With companies worldwide looking forward to days when they can reopen their doors and reduce COVID-19 restrictions, we’re all in planning mode. The landscape has changed on a fundamental level, but all organisations still need to keep customer experience at the heart of their decision-making strategies.
Though there’s plenty of advice out there on how to keep companies hygienic and safe during a re-opening procedure, there isn’t as much guidance for customer experience. If you’re planning on updating your business practices for CX in a post-pandemic world, you’re in the right place.
Here are just some of the most important points to consider.
Consider Your Online Presence
The digital world has emerged as the ultimate solution to many of the challenges companies and consumers face in the age of the pandemic. Many businesses have even shifted their strategy to offer more products and services online, instead of relying on face-to-face interactions. Going forward, companies will need to reconsider how they can strengthen their relationship with clients in this digital world.
To start with, building a website, app, and social media presence where customers can learn everything, they need to know about your organisation is a good start. From there, it’s important for business leaders to provide consumers with easy ways to contact the team about sales and support within a digital environment.
For some organisations, this will mean implementing chat bots and automated live chat systems into their websites. Others will use common tools like Facebook Messenger and Zoom to enable different kinds of conversations in places where clients feel most comfortable.
Evolve the Shopping Experience
Delivering excellent customer experiences isn’t just about providing the right service when a consumer needs help. Companies will have fewer opportunities to develop relationships with people through face-to-face interactions and in-store connections. This means that they need to rethink their digital shopping experience.
How can you make it easier for your consumers to decide what they really need from you when online? Can you offer things like 360-degree views of products that make it easier for your customers to imagine what they would look like in real life? In the future, VR and AR technology may be a more widespread solution for companies hoping to provide the best virtual shopping experiences.
At the same time, consider how you can support your customers in making decisions. Can you set up a chatbot to offer customised suggestions to return customers based on what they’ve purchased in the past? How can you make sure that your clients have instant answers to any questions they may have?
Empower Agents
Agents in the new landscape are going to be under more pressure than ever before.
Today’s consumers expect to be able to connect with businesses any time they choose, on the platform that they prefer. What’s more, these clients don’t want to have to repeat their concerns and questions, even if they’re jumping between platforms.
A combined CCaaS and customer engagement solution that connects multiple channels into a single omnichannel experience will be essential going forward. Empowering agents to see information about their customers aligned from every channel into a single pane of glass will allow them to solve problems quicker. Integrations with CRM and AI tools could also lead to more relevant conversations with clients, and better overall outcomes.
Businesses in the age of post-pandemic CX will need to think about how they can give their agents access to all the tools they need for support, whether it’s a CRM pop-up, or easy collaboration with other team members.
Keep Employees Connected
Better agent experiences create better customer experiences. In a remote environment where employees are distributed, and customers are spending less time on-site at your store or office, it’s important to make sure that everything is connected.
Your employees will need to be able to interact with other members of staff and specialists when presenting a sales opportunity to a client or resolving a problem. Connected employees can work together to come up with creative solutions to issues and deliver a better chance of success in sales journeys.
Ensure your employees have a collaborative environment connected to your contact centre and customer experience tools. This way, everyone will be able to communicate within the context of customer conversations. What’s more, a connected solution will mean that employees don’t have to jump back and forth between apps to find someone that’s available to assist them.
Track Everything
Data was already the most valuable asset any company had before the pandemic hit. Now that we’re living in a more digital world, information is more crucial than ever. Your customers expect you to know their preferences, history, and unique information, so you can’t afford to run the risk of a customer experience that’s not tailored to their needs.
Additionally, being able to track everything in a comprehensive way will allow for a better decision making strategy. You should be able to look at your customer experience stack and instantly determine whether one communication channel is driving better results for your agents than others.
Tracking your CX strategy will also mean keeping a close eye on your employees. Tracking your workforce and their productivity levels will help you to determine where staff need extra help or investment to make them more productive. The more insights you have on both the consumer side, and the staff side, the better you’ll be at optimising CX.
Are You Ready for the Change?
There’s no arguing with the fact that customer experience is changing. Since the pandemic, the way that we interact with consumers and clients has evolved on a drastic scale. The good news is that there are tools available to help you create a more effective strategy for ongoing customer satisfaction.
Now’s the time for all companies to ask themselves whether they’re prepared for a shifting CX environment post-pandemic, and what they can do to get ahead of the curve.
