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Delivering the best possible customer experience requires you to move mountains, which explains why many companies fail at the task. But, in the highly competitive market of the day, turning a blind eye to bottlenecks in customer service could be fatal to business sustainability. Most leading brands are already realizing the power of customer engagement and realizing improvements in brand image and bottom line through exemplary customer service quality. Customers who had previous peak experience with a product, spent about 140% more on the same brand the next time.
What are the key takeaways from these bright spots, the pioneers who managed to pull it off? The primary insight from the success stories in customer experience is that customer experience requires effort on many fronts, and improvements happen in incremental steps spread over time.
Putting together a fabulous customer experience system requires a strategy. So, what can your team do to start your journey towards success in customer service? Let’s look at a few pointers.
Understand your customer
You should know whom you are selling to and who is listening. A brand that is not in sync with its audience will inevitably lose it. Understanding your customer implies the whole gamut of market segmentation, customer profiling, starting from customer needs and motivation, and so on. A business that understands its customers survives and thrives, taking business away from those that don't. Understanding your customers, their needs, thought processes, motivation, and profile help you build a competitive advantage in a market segment.
There are several ways of going about it from market research, surveys, competitor analysis, and industry analysis. The challenges in understanding your customers are similar to challenges in understanding anything else. It's not in understanding your customer but in knowing what to do with the insight. Most companies fail at implementing a strategy that ties into customer needs and drifts astray somewhere down the line, losing focus. Understanding and implementation together build success.
Build systems around customer experience
Customer services operate based on workflow. If your customer support system is not tuned to deliver quality customer service, the output will be subpar with a dismal customer experience. So, the first step towards creating a fabulous customer experience is getting your act right. Identify and eliminate potential bottlenecks to speed up customer service.
Fortunately, technology can save the day by offering several solutions that work towards the goal. Features like chatbots, automated email responses, and notifications help streamline customer interactions. Centralizing your customer service with a high-performance helpdesk application lets you manage the customer experience from a single point of control and monitoring. Customer service is hard and having a crystal ball that you can gaze into to monitor performance is extremely helpful.
Data-driven decisions
Let your customers be your guide in your journey of improving customer experience. How? It's vital to look at your customers as more than people who purchase your products. They are also an immense reservoir of information and insights that can help you improve customer experience. Customers know what they want better than anyone else. An elegant way of capturing customer opinions and suggestions is through well-structured customer feedback.
Collecting customer feedback is half the step. Analyzing it, deriving insights, and acting upon them is the next. Look for common and frequent problems that are low-hanging fruits. After addressing them, move on to the other ones. The Pareto principle is a fantastic way of driving improvements which states that 80% of the problems are due to only 20% of factors. Address those 20% factors first, and you will eliminate 80% of the issues in a sweep!
Personalization
Customer experience is all about making the customer feel important, and nothing goes further than a personal touch to your customer service. People like it when you remember them as more than just an invoice number in your records. Personalization is all about having a centralized, well-maintained, and easily retrievable information bank at your fingertips. Most helpdesk applications have data management capabilities that let you deliver personalized service.
A few aspects of business communication are difficult to personalize like chatbot interactions or automated email responses. However, managing to personalize the rest and giving it human touch tips the game in your favor. Customers want to be understood, and they engage with brands that can understand what they are looking for,
Omnichannel service delivery
Adopting multiple channels of customer engagement improves your customer engagement. Being available on several platforms like email, SMS, phone call, WhatsApp, social media, allows customers to connect with you on their preferred mode of communication. It also improves your brand image and makes it look more tech-savvy.
Omnichannel capabilities are easy to implement through modern helpdesk applications. Eliminating bottlenecks of communication improves business transparency. Customer support availability round the clock on different channels builds customer trust and loyalty.
Employee engagement
No initiative in an organization has seen the light of the day without active employee engagement. It's more relevant in customer service as employees in customer service are the face of your organization for the customer. Their actions, decisions, interactions, and thought processes have huge implications in customer engagement and loyalty.
So, what can you do here? You cannot possibly monitor and control every customer interaction between your customers and employees. But you can positively engage your employees by addressing their pain points to improve employee goodwill. Proper training and support go a long way in employee morale. A motivated employee makes the best decisions in the interests of the business. Employee goodwill translates down the line into customer goodwill.
A few final words
Customer experience is a challenging aspect of a business to get right. If you look at it from a bird's eye view though, it is also your main product. As a business, you are selling the value of a product and not the product itself, and value can only be experienced. Delivering that value experience is vital for business growth and brand building.
At Wolken, we have worked with several leading brands in the industry to help them deliver that valuable experience to their customers. Our mission is to leverage technology to create a customer experience that drives business growth and delivers value for our customers. Get in touch with our team to find out more about how we can help your business.
