Taking Your Customer Experience to the Next Level
People expect easy everything anywhere anytime so why not customer service or sales? Great CXM and CRM will be the deciding factor on who will still be in business in ten years. People will pay more for products and services if it comes with great CX! Common reasons why customer service, sales, marketing and customer engagement in general have to Modernize, Innovate and Transform themselves:
- Digital Channel Additions
- ACD End of Life
- Vendor Consolidation
- TDM to SIP Transformation
- Site Virtualization
- Cost Reduction
- CX Journey Transformation
- Need Better Analytics w/ Actionable Data
- Increase Sales
- Mobile and Contact Center Extensibility
- Eliminate Engagement Silos
- Increase Brand Loyalty
- Decrease Agent Turnover
- Omni-Channel
From Managing Touchpoints to Customer Journeys…..
A Customer Journey is a process where a customer engages with a company from beginning to end to obtain a desired result. There are journeys for buying, booking, changing, complaining and liking along with many more. What media is used for those journeys: IVR, Voice, SMS, Email, Text, Chat, Social, Mobile App, Video Chat? Is it Inbound, Outbound, Proactive and Cross-Channel? Are there special Skills Based Routing rules based on agent availability, timing and customer information? All of these are components that make up the Customer Journey.
Imagine a customer making an order via a mobile app and their battery dies or they are out of range. So they get home to charge their battery and decide to go online to finish the order. Oops they have to start over! So they get frustrated and decide to call and they get an IVR. Oops the IVR did not know about the order so they opt out to speak to an agent. Oops the agent does not know about the order so they had to start over and repeat themselves.
Wouldn’t it be great if any channel could pick up where the customer left off and finish the transaction with complete seamless contextual transfers. Now that is true Omni-Channel and Great CX. They will definitely “like” that experience, share socially and be a repeat customer!
Reducing customer effort is key to ensuring loyalty and driving brand recognition with “likes” on social networks. Low customer effort is created by eliminating the need for customers to repeat or start over when transferred to another agent or continuing a journey via a different channel. Nothing should be lost! Believe it or not these capabilities are available today! Investing in CX Solutions is an investment in your customers as well as your employees and quickly produces customer loyalty, sales revenue and lower employee turnover by enabling your agents to be successful. Lower effort for everybody is a win for everybody!
Do your Customer Service Agents utilize the Social Media Channel or is Marketing and Customer Service operating as silos? Is the messaging via Social Media consistent with other Engagement Channels and is there complete visibility of all engagement activities for the creation of actionable data? Super Important! “71% of consumers who experience a quick and effective brand response on social media are likely to recommend that brand to others, compared to just 19% of customers who do not receive a response.”
Today’s Mindset – “I want it and I want it NOW!”
Do you have the capabilities to accommodate the new world of “instant gratification” – customer expectations? According to analyst reports, consumers are expecting near real time resolutions that are quick and easy and in sync with how they engage no matter what channel. And they certainly don’t expect to repeat themselves. Consumers today will drop you in a heartbeat if you do not provide excellent customer service!
Even if you have what you consider to be a “bad egg”……can you afford to not take care of them? Their voice can be even louder than Veruca Salt when you consider the brand damage that can be posted on Social Media.
So what do you do? You can’t just get rid of them because this behavior is the new norm and unfortunately you could go out of business!
In all seriousness take a look at the articles on the left panel of this site. I am building a collection of real life scenarios and stories as I meet and speak with Call Center and Customer Relationship Management. We all service, sell and market these days! Great CX is the only way to survive the age of the consumer!