While the customer experience has always been important, the expectations from consumers are perhaps higher now than they’ve ever been. Here are just some ways marketers can ensure they help give the customers the positive experience needed to make a purchase.

Enriching The Consumer Experience

The experience organisations give to consumers can mean many different things according to where they are in the buying journey. For example, allowing customers to try out a virtual reality headset in-store can be enough to make them want to purchase one later, even if it’s something they had not considered previously. The simple experience is enough to bring joy to a person by introducing a form of variety into their everyday routine which can essentially trigger a ‘sensation seeking’ response in some individuals leading to impulse purchasing.

Having a good experience with customer service staff or finding a sales team particularly helpful can also be a driving force behind encouraging consumers to return and make further purchases from a brand. A study shows that 42% of customers are likely to return to purchase more after having a good experience with customer service staff.

The experience which occurs after the purchase has been made is also extremely important. Think of Apple, which is currently the number one company in the world according to Interbrand. An Apple product can literally be life changing for a user, depending on how much they wish to incorporate it into their lives. An Apple phone can provide them with a means of contacting friends and family, taking photos and creating documents. They can use it to stream videos onto their television and can create entire playlists based on their favourite songs using Apple music.

It’s been almost a year and a half since lockdown restrictions first came into effect in the UK – and what a strange time for marketers it’s been. With leaving the house without an essential reason to do so becoming completely off limits at one point, companies were forced to get creative if they wanted to stay at the forefront of people’s minds. 

Even though Netflix had already become an integral part of many people’s daily routines pre-Covid, the company found a way to increase its viewer’s connection to friends by introducing the Netflix Party extension. The simple plugin allowed users to chat to friends and family while watching the same film at the same time to increase the feeling of being together even when they were apart.  

 Perhaps these experiences aren’t what you would call ‘extraordinary’, but they do enrich elements of everyday life enough to make people want to purchase from them more and more. Putting a little effort into creating memorable experiences for consumers can really help increase sales and awareness of your product in the long-term.