Now more than ever, customers are holding companies to higher standards when it comes to experience. In a world where consumers are used to instant, convenient, and personalised service delivered over a range of channels, clients won’t accept anything less than the best.
59% of customers say they’d abandon a brand after a few bad experiences, almost 30% of customers worldwide say they’d give up on a company after just one poor interaction. To maintain and preserve customer loyalty, organisations need to be willing to innovate, investing in new and more advanced tools for their CX strategy.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to determine which tools are the most important to each brand. As the CX landscape continues to evolve, here are some of the steps businesses can follow to ensure they’re investing in the right strategies for enhanced customer satisfaction.
Step 1: Begin with Analytics
One of the main reasons why choosing the right CX solutions is so complex for businesses, is that different consumers have varying expectations. For some clients, the most important thing a company can do to deliver a phenomenal interaction is ensure questions and queries are answered quickly. For other customers, it’s more important to get a personalized, friendly service.
Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to pinpoint which CX strategies will move the needle on CSAT and NPS scores without first gaining a deeper understanding of your target audience. This means businesses need to begin by collecting the right insights. Powerful analytical tools built into CCaaS platforms and CRM solutions can help organisations to understand what their customers value most.
Conversational analytics software can dive deeper into the meaning and intent behind conversations, to assist brands in building more personalised, relevant experiences. AI-enhanced analytics tools can pinpoint trends and even help organisations to create proactive strategies for service. The better a company’s analytics, the more impactful their CX strategies are likely to be.
Step 2: Optimise the Employee Experience
Employee experience and customer experience are two sides of the same coin. In order to delight, engage, and impress customers, companies must first provide their customer service agents, representatives, and professionals with the right tools and guidance. This means the CX initiatives implemented by brands need to focus not just on CX, but the “Total Experience”, or TX.
Employees need access to a convenient environment where they can find the information they need to serve clients quickly, with the right knowledge and insights. Indeed, a “knowledgeable and friendly service” was named as one of the top things customers value in a purchasing experience by PWC.
An aligned ecosystem of cloud-based tools which provide employees with communication capabilities, in-depth analytics, dashboards, and guidance will help to ensure all staff members remain productive and efficient in any environment. For some brands, it may even be helpful to implement disruptive tools to assist staff members, such as workforce automation and AI assistants. The less repetitive and confusing a CX employee’s work is, the more they can focus on serving the client.
Step 3: Map and Understand the Customer Journey
Once companies have gained a deeper knowledge of their target audience, and made changes to the technology stack to empower employees, the next step in choosing the right CX solution is mapping the buyer journey. Today, consumers interact with companies across a range of channels, using different mediums throughout each stage of their transaction. Clients may start by searching for answers to queries using self-service tools, chatbots and FAQs. They may then transition into a voice call with an agent, before requesting a video-based demonstration of a tool.
Mapping how and where consumers interact with the business can help companies to figure out where they need to remove points of friction. Software brands, service providers, and technology vendors may need to invest in intelligent self-service solutions which help consumers to automatically troubleshoot and alleviate issues. Ecommerce organisations may need to think about implementing chat features into their website, so they can rapidly respond to customer queries.
The right CX solutions should allow companies to provide meaningful experiences to their customers at every touchpoint, both online and offline. At the same time, these tools should be able to collect information at each stage of the journey, to help brands build more comprehensive profiles for lead generation and customer conversion.
Step 4: Prioritise Security and Compliance
Bringing new CX innovations into a technology stack should never mean companies need to compromise on the privacy or security of their service. This is particularly true in the current age, as consumers are becoming more concerned about how their data is collected and used.
New regulations and guidelines are emerging all the time to ensure companies are as transparent and safe as possible when dealing with personal data. Any CX solution implemented by a business should adhere to the company’s policy for data security and privacy. With 69% of customers saying they’re concerned about how personal data is collected, every brand should be able to demonstrate their ability to put the security of their clients first.
For some brands, this will mean investing in CX tools with specific security features already in place. Many CCaaS and CRM tools come with access to multi-factor authentication options, data sovereignty solutions, and eDiscovery services. In some cases, organisations may even need to think about accessing additional applications and tools to assist with their compliance strategies.
Step 5: Analyse the Latest Trending Tools
Only once companies have built the foundations for an excellent CX strategy, with the right journey mapping, analytics, employee engagement, and security factors, should they begin to look at the latest trends in the CX world. Innovative tools like artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and automation can significantly improve any CX strategy. However, they can’t fix a fundamentally broken ecosystem.
When evaluating which CX innovations to add to a technology stack, business leaders will need to think about their current technology strategy, and where they need to explore new opportunities to excel. For instance, after assessing their analytics tools, some businesses may find they can serve more customers, at a faster rate, by implementing AI virtual agents and assistants into their stack.
Other brands may find using automation to minimise repetitive tasks for employees helps to reduce call volume and improve employee engagement. As each new technology is introduced to the landscape, business leaders will need to continue to measure key CX metrics like CSAT, NPS, and customer effort score, to evaluate the potential impact. This will help brands to make the right decisions based on real-world customer experiences.
