5 steps to a stronger CX
1. Build an omnichannel solution
From voice, online chat and email to social media, chatbots and self-service, your brand needs to be ready and waiting where your customers are — on average, consumers use two distinct channels to connect with brands and 30% use three or more.
But that’s just the start. For an omnichannel strategy to work, it needs to deliver a seamless, consistent CX no matter how or why customers move from channel to channel.
Get it right and you’ll reduce pain points from the customer journey, eliminate inconsistencies in service and gain a fuller customer view.
Get it wrong and you’ll leave your agents switching from system to system and from application to application, attempting to understand the customer and their history. A recipe for plunging CSAT and NPS scores and soaring average handle times.
Customer experience
Noun [ C ]
/ˈkʌs.tə.mɚ ɪkˈspɪr.i.əns/
The way someone feels at every stage of doing business with a company or organization. Often abbreviated to CX.
Sales funnel
Noun [ S ]
/seɪlzˈfʌn.əl/
The visual representation of the customer journey, depicting the four stages of the sales process: awareness, interest, decision and action.
2. Create customer journeys
You can’t claim to know your customers unless you know how and why they are interacting with your business. Be it social media, Google ads, your website or an online chat with a customer representative, each customer uses a different combination of channels and touch points on their journey to purchasing goods or services and resolving issues related to them. This is why each of those touch points could carry the same weight in moving someone from one end of the sales funnel to the other. Or, moving a customer from one brand to another.
As consumers become digital by default, cataloging individual journeys and recognizing individual personas becomes easier.
So, it’s crucial you seize this opportunity to segment your customer base. Without a full view of the customer lifecycle and a clear understanding of individual customer journeys, your marketing will fall short, pain points will go unnoticed, it will be impossible to recognize customer loyalty — or worse, frustration — and your CX will suffer.
3. Ease customer effort
CX is as much about what you do when things go wrong as it is about getting things right. The less energy a customer has to use to resolve an issue, the more that customer will feel satisfied and the more they’ll recommend you to their peers.
As well as advocacy, reducing effort increases customer loyalty and future spend. But to really benefit every stage of the customer journey — not just the post-purchase experience — it needs to be effortless.
Is your website easy to navigate? Is self-service content up to date? Can a customer jump from one channel to another without having to start a process again? These are the annoyances that make customers work harder to get what they want and are the negative experiences they’ll remember when considering whether or not to continue doing business with you. A single poor website experience is enough to make 35% of consumers consider ditching your brand for another.
This is why Customer Effort Scores (CES) have become the best metric for measuring how customers really feel about your brand. Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are important for gaining insight into customer sentiment at different stages of their brand relationship. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys offer an immediate benchmark for your agents’ performance. However, it’s only when all three metrics are combined that the clearest picture emerges.
Organizations with a high CES have a lower cost to serve, a lower churn rate and a customer base that’s more likely to advocate and increase their average spend. In other words, there’s a real ROI on CES.
Customer effort
Noun [ C ]
/ˈkʌs.tə.mɚ ef.ɚt/
The amount of effort a customer needs to exert in order to use a product or service, find the information they need or resolve an issue.
Unstructured data
Noun [ U +sing/pl verb ]
/ʌnˈstrʌk.tʃɚdˈdeɪ.tə/
Information that cannot be arranged or processed using traditional models or stored in a traditional relational database. Unstructured data contains a wealth of customer insights that can be used to inform the decision-making process, drive improvements in customer experience and lower the cost to serve.
4. Dive into data
If you can’t collect and analyze data generated via customer interactions across channels, you’ll always be one step behind customer expectations and one step behind the competition — 60% of consumers are looking for brands that can deliver personalized service. Furthermore, it’s imperative that this data is gathered in a way that meets the requirements of regulatory changes and is aligned with growing ethical considerations.
It’s the key to customer trust. With the right CX analytics platform, you can combine existing structured data from direct digital touch points and available unstructured data from social media, review aggregation sites and customer interactions with agents to generate real-time, actionable insights. CX analytics steers R&D, creates better products and services, lowers call volumes, and improves first-call resolution rates, boosts agents’ capabilities and productivity and, ultimately, optimizes CX — all without asking customers for more data.
What to keep in your CX toolbox:
CX analytics
CX analytics turns your contact center into an insights center. By sifting through all interactions with customers, be it voice, online chat, emails or social media messaging, you’re able to truly listen to your customers and identify everything from how they feel about your products, services and brand to pain points on the path to purchase and opportunities to upsell and cross-sell.
For contact center agents, the technology allows them to understand a caller’s emotions, feelings and tone in real time and apply the most suitable best practice for resolving an issue and ensuring a positive experience for the caller. CX analytics tracks the reason for every customer interaction and all aspects of agent performance from handle times and call resolutions to script adherence.
The resulting insights can be used for constantly refining agent training, developing self-service solutions for common call drivers, improving first call resolution times, lowering average times and even for improving marketing and promotional activities.
5. Help customers help themselves
Self-service is a key ingredient of modern customer relations, because time is now the customer’s most valuable commodity — so don’t waste it. No one wants to phone or start a chat session with your brand by choice. So, presume that any customer queuing in a live channel has already tried — and failed — to solve their own problem.
So, when your customers try to help themselves, make sure they find what they’re looking for.
Putting frequently asked questions or frequently searched for content front and center — and keeping it constantly updated — will keep your customers happy and deflect low-value calls to your contact center. But don’t stop there. By embracing chatbots and conversational IVR, you can add new forms of engagement while empowering customers to serve themselves – 15% of negative reviews and social media posts about customer experience are about poor self-service.
What to keep in your CX toolbox:
Chatbots
The benefits of a channel that’s always open and always able to provide an instant answer to a customer’s question should be clear to see. A chatbot can hold multiple conversations with multiple users simultaneously and eradicates the need for users to browse through page after page of your website looking for answers.
Conversational IVR
No one likes having to listen to and replay audio menus especially on a smartphone, where typing the number means taking the phone away from their ear and activating the keypad. With Conversational Interactive Voice Response (Conversational IVR), every phone call will start well, because customers can simply explain why they need to speak with an agent, before the connection is made.
Autonomy
Noun [ U ]
/ɑːˈtɑː.nə.mi
The ability to make and enact decisions, solve problems and access information without recourse to others.