That’s an easy question to answer: think about how you do business today compared to just a few years ago. Customer service was measured by metrics like how many rings before your service department answered. In addition, were your retail staff smiling and pleasant, and did your team respond to a customer email timeously? Customer service is certainly crucial, but there’s a lot more to it in today’s multilayered, omnichannel world of business.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience, or CX, is how your customers perceive their interactions with your company or brand.
From navigating the website to contacting customer service and receiving the product that they ordered, customer experience is the sum of every interaction the customer has with your company. Think about it, every action you take influences your customers' perception of you and affects whether they come back or not.
Is Customer Experience vital for your company? You bet it is!
No matter what your business is, a great customer experience will be of benefit, whether it serves to reduce customer churn, increase sales, or expand a membership base. But how do we improve on this fluid concept and make sure that we stay on top of our customer experience?
Customer Experience Impact
The goal of a great customer experience is to make sure every interaction and touchpoint with your business is simple, enjoyable, and seamless. In contrast, a negative customer experience is precisely the opposite.
Each year, poor customer service costs more than $62 billion. Another study found that 91% of unhappy consumers don't complain; they simply don’t come back. The top bugbears listed were difficult purchasing processes, negative customer support experiences, compromising the personal data of a customer and taking too long to respond.
6 Steps to Bulletproof Customer Experience
With such a broad range of expectations, how can we narrow down the most critical factors and eliminate friction where it matters most? You’ll be thrilled to know that we’ve done the heavy lifting for you and the easiest solution lies in Mobile Service Cloud.
Here’s how this smart technology helps to solve the most common customer issues.
1. Omnichannel Inbox
In a single, convenient inbox, you can manage conversations from all channels. This solves the problem of long wait times when customers have a problem or a question as it places all communication in one place for easy reference and super-fast response.
It is common for many customers to conduct a little research before purchasing something from your company, and checking different platforms is one way of doing this. Whether they trust you or not depends on the quality of information they find and your responses along the way.
An omnichannel inbox makes it possible to deliver a brilliant customer experience on all channels. Don’t you agree that it looks unprofessional if you respond quickly via live chat but not at all via Facebook? When customers receive excellent service, they will tell their colleagues and friends about it.
2. Communication Stream
From the above point, we find that it is important to communicate with customers wherever they feel comfortable, and wherever they are likely to be.
Remember, the customer experience is built on the somewhat fickle foundation of customer perception. What makes one person irate may not bother another, so it makes sense to cover all our bases. Communication can make or break your customer experience, so lengthy delays, inefficient processes, or insufficient access to information will have your customers rolling their eyes in frustration.
Customer experience is all about strengthening relationships with customers and building bonds through the use of technology. Did you know that 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience? Food for thought...
3. Chatbots
It used to be considered a bad form to chat with a customer via text or any automated platform, but today it’s the norm. In fact, it’s expected.
Streamline repetitive tasks by automating them. Our system allows you to create your own chatbot to automate conversations and implement quick replies. Your team can serve customers better and more efficiently if you make service easier and faster for them, without weighing them down with unnecessary and unproductive conversations.
Chatbots can reflect the personality of your brand, answer FAQs, and direct customers to where they need to be. Fast. A super-efficient addition to your customer service team, they don't require sleep so they're even more perfect for those after-hours shoppers. Your customers will benefit from swift response times for quick questions or enjoy assistance from stress-free and focused staff.
4. Team Collaboration
The problem of disjointed communication between internal and external teams ends here, as do many customer frustrations.
Remote employees, global time differences, and communication with external parties can get messy and negatively impact your SLAs. And really, your internal communication choices shouldn’t impact your customer’s experience, should they?
Mobile Service Cloud alleviates this problem by bringing all players together in one place, allowing conversations to be automatically assigned based on skills, or snoozing conversations as needed. It’s like putting everyone in the same room at the same time, relegating forgotten messages or misplaced communication to a thing of the past.
5. Customer Profile
Develop customer profiles based on data from your CRM or Customer Data Platform. The integration of systems enables you to provide customers with a quicker, more personal service experience.
Data can be displayed right next to the customer’s questions, so there is no need to search across multiple systems. Improve customer profiles by including all available data and getting more insights about customer impact.
This key area grants your team the information they need to assist a customer, no matter what platform they come from. All data is immediately available to all employees no matter where they are, which, let’s face it, makes you look good.
6. Statistics
Customers are the lifeblood of a business, which is why corporations are concentrating on how to develop new business and, perhaps more importantly, retain existing customers. However, if you don’t know where a problem lies, you won’t know how to fix it.
Identifying and addressing customer issues can be prevented by using reporting tools that uncover metrics that directly impact your business. Other vital statistics such as ‘response time’ or ‘availability’ highlight how your team is coping with their responsibilities and where improvements can be made. The data in these reports is invaluable to improving customer experience and deep-diving into customer experience metrics.
As effective as your management team may be, they can’t be omnipresent. But having real-time access to your channels, your team, your business partners, and any other stakeholders that you care to track gives you information worth its weight in gold.
Enhance Your Customer Experience Today
Many people seem to mistake customer service for customer experience. While one of the touchpoints associated with a brand is simple, the other impacts customers' feelings and emotions, encompassing the entire customer journey.
Businesses that adopt a customer experience strategy enjoy success in key areas; their churn rates are reduced, they increase brand loyalty, and revenues are increased. Surely those advantages are worth exploring?
Ultimately, customer experiences are the most effective form of marketing with the highest ROI. Successful businesses are simply those with happy customers.
Let us help you to implement these smart systems into your business so you too, can level up in 2021 and beyond.