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.