Customer experience is a crucial aspect of your business as it can wield so much power over the success of your bottom line.
Small tweaks to improve the experience can have a positive knock-on effect on your revenue, but if CX isn't a focus, you run the risk of letting bad experiences break your brand.
With 61% of customers ceasing business with a brand due to poor customer service, you need to create smart, efficient strategies that can bring big wins to your bottom line.
Find out how you can improve your customer experience, measure their happiness and ensure it can prime your business for success:
Why is customer experience important for your business?
- What is customer experience?
- Customer experience vs customer service
- What bad customer experience can do to your bottom line
Why is a customer experience strategy important for your business?
How to improve omnichannel customer experience
How to improve CX by automating customer service:
- AI Knowledge Base
- Benefits of an AI-knowledge base
- How can chatbots improve customer service?
- What are the benefits of chatbots?
- Personalise, personalise, personalise!
How to improve call centre agent performance
- Introduce a quality framework
- How to enhance customer relationships with emotional connections
- Empower your employees
- Train your customer service team to success
- Listen to customer service team feedback
- Adopt a top-down approach
How to measure and analyse Customer Experience Metrics
- How to improve CSAT and how it can enhance the customer experience
- What is CSAT?
- CSAT improvement ideas
- How to improve your NPS score and what it means for your business
Why is customer experience important for your business?
With an in-depth customer experience improvement strategy, you could see an increase in revenue, long-term growth, a reduction in operational costs, and higher retention rates. It also presents the opportunity for you to turn disgruntled customers into brand advocates who can sing your praises through digital and word-of-mouth recommendations. An invaluable asset to any company!
It's estimated that the pandemic has accelerated companies' digital communications strategy by an average of six years, with instant gratification in customer experience getting more efficient. If businesses want to stay ahead of their competitors, they will need their customer service departments to adapt to the modern consumer's demands.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience is defined by the interactions between the consumer and your company throughout the entire customer journey. However, a great customer experience comes from providing value to your customers quickly and efficiently throughout each interaction.
Customer experience is the number one brand differentiator. It starts with understanding your customers' needs and wants, looking at the entire customer journey to identify pain points, being proactive and ensuring all support knowledge is accessible to both the customer and your workforce. Companies focusing on delivering top customer experience means providing excellent service and products whilst making customers feel valued.
When you nail your CX, you'll see the benefits. Happier customers mean brand loyalty and repeat purchases, the ultimate goal.
Customer experience vs customer service: Are they the same?
Although they are connected, customer experience is not the same as customer service. Customer service is only one part of the overall experience; a single touchpoint between the customer and the brand.
Good customer experience is more complex. Nowadays, consumers can connect with brands in many new and exciting ways across various channels and platforms. A solid customer experience strategy should streamline processes and ensure peak efficiency throughout the entire customer journey by utilising intelligent technology.
Do it right, and you can leverage the excellent experience to create an emotional connection and strengthen relations between the brand and the customer.
What bad customer experience can do to your bottom line
Bad customer experiences are expensive. Customers who receive poor experiences are likely to cease purchasing with your company and potentially share their negative sentiments on and offline. You don't need to be told twice that this is incredibly damaging to your brand and growth.
With new customer acquisition being 5 - 25 times more expensive than retaining existing customers, it makes complete business sense to invest in improving customer experience, and consequently, retention. By boosting your retention rates by as little as 5%, you could see your profits increase anywhere from 25% to 95%.
The cost of bad customer experience can also impact the well-being of your team, as 74% of call centre agents are at risk for burnout, and 30% of those are at severe risk of burnout.
High volumes of support tickets and calls with inefficient tools can push overwhelmed staff to burn out, meaning high turnovers and expensive hiring and training.
Why is a customer experience strategy important for your business?
Your customers will always come first. Your business wouldn't last for long without them, so delivering an outstanding experience should be a priority. With 45% of consumers stating they would switch brands if a company doesn't anticipate their needs, a solid customer experience strategy will guide you on how to improve the customer experience so customers keep coming back.
While the importance of having a strategy cannot be overstated, most businesses don't have one! Customer experience strategies drive higher customer satisfaction rates, reduce churn and increase revenue, so get the upper hand over your competitors by implementing a customer experience strategy.
What is a customer experience strategy?
A customer experience strategy is a clear customer-focused vision that guides your company and the agents within your customer support team. When developing a strategy, you will need to focus on improving every aspect of the customer experience, including product design, marketing, sales, fulfillment, support, operations, and more.
From creating customer personas to understanding the customer journey, utilise your strategy to account for any friction in the customer experience.
Use Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journeys are significant predictors of business success. Consumers now expect well-designed, easy-to-use websites - a staggering 88% say they're less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience (source: mckinsey.com).
Create a customer journey map to illustrate customers' processes, needs, and perceptions throughout their interactions with your brand.
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Use a journey map to improve the current customer experience or envision your future customer experiences.
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By cross-referencing journey maps with core metrics, you can better understand your customer's needs, opportunities, and potential issues.
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Perform this audit by considering the unique perspectives of all departments within your company. Each one will bring valuable insight, and it will help your team brainstorm ideas to reduce pain points, improve business relationships, and increase growth.
Create Customer Personas
To help you better understand your customers, deep dive into how they think by creating customer personas.
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Bring personas to life - give them names and personalities! Your customers might be very similar, but they will always have different needs or desires, so this will help you know what type of information or service you should provide.
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Create personas that represent your customers' needs to help your support team become more aware of what they want and how they might be satisfied by the company.
How omnichannel can benefit your customer experience
With Millennials and Gen Z running to social media and other various channels for customer service, you need to embrace an omnichannel mindset with your customer experience.
What is omnichannel customer service?
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Consumers use a range of offline and online channels to connect with a brand, often switching multiple times.
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To achieve a great experience, every part of the customer journey must be seamless and consistent. Agents need to follow interactions from start to finish with omnichannel solutions that keep conversations connected through a central hub and shared history.
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The correct tools and software, like NICE CXone, can centralise interactions from numerous channels (social media, review sites, apps, forums, etc) into one space for your agents so your agents know exactly who said what, where and when.
How omnichannel benefits customers?
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Omnichannel is an integral part of the customer experience. Customers will reach out to brands using whichever channels are convenient to them, so brands need to keep up or risk chaotic interactions that can lead to frustrated customers.
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Customers with strong omnichannel strategies enjoy better customer experience and improved customer retention rates. It creates low-effort experiences that lead to customer retention and loyalty.
How to improve CX by automating customer service
What do customers want? They want their questions answered as quickly as possible. Studies show that 31.2% of customers expect responses in an hour or less, while 11.3% expect to receive a response in less than 15 minutes. But how do you keep up with these gruelling customer satisfaction targets?
With contact centre platforms in the cloud (like NICE CXone), AI-driven customer interaction handling creates a differentiated experience and automated/agent-assisted customer journeys. Leverage innovative technology to reduce queue length and increase satisfaction levels.
AI Knowledge Base:
Customer service should never be reactive. It should be proactive, anticipating potential issues and ensuring self-service answers are accessible and convenient.
As 81% of customers attempt to take care of themselves before reaching out to an agent, AI can vastly improve the experience. Not only do customers get answers faster, but it will filter out the more basic inquiries to free up your agents to focus on customers with more complex issues.
Benefits of an AI-knowledge base:
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A self-service option allows customers to search for answers on their own and gives them the ability to solve other similar issues in the near future.
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Self-service portals save time and help your customers locate the information they need that has been populated using data from past problems.
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Intuitive self-service options will strengthen your brand reputation by creating positive customer interactions.
How can chatbots improve customer service:
Around 56% of consumers still view slow response time as the biggest problem in their customer experience (source: customercontactweekdigital.com), which can be avoided with the right tools.
What are the benefits of chatbots?
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Speed is of the essence! Chatbots can deliver real-time conversations and be deployed to quicken response times and answer questions, increasing the likelihood for issues to be dealt within the customer's first contact resolution.
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Chatbots are ready to talk with customers 24/7, all year round. Your customers will never be left feeling frustrated.
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Intelligent platforms like CXone collect all the necessary data during automated interactions to pass onto an agent if the customer needs further assistance. This reduces friction for the customer and stops them from needing to repeat themselves - reducing frustration.
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Post-interaction, use post-chat surveys to collect feedback. And with feedback, you have the intel to improve the experience.
Personalise, personalise, personalise!
Customers today expect personalised, contextual experiences that go beyond a brand knowing their name. They want to understand products and services relevant to them based on their interests or previous purchases. And they're willing to share more information with your brand to get this personalised experience.
Fulfilling the customers' needs and solving their problems with personalised interactions creates an emotionally satisfied customer. They want brands to understand who they are and go that extra mile by anticipating their needs.
And a personalised service will have its payoffs; 70% of consumers would exclusively shop with certain retailers and brands that personally understand them (Dynata, 2021). And when emotionally connected with a brand, 83% are more likely to do business with them (CMSWire, 2020).
How to improve call centre agent performance
A fundamental way to improve customer experience is by empowering the customer-facing teams who are the first to interact with your customers.
By taking accountability for their service and having the correct tools and training, they can be a formidable force and a valuable asset to your company. But how can you improve their service and skillset?
Introduce a quality framework
A quality framework is used to measure an organisation's quality of customer service. This framework includes assessing the quality of phone calls and emails, and tracking customer support staff development through coaching, e-learning, and group training.
A quality framework should schedule and track the training of each member of the team. To ensure consistency across teams, implement a defined standard of how customers should be treated when interacting with your company.
How to enhance customer relationships with emotional connections
Emotions play a significant role in customer service. When customers are unhappy, they need to feel cared for by a proactive, helpful member of your team. But not only that, they expect a certain level of respect and kindness whilst dealing with simple experiences and communication.
Agents should try to create an emotional connection with customers, as 83% are more likely to do business with a brand when feeling emotionally connected. These connections also signify customers' future value to a brand.
Any company can begin learning about their customers' emotional motivators and leverage them to create connections. Intertwine this into your customer experience strategy, and you will have a deeper insight into your customers' wants, needs and issues. And the bonus? Your agents will feel more connected to the customer and the bigger revenue picture of your business.
Empower your employees
Empower your customer service agents first, and the customers will feel, see and hear the difference - happy employees make happy customers!
Allow your team to use their initiative and embrace their interpersonal skills, rather than enforcing a predetermined script and pushing them to speed through support tickets. Using first contact resolution (FCR) as a success metric is more likely to give a better customer experience as the focus moves from speed to both speed and satisfaction. Call centres that encouraged agents to use their initiative saw a 50% increase in agent performance according to productivity and customer experience indicators.
Another way of empowering your agents is by having your AI knowledge base centralised, accessible, and convenient. They'll have all the company and customer information at their fingertips, which will help make them faster, more efficient, less stressed, and generally build a more meaningful, satisfying career. Employees who feel empowered by their company will do better work than those who are micromanaged or undervalued.
Train your customer service team to success
Training your customer support team is paramount if you're looking to improve customer experience. Every agent must know your company inside out and foster practical communication skills. Training the team in etiquettes, like patience and empathy, will help emotionally connect the customers to the brand. With strong product knowledge and honed soft skills, your agents will be able to deal with customer complaints effectively, increase customer satisfaction and make those critical sales.
But with the average manager spending 35% of their time looking for coaching opportunities and only 7% of their time coaching, there's got to be a more straightforward solution to aid the training process.
Capitalise on training opportunities based on the quality of the calls. Real-time Interaction Guidance powered by AI can be used to remind agents to build rapport and encourage active listening based on AI models that understand customer cues across all industries.
Interaction analytics can help to save time and money by providing a clear view of agent performance. With the insights gathered from interactions, you will be better equipped to identify and address issues affecting large workforce areas or implement one-to-one training for underperforming individuals.
Listen to and action customer service feedback
Close the loop with your customers and transform their experiences through unbiased feedback. By distributing the right data to the right people and departments across your entire organisation, you can ensure that valuable CX insights are being leveraged.
Agents on the front lines interacting with customers are in an important position. They can gather observations that could give quick wins for improving your CX or crucial feedback that could transform the revenue of your business. By empowering your agents with the personalised information and feedback they need to self-coach, you can ensure they are engaged and delivering the best possible experiences for your customers.
The right Voice of the Customer application will unlock actionable insights to improve customer satisfaction and boost loyalty. Tools like CXone Feedback Management can help your organisation to collect unbiased customer feedback across multiple channels.
Expanding your contact centre to drive actions across departments can help to resolve concerns faster and drive business performance.
Adopt a top-down approach
Being customer-centric is essential for any company, but you must start at the top. Leadership plays a significant role in setting the right example for the rest of the workforce, as it fully centralises the customer in everything the company does.
By 2026, 60% of large enterprises will use total experience to transform their business models to achieve world-class customer and employee advocacy levels.
The companies that lead the way in customer service have buy-in at every level of the business, with leadership taking an active role in monitoring performance and impact. In many cases, compensation of senior executives is directly tied to customer satisfaction – meaning these businesses are 7.7 times more likely to strongly agree they have senior leaders who immerse themselves in customer service, and 9.2 times more likely to report their senior leaders view customer service metrics on a daily basis (Zendesk CX Trends 2022).
Values and behaviours need to be consistent throughout the entire organisation, from the top down. Here are some quick ways to embrace a customer-centric way of thinking:
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Have a clear vision and mission statement.
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Provide excellent customer service.
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Build connections and relationships with customers utilising personalisation.
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Use technology to provide a speedy customer experience.
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Create a culture of continuous improvement.
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Incentivise employees to provide exceptional customer experiences.
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Focus on customer retention.
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Listen to customer feedback on your products and services, and be willing to change if you see an opportunity.
How to measure and analyse Customer Experience Metrics
It can be tough to measure customer experience directly, but Customer Experience Metrics are valuable to track to get an idea of how it's performing. Capturing feedback in real-time is paramount in gauging customer satisfaction and seeing the effectiveness of the experience. But however you collect this important data, it needs to be simple to implement and measure.
Customer satisfaction surveys, such as NPS and CSAT, can provide great insight into your customers' experiences with your brand and product/service. This data will help you understand your team's performance and assist you in improving the customer experience (and your business) off the back of tangible feedback.
How to improve CSAT and how it can enhance the customer experience
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is one of the most used customer experience metrics. It will give you an idea of how much customers enjoyed your product or service, and give insight into how to improve your services.
What is CSAT?
Customer Satisfaction is measured by asking customers what they think about your product or service and is usually sent after a transaction or support ticket to check in on the efficiency of the customer's experience.
CSAT can come in many forms, but the most common is a scale from 1 to 5. A rating of five means that the customer liked it and a rating of one means that the customer hated it. It's a great tool to measure customer satisfaction with one-time interaction.
CSAT improvement ideas
Customer loyalty matters, so if your CSAT score is looking a bit worse for wear, it's time to invest in improving your customer experience before your business suffers.
Here are five quick ideas on how to increase CSAT:
- Minimise wait time by leaning on AI-driven knowledge bases and chatbots.
- Provide omnichannel support and ensure all data is centralised, so agents have customer data at their fingertips.
- Empower your employees to deal with customers directly without checking with management.
- Jump on feedback quickly, regardless of whether it's negative or positive. You could unearth a deeper understanding of your business.
- Be a mystery shopper for your company - sign up as a customer and follow the user experience to check pain points and potential areas that could be evoking negative feedback.
How to improve your NPS score and what it means for your business:
Customers want to feel appreciated by companies, and companies should be ensuring customers feel valued and appreciated, as loyalty breeds long-term growth! But how can you figure out how loyal your customers are and whether they would recommend you to a friend?
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the most common customer experience measurement. It's easy and quick to complete, and provides a bigger picture of general customer satisfaction.
What is NPS?
NPS asks customers to rate their satisfaction with a company with a straightforward question: 'How likely is it that you would recommend (insert brand, product or service) to a friend or colleague?'. Respondents give a rating between 0 (not at all likely) and 10 (extremely likely). You achieve an NPS score by removing the neutral responses and subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.
Companies use NPS to understand what drives customer loyalty and retention, as those satisfied with a company tend to be loyal to that particular brand. When companies have high scores on NPS, they are more profitable than those with low scores.
Why NPS should be in your customer experience strategy
NPS is fast, simple, and easy for both customers and companies, and the learnings can be invaluable. Analysing NPS data from multiple touchpoints across your customer journey will help you understand what you need to improve.
Your NPS score will show you how you're doing overall, where you're performing well, and where you could improve. One tactic is that you might decide to follow up on customer comments to get more information about why they left and then either try to resolve the situation, or fix the issue to avoid it happening to future customers.
Tips to improve your NPS score
As a business owner, you want to ensure that you're doing everything possible to increase customer satisfaction. When your NPS surveys begin saying that customers aren't happy, you must jump on it before it becomes a runaway train.
Here are five quick tips to improve NPS scores:
- Dig deeper: Find out why the customer gave you that score and take their feedback seriously. It will demonstrate the brand's care for the consumer and is an effective first step in repairing the relationship.
- Align the company with NPS scores: Be transparent about NPS and how it can factor into the company's revenue.
- Keep NPS scores at the top of your team's mind: Have regular meetings to discuss how customer experience can be improved off the back of the scores, and be open to feedback from the team.
- Leverage scores for training: Customer feedback can be integral to the training of your agents.
- Root Cause Analysis (RCA): These can be exceptionally helpful when delving into the root of customer issues. Analyse the customer journey and see if you can identify the reasoning behind low NPS scores.
When you need to improve your customer experience, there are many different tactics and tools that can help. Ultimately, customers expect high-quality service and products, and there are a myriad of tools, software and technology that can help make the experience as smooth (and satisfactory!) as possible.
Here at Route 101, we have many options that can help you improve your customer experience and also empower the agents in your workforce. Hit this link to book a discovery call so we can help find the best option for your customer needs and business goals.
