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86% of buyers worldwide are willing to pay more for an excellent customer experience. But despite that, many companies still struggle with implementing the right processes for matching customer expectations and keeping them happy throughout the customer journey.
However, while there are many strategies for improving the customer experience, few are as crucial as utilizing thought leadership to build a stronger brand presence while simultaneously helping customers get the most out of the products you offer.
Luckily, no matter the size of your company, you can become a thought leader in your field, building a solid foundation that will ensure your customer experience (CX) sets the standard in your market.
In this article, we will explore why thought leadership matters in CX and a few best practices you should consider.
Why Is Thought Leadership Essential In Customer Experience?
Becoming a thought leader in your industry is an appealing possibility. If you can consistently get to the heart of the most pressing issues your audience is facing, you will quickly separate yourself from the competition and become the go-to source for answers, which can lead to a lot of sales.
But in most cases, thought leadership is associated with top-of-the-funnel content, which gets created with the sole purpose of attracting prospective customers and getting them to see why the company’s products are the best option in their situation.
And there’s nothing wrong with that approach. Thought leadership can be a great lead generation tool, allowing you to break through barriers and remove objections that your customers might have.
But at the same time, you shouldn’t look at thought leadership as something only relevant before the sale. If you take a broader approach when creating content, you can develop an entire system where customers get the critical answers to their questions at every stage of their journey, including after they’ve made the purchase.
Ensuring that your customers are happy with your products and knowing how to use them will provide a massive boost to your customer experience and make satisfying your clients that much easier.
Thought Leadership Best Practices In CX
Thought leadership can be a powerful component in improving customer experience. But there are practices you should consider if you want to get the most of the effort and company resources you will have to put in.
Let’s go through a few key strategies below.
Develop A Knowledge Base
Having a customer service knowledge base comes with a range of benefits, providing your support team with the tools to work through various issues and provide customers with helpful resources they can go through themselves.
The best part about implementing knowledge management systems in your company is that you can provide consistent and responsive support, where both your support staff and customers can find relevant content that’s structured in a logical and hierarchical way. But having a knowledge base can also be critical in creating a better overall customer experience.
As mentioned before, customer satisfaction is mainly determined by how much they enjoy using your products and services. And having a knowledge base can help you get ahead of various problems before they occur, providing helpful resources for your customers and support team.
What’s more, if you have an easy-to-use knowledge base, that can help you become a thought leader in your field. When you’re in a highly competitive market, the main difference between a few competing products might end up being the quality of the information that is available.
If you can explain your product’s features and onboard clients more effectively, that will improve the customer experience and make it better than the competition. And that’s a significant advantage to have when you’re looking for a way to edge ahead.
Create Content That Builds Authority
Having a knowledge base is absolutely essential, but not all of your customers will be willing to use it. That’s why you also need more public articles and other content that informs and educates your customers while also building up your status as an authority.
As mentioned before, most companies use the content for generating leads, but if you want to become a thought leader and improve customer experience, that’s not enough.
You need to have visible, engaging, and comprehensive content throughout your buyer’s journey, especially on topics related to the issues that customers might face after the sale.
In many ways, this content can act as a replacement for in-person contact with your sales or customer success teams. Instead of manually dealing with each client’s issues, you can put out a content piece that addresses it and then use your marketing and communication channels (such as email or social media) to spread that message to as many of your customers as possible.
For instance, you might notice that your customers aren’t using a new powerful feature your product offers. Using thought leadership, you could create content that introduces the new feature and lays out the arguments for why it makes sense to try it out.
Showcase Your Brand
Finally, thought leadership can also be used to showcase the type of brand you want to be seen as. And the best part is, using both a knowledge base and comprehensive content can help you achieve that simultaneously.
Buying decisions often come down to which brand has the best reputation as a leader in the field. By having thought leadership content and a robust knowledge base, you show prospective clients that you know how to help them and provide the most innovative solutions to their problems.
But for that to happen, you need to look at your content not just as a way to generate leads but as an integral part of guiding your customers through the buyer journey and well after they’ve made the initial sale.
In fact, you can use content to ensure that your customers stay with you for much longer, providing a massive boost to your customer lifetime value.
Final Words
Becoming a thought leader in your field is an integral part of running a successful business online. But at the same time, thought leadership can become a vital tool in improving the customer experience and helping your customers get the most of what your products have to offer.
By creating a comprehensive knowledge base and implementing content throughout the buyer journey and beyond, you can build a stronger brand reputation, becoming the company your audience trusts the most to help them.
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