#107 Steven Van Belleghem: Best Customer Experience Strategies For E-Commerce

We’re delighted to welcome Steven Van Belleghem, bestselling author, YouTuber, and co-founder of nexxworks, to this episode of The Ecom Show.

Steven is the author of the bestselling book, The Conversation Manager. He also has a very helpful YouTube channel where he speaks about customer experience strategies. Steven has successfully founded several ventures like Snack Bites and Nexxworks. In recent years, his primary focus has been towards educating entrepreneurs about customer experience through webinars and YouTube.

In this episode Steven and Daniel Budai, our podcast host and CEO, will discuss:

✔ Steven’s Youtube Journey.

✔ Building An Emotional Customer Experience.

✔ Customer Experience Trends To Watch Out For.

✔ Why Businesses Need To Deep Dive Into Data.

Steven’s Youtube Journey

Steven started his Youtube channel back in 2010, back then it was more to promote his newly launched book, The Conversation Manager. He had created an animated infographic video, a style which was really trending back in 2010, and he received over 50,000 views on his first videos.

Post this, he took a hiatus up until 2014 and realized that he needed consistency to grow. Steven created an entire series of value based videos to help businesses better their customer experience. However, these videos didn’t receive much traction. Instead of getting demotivated, Steven decided to push harder, and he now has a strong and growing community of over 20,000 subscribers.

“It's slow. The hardest thing is the first 1000 subscribers, and then you're starting to have a community you start to feel it. It took me I think two or three years before it really took off. Now, I have a pretty active group of people who watch my content, and I enjoy it myself. I make a few videos each month.”

So, the key learning for anyone looking to start a career in YouTube is to be persistent and patient through the entire journey. It takes time, but eventually it’s worth the payoff.

Building An Emotional Customer Experience

Customer experience has changed a lot over the past few years. The past 10 years were really about making things very convenient. But after the big digital jump forward from COVID, convenience has become a commodity. It’s no longer a differentiator. We live in a world where there's almost zero tolerance for digital inconvenience, people are not willing to waste their precious time on the digital incompetence of an organization. So, it's no longer a positive differentiator, it's a negative differentiator.

Being very convenient is very cool, but it’s only creating a transactional relationship. So, the goal to differentiate yourself in the next couple of years will indeed be to make it more emotional and there are two main ways to create a more emotional bond with your customers:

1. The first one is what Steven calls, a partner in life strategy, where you try to understand the human behind the customer. This involves learning more about the interests, ambitions, and tastes of your customers. The better you understand that from each of your individual customers, the more value you can add to their life. So to become more emotional, it's not about optimizing the customer journey, it's about creating positive change in the life journey of people.
2. The second one is about society. If you look to the world today, there are a lot of challenges on our plate, we have a fight against racism and discrimination, we have more geopolitical tension than we had in the last seven years, we have a climate crisis that is becoming more and more urgent, and we're still in the biggest healthcare crisis of our generation. And more and more customers expect organizations to make a difference to become part of the solution. Having a strong brand philosophy that works towards making the society a better place is a great way to emotionally connect with your customers. Everyone loves to support a brand that’s genuinely trying to do good for people and the world around them.

This applies to businesses at all levels! If you're a small local company, try not to change the world, try to change your world, look at things in your own local community, where there's a challenge, where there's a problem, and see how you can contribute towards solving it. And if you do so, people will recognize that, and you will build a stronger emotional relationship.

Customer Experience Trends To Watch Out For

There are basically two key evolutions that will play a big role in transforming customer experience:

1. The first one is everything related to technology. Technology is evolving, and because of that the expectations of customers are evolving. The second dimension is the human part. As technology evolves, what does that mean for human customer service, human customer experience?There are three technology trends that can heavily change the way businesses and customers react. The first is artificial intelligence. AI will help us to automate customer relations and make it more personalized, which will in turn lead to faster interactions.
2. The second technology trend that will change a lot in the next five years is the hype of cryptocurrency and NFTs. There's a lot going on now with NFT's and it could entirely change the way you look at customer loyalty. Because if you look at customer loyalty today, it’s still very old fashioned. Let’s take the example of a supermarket, imagine that the supermarket starts with their own coin as a loyalty instrument. Today in Belgium, when you go to the supermarket, you have to have 500 points, to avail a discount of five euros. It's not creating loyalty today, but what if you had a coin from that supermarket, which means that if the supermarket performs well, the value of your coin goes up. So as soon as you invest one euro in that supermarket, you get a coin as a reward system, so every time they perform well, you benefit from that. That means that the more successful they are, the more value you get, which means that there's a chance that you will evolve towards an active ambassador, because you have the same goal.

And then you have the whole evolution of the metaverse that has become a real hype since Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his own company which can have a huge impact in the next 5 to 10 years.

The other side of the equation is the human part. The more digital the world becomes, the more value customers will find in a human relationship. While the role of humans might change they will always be needed to ace customer experience. Especially, when it comes to adding empathy, creativity, and passion to technology.

Why Businesses Need To Deep Dive Into Data?

There’s a lot of talk about data and analytics being the key factor in driving business decisions, but let’s deep dive into this a little bit more. Let’s look at the Net Promoter Score survey, for instance. As a business owner, you fill out the survey and receive your score. But, what exactly do you do with that data?

Most companies measure it, and then communicate the score in the organization, let's say you have 26. And then they tell the teams, we want to go to 30. And usually, that's where it ends. If you want to make NPS or any data work for you, you need to get to the bottom of it! You should be able to answer: what your score means and how a higher score would benefit you more to be able to understand the way to achieve it.

As a leader it’s important to translate what that data means for every individual employee, where you go to your account manager, for instance, and that you say, hey, look, dear account manager, you got to six. And that's because this small detail that may not be important to you was really crucial to the client. And if there's one thing that really gave or explained his low score, so if you improve that part of your job, you're going to score a 9 or a 10.

If you can successfully tell your employees how their individual work is affecting the score, it becomes a workable goal that the entire team can work towards achieving. This erases the disconnect between the figures and the day to day activities on the floor.

This works with customer feedback as well. Quantitative feedback is easier to get but it’ll never be as effective as qualitative feedback. Instead of just asking for ratings, ask your customers questions to understand their perspective better.

If you’re keen on knowing more about customer experience make sure to follow Steven Van Belleghem on Youtube. You can also check out his bestselling novel here, and follow him on LinkedIn for some more expert advice.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Ecom Show. We release new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. You can check out some of our earlier episodes here.

Follow Daniel Budai:

Daniel's LinkedIn

Daniel's Facebook

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.