Electricians almost always have competitors within their geographic service areas. If this is the case for your electrical business, it’s important to find ways to stand out from your competition. An effective strategy you can use to ensure your electrician business is the clear choice for both existing customers and potential customers is to improve their experiences with your company and brand.
Improved Customer Experience
Not only does customer experience (CX) set your company apart from competitors, but it also helps your electrical business:
- Acquire more prospects
- Increase customer retention
- Improve brand loyalty
- Enhance the service/product experience
Continue reading this blog to learn more about how to improve the overall customer experience of your electrical business and achieve your goals.
5 Ways to Improve the Customer Experience for Electricians
Here are five ways that electricians like yourself can improve the customer experience. You may think about these steps as your electrician customer experience strategy.
CX tip for electricians: When working towards a better customer experience, put at least one member of your electrical team in charge of customer experience management so the strategy and all processes around it remain a priority as your business grows.
1. Understand your electrician company’s customer personas.
Create and understand buyer personas for your electrical business. Buyer personas help you learn customer behaviors and customer needs — they also give you insight into other customer characteristics such as their:
- Location
- Age
- Electrical challenges
- Electrical goals
Buyer personas guide your business to create and share the right message with your audience at the right time. They also help you identify the most effective ways to reach and resonate with your target audience across all parts of the business including marketing, sales, and customer service and support. As a result, your electrical company will be able to tailor sales outreach, communications, email marketing, services, and more to drive business growth among your target audience.
2. Learn about and map the electrical customer journey.
The customer journey gives your electrical business a look at what interactions customers have with your brand and their perception of your business as a whole throughout every stage of the customer journey.
Electrician customer journey mapping visualizes this on a detailed level for your business — it looks at every interaction a customer has throughout the buyer’s journey, from the first time that they hear about your company til after they decide to become paying customers. Customer journey mapping offers a detailed look at who your customers are, their specific pain points and challenges, and their overall experiences throughout the entire journey with your electrical service.
By visualizing all customer interactions throughout the customer journey, your electrical company understands how the company and services you offer fit into the lives of your target audience. It uncovers pain points (e.g. it’s hard to find customer reviews on your website) that are commonly felt and the most successful strategies (e.g. your “contact form” is enticing and easy to use) that you have in place. It also allows you to feel empathy for your customers and deliver solutions to their challenges by pinpointing the root cause of the issue they’re experiencing.
3. Customize and tailor all of your electrician communications.
Personalization and customization are crucial when creating a positive experience and working to increase customer loyalty and engagement. “Personalization is especially effective at driving repeat engagement and loyalty over time.” Customize customer interactions and digital experiences with your brand.
You may use a home services marketing tool with automation to help. For example, automate emails about your electrical business to existing subscribers and include their first names and information about a relevant service option based on what you provided for them in the past.
Another way to make personalization easier is by using a tool, such as a CRM like Hubspot, to automatically create customer profiles for your electrician prospects and customers every time you speak to them. Each time an electrician or customer service rep speaks to a prospect or customer, a new customer profile is created or an existing profile is updated. This way, no matter which electrician or customer service rep speaks to a prospect or existing client, these customer stories are accessible and all information including name, service area, and past services are accessible.
4. Provide excellent electrician customer service.
To start improving customer service — which is a major factor when it comes to overall customer experience — across your electrical company, establish a contact center. This contact center will serve as a way for electrical prospects and customers to reach out to your customer support and customer success reps. Here, your team can direct client calls, answer questions, book electrical consultations, and schedule electrical services.
5. Get customer feedback and measure your electrical CX success.
Leverage your current clients to collect customer feedback and survey responses via questionnaires and surveys (which may be shared through survey software). This feedback should come from different personas and include feedback about good customer experiences as well as bad customer experiences. That way, you have a complete picture of what your electrical CX looks like including your strengths and weaknesses.
Here are some examples of questions you may ask customers for feedback on:
- What were the most memorable in-person and digital customer experiences you had with our electrical business?
- Did our electricians and customer service team provide the solutions you needed?
- If you could change one thing about your experience working with our electrical business, what would it be?
These are examples of surveys that you may share:
- Net promoter survey (by calculating net promoter score/NPS)
- Customer satisfaction (by calculating customer satisfaction score)
- Customer effort score (by calculating customer effort score)
The main benefits to asking for customer feedback and collecting survey responses is that you’ll have real answers to important questions such as:
- What makes for a happy customer of ours?
- What does satisfaction look like across our base of customers?
- In which situations are our electrical clients more likely to have a positive customer experience vs. a poor customer experience?
- Which experiences are shared by our most loyal customers?
- During which parts of the customer journey does our business often exceed customer expectations vs. miss the mark?
Lastly, in addition to asking for customer feedback, measure and analyze your electrician customer experience strategy by tracking some CX metrics. Similar to what we covered above, the data collected will offer insight into which aspects of your electrical customer experience are most effective and which have room for improvement.
Here are a few examples of electrician customer experience metrics you may track:
- Electrical customer lifetime value (CLV): Amount of revenue you can expect from a single electrical customer
- Electrical customer retention rate: Percentage of customers who continue to be clients over time
- Electrical customer churn rate: Percentage of customers who decide to stop being clients
Start Using the Electricians Guide to Improving the Customer Experience
As an electrician hoping to grow your business, it’s critical that you consider the customer experience. Begin by working through the above five steps to start improving electrical CX throughout your buyer’s journey.
Want to learn how Scorpion, a home services marketing tool, can help your electrical business improve the customer experience?
