Top 5 Tips for Customer Experience Excellence 2020

Unbeatable experiences for 2020

4
Top-5-Tips-CX-Excellence
Data & Analytics

Published: March 12, 2020

Rebekah Carter

Customer experience is everything in today’s marketplace.

You can have the most innovative product that the world has ever seen, but if you don’t delight your customers, you’re done for. That means investing in everything from a fast contact centre response rate, to a convenient provisioning experience.

Though most companies today know how valuable customer experience can be to their bottom line, it’s not always easy to know how you should be delighting your clients. After all, the trends of the industry and the demands of customers are always changing.

Fortunately, we’ve got some tips to help you make the right moves for 2020.

1.    Get to Know Your Customers (with Data)

The first step in giving any customer an exceptional experience, is getting to know them. How can you possibly deliver the kind of personalised and meaningful moments that your clients want, if you don’t understand their likes and dislikes, their frustrations and their pain points?

The good news? Countless groups in your business, from your sales team, to your contact centre support agents, can help you to get to know your customers on a deeper level. You don’t even need to risk GDPR standards either. Collecting information on which topics come up most often in contact centre discussions can help you to create FAQ articles that ensure customers can serve themselves.

Use basic analytics to track whether your clients prefer to call you for help, or use text and messaging services, then ensure they have access to the options they like. In CX, knowledge really is power.

2.    Be Omni-channel

In its 2020 report, PWC learned that the number of businesses spending cash on the omni-channel experience has increased rapidly from 20% to 80% in the last ten years. Your customers expect to be able to reach you in a way that’s convenient and efficient for them. Sometimes, that will mean conducting face-to-face video conferences with clients. Other times, your customers will want a quick and simple SMS messaging experience.

Embracing the omni-channel trend for customer experience doesn’t have to mean investing in every kind of communication tool for your business. Instead, you’ll need to spend some time finding out what kind of platforms make your customers feel the most comfortable, then work from there.

Having a few well-targeted and optimised communication channels is much better than having dozens of platforms that your customers hate using.

3.    Combine Humans and Machines

When AI started to emerge in the contact centre, many employees were concerned that their jobs would soon be replaced by bots. However, we’ve quickly discovered that the best way to use AI isn’t as a replacement for your human workers – but as a useful supplement.

Virtual agents and intelligent assistants in your contact centre and customer response environments can speed up problem resolution and lead to more satisfied clients. For instance, a smart IVR can use skills-based routing to send a customer directly to the person best-equipped to help with their queries. An assistant on an agent dashboard can analyse sentiment in a call, and automatically flag when the agent needs help from a supervisor.

Assistants can even pull contextual information on a client onto an agent’s screen at a moment’s notice so that the representative can deliver a more bespoke and personalised experience. Bringing humans and machines together is creating better, more productive conversations for everyone.

4.    Let them Serve Themselves

As younger generations continue to enter the consumer market, the trend for self-service is increasing. Millennials and Gen-Z consumers often prefer the option to try and solve a problem themselves before they reach out to a rep. Around 67% say that they appreciate having a DIY way to tackle their problems.

Give your customers the option to find quick answers to their questions with things like an FAQ section on their website, or a useful automated chatbot that can direct them to the information they need. Just ensure that self-service isn’t the only option. Your client should also be able to accelerate a conversation to a human rep as soon as they need extra assistance.

Provide self-service to your clients, and you don’t just end up with happier customers, you could take some of the stress off your agents’ shoulders too.

5.    Analyse, optimise, and evolve

The customer experience landscape is in a state of constant evolution.

As new tools like artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and even the internet of things become more deeply embedded in the contact centre environment, no company can afford to stay static. While you don’t necessarily have to invest in every new technology that appears in your industry, you do need to be open to new ideas.

Measure which customer experience strategies are having the best impact on your business and listen to your customers when they say they need something new from you. Be ready to adapt and evolve, or you risk losing clients to a more agile competitor.

 

 

Artificial IntelligenceChatbotsInteractive Voice ResponseOmni-channelSecurity and ComplianceVirtual Assistant
Featured

Share This Post