We’re living in a world where customer experiences have the power to make or break a business. Thanks to the rising popularity of customer service leaders like Amazon, customer expectations have never been higher. Both in the B2B and B2C worlds, customers now demand flawless, personalized, and highly convenient experiences across multiple channels.
There are countless statistics and studies highlighting just how important amazing customer experiences really are. In fact, a report from Microsoft found that 56% of customers worldwide have stopped connecting with a business due to bad customer service.
Creating a memorable customer experience capable of boosting customer retention, increasing satisfaction scores, and improving brand reputation can seem like a complex process. However, the reality is that in today’s technology-advanced world, any business can start enhancing customer experience with just three simple steps.
Step 1: Get to Know Your Customers
It’s impossible to deliver an experience that meets customer expectations, before first defining what those expectations are. At a time when consumers are looking for convenience, empathy, and personalization, 76% say they expect companies to understand their needs and goals. This means organizations need to invest more time and effort into getting to know their audience.
Fortunately, there are various ways to learn more about customer needs. Business leaders can automatically implement survey requests into IVR flows and conversations with bots, boosting their chances of collecting feedback from clients.
Customer journey monitoring and mapping tools can provide businesses with behind-the-scenes insights into each crucial touchpoint a customer uses to interact with a brand. There are even contact center platforms that come with quality monitoring tools built-in, allowing businesses to monitor everything from average time spent on hold, to number of calls abandoned.
Artificial Intelligence can be a particularly useful tool for gaining a behind-the-scenes insight into customer needs and expectations. The right AI analytical tools can automatically spot trends in customer preferences, such as which channels they tend to use for different purposes. Conversational AI bots and systems can also interact with customers, collecting data from them without the need for human input. AI even provides a way to monitor the emotions of customers.
Sentiment analysis tools allow businesses to track the changes in customer sentiment that can occur during different stages of a customer journey. Plus, dashboards can offer these insights to agents in real-time, allowing them to alter strategies instantly.
The more data companies can collect about their target audience, the more they can deliver personalized, intuitive, and powerful service, on any channel.
Step 2: Design a Strategy for Omnichannel Service
Once companies have a clear idea of their customer’s needs, expectations pain points throughout the CX journey, they can begin to design a strategy focused on improving interactions. The first step to building an effective customer service strategy is understanding which channels customers use to interact with a brand, and how these platforms can be aligned.
Today’s consumers interact with companies across a range of different platforms, utilizing everything from phone and video calls to social media, and messaging. Ensuring customers can interact with companies on the channels of their choice is one of the easiest ways to improve experience and reduce customer effort scores. However, it’s not enough to simply stitch separate channels together.
A true omnichannel experience aligns every platform a company uses to engage with audiences, to create a consistent, contextual journey. 90% of business leaders say that a seamless omnichannel strategy is essential for business success.
To design a strategy for a truly unified omnichannel experience companies need to:
- Analyze: Looking at the information already collected about their target audience, business leaders can determine which channels they need to prioritize, and how they need to connect their platforms to drive excellent results. It’s also worth looking for tools that should be unified with the omnichannel contact center to improve employee productivity. For instance, connecting a CRM, and UC solution to CCaaS service can boost results significantly.
- Build: Using the right CCaaS platform solution, companies can begin building customer-centric workflows, exploring routing strategies, scheduling opportunities, and even automations that can strengthen team performance. Examine the pain points that might prevent employees from delivering excellent service, and find solutions.
- Monitor: Paying close attention to the performance and efficacy of an omnichannel strategy over time will help businesses to make data-driven decisions for growth. Pinpoint core metrics and KPIs that should be tracked to determine whether the CX strategy is delivering the right results for customers, and the business.
Step 3: Empower Teams
Finally, companies in today’s customer-focused world need to recognize that excellent customer experiences start with fantastic employee experiences. Empowered and engaged staff members can automatically provide a better quality of service. Providing staff members with the tools they need to accelerate their workflows, and deliver personalized service is crucial.
Start with a comprehensive platform where teams can access all of the resources they need to serve and support customers in one place, from CRM platforms to scripting tools, internal chat for collaboration, and customized real-time dashboards and reports.
Ensure every staff member has insights into the real-time data they need to consistently improve their performance in the moment. Additionally, make sure supervisors can track quality scores and metrics to determine where employees might benefit from additional training and support. Next, look for ways to augment teams with AI and automation.
Conversational AI tools can significantly reduce the strain on team members, by allowing companies to offer powerful self-service experiences to customers, reducing the number of incoming calls agents have to handle. They can also be utilized as virtual assistants, helping agents to find the resources they need to address questions and queries faster.
Automation can help to reduce the number of repetitive tasks teams need to complete each day, from entering details into a database, to transferring callers to a different employee, or even authenticating customers. This means staff will have more time to focus on delivering an empathetic, personalized experience to customers.
Create a Memorable Customer Experience
Paolo Annoni, Head of Digital Marketing at INGO Group said: ‘“We’re living in a world where customer experiences have the power to make or break a business. XCALLY with his automation system can help to reduce the number of repetitive tasks teams need to complete each day, freeing up more time for delivering an empathetic, personalized experience to customers.”
Every business needs to focus on enhancing and optimizing customer experiences in today’s world. However, unlocking the power of a memorable CX strategy doesn’t have to mean implementing endless new tools, using complicated systems, or investing heavily in new strategies.
With the three simple steps above, businesses can upgrade their CX strategy, empower their teams, and improve customer satisfaction, all with minimal effort.
