapp chat;
- Integrating chat boxes;
- Mentioning your telephone number;
- having an obvious help center on your website;
- creating video tutorials;
- etc.
7. Don’t outsource this if you can’t ensure the quality
The second biggest issue I constantly experience as a customer is the bad quality of the customer experience because it was outsourced.
Outsourcing services can be vital, but if you do it, do it right.
Those potential cost savings can blind you from the reduced revenue you will experience if your customer experience sucks.
High-quality customer experience is non-negotiable.
8. Be nice
I can’t believe I have to say this, but just be nice. The customer is already having a hard time because something went wrong. Be the kindest you can be.
Make it human.
I can’t count the occasions where I, as the customer, was the nice person in the conversation. Often, it even felt like an inconvenience to the other person.
Sorry to bother you.
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Your turn: how can you improve your customer experience with those 8 hacks?
5 key steps to remember to create a best in class customer experience
- Dedicate an hour this week (what about Tuesday?) to going through your current customer experience and looking out for ways to improve it.
- If you run a big environmental business or NGO, use a fake mail and pretend to have a problem to see how things are currently handled.
- Go through the list of hacks and improve on the one you are currently struggling with the most.
- Ensure that all insights are collected and lead to the improvement of your nature product or service.
- Reach out to me if you want me to test your current customer experience. Just write me at oliver.dauert@wildya.earth.
Cheat sheet to improve customer experience in your nature organization
In a nutshell: Customer experience is crucial to keep customers & get new ones.
Best tools: Aircall, Canny , Intercom
Set up time: A complete system, probably a week, if not a month. But it will save many hours later because the customer can help themselves.
Maintaining time: After a good setup, not more than 30min per week.
Yes, making a sale for your nature cause is tricky. Still, plenty of nature companies and NGOs also suck in creating an amazing customer experience. So great opportunity for you to get their supporters by improving the experience of your customers!
See you next week. Have a wild one!
Oliver
🦧 Whenever you are ready, there are 2 ways we can help you:
1. 1-to-1 business consulting. Detailed and personalized consulting to double the impact of your biodiversity organization in the shortest possible time. Not sure how good your pitch deck is?
Sign up for the waiting list by writing us at oliver@wildbusinessmates.com (unfortunately, we are booked out at the moment).
2. Wild Business Mates in Action. Wild Business Mates help you execute in areas you are struggling with. Tech, Marketing, Sales, Communication, etc. We can realize all the steps I mentioned above.
1 30 customer experience statistics to know for 2022, Qualtrics.
