A new generation of consumers has arrived. Thanks to mobile phones, today’s consumers can instantly have what they want with a few taps and swipes. As a result, they are more impatient and demanding than ever.
This habit of impatience can be clearly felt in many industries. For the 2020 customer, better customer service and customer knowledge will be the distinguishing feature of the competition and the heart of a company’s success.
We’ve identified seven strategic development needs for your business to adapt to consumers in 2020.
- Communicate in Real-Time
71 percent of today’s consumers want firms to connect with them in real-time.
Consumers’ penchant for immediate satisfaction affects the way they shop, and almost six out of ten are now ready to move to the competition, for example, with faster and most affordable shipping. 68 per cent would prefer to use self-service.
In short, today’s consumers are becoming more and more impatient with the term ‘wait’. Businesses are encouraged to engage in two-way, real-time communication with clients.
- Address Customers’ Needs
Invest to meet the client’s needs, not the company’s problems. Running programmes to improve internal indicators, companies must strive to increase the value generated by customer experience.
This includes more focused investments and key data only on those initiatives that are really relevant to and desired by clients, as indicated by customer analyses.
- Invest in Self-Service
Your customers need help. It is important to invest time and effort to create a comprehensive and reliable knowledge base. With a knowledge base, customers can serve themselves, reduce product-related friction, and reduce support requests. This keeps everyone happy and satisfied.
There are several reasons why consumers prefer to serve themselves: they think they have to wait to talk to someone and believe they have to contact you several times.
- Connect with Customers at the Right Moment
Start engaging customers at the right moment via mobile. The micro-moments guide from Google is helpful.
Where do they go, what are they looking for, what do they find, what connects them, and where do they go next? The answers to these questions will help you prepare to meet the needs of impatient customers at the right moment.
- Optimise Your Site for Speed
When customers visit your site, you only have a few seconds to get their attention. If your website is loads slowly, your entire marketing budget will be lost if you lose customers on your first visit.
The first thing to do? See how fast your site is. The free Google PageSpeed Insights tool provides a fairly detailed analysis in less than a minute. The tool provides a report for mobile and desktop users.
Among all the website optimisation suggestions you’ll get, the most important is where you host your website. Hosting your website in top hosting platforms such as Amazon, Domains4Less Host, Google, and so on can affect the overall success of your business.
After optimising your site, start monitoring your speed after a few intervals. All you have to do is open your website and record the time it takes for the website to load. You can also use various tools available online to monitor the speed of your website.
- Optimise Your Site for Mobile
Making your website mobile friendly is probably the most important thing you can do for your website in 2020. Most consumers today access the Internet via a mobile browser, not a desktop browser.
Millennials know the easy way out of everything: eliminating the old way of accessing the Internet using laptops. More than 45 per cent of Internet users use phones and tablets to access websites and when your website is not responsive with the right options it’s likely that your site will be rarely visited.
It can’t be stressed enough that websites will need to be optimised for mobile phones in 2020. It’s all right and good if the powerful desktop processor can load pages in 1-2 seconds, but most buyers use their phones for browsing.
- Test and Learn Everything
In the digital age, marketers can use the speed and flexibility of digital marketing to drive growth and adapt to changing consumer behaviours.
You can test new ideas, eliminate guesswork, check the effectiveness of messages or promotions and define the most appropriate target groups.
At the same time, you can run several tests to gain meaningful insight with little financial outlay, and learn quickly how to better fulfil your customers’ expectations.
Conclusion
This the age of instant gratification. Businesses have to adapt to their new impatient customers to keep up.
The question is, will you take advantage of this opportunity and meet the needs of your customers faster and better than your competitors in 2020?
