Customer Experience (CX)
Customer experience, also known as CX, is the customers’ all-around insight of their experience with your business. The result of each encounter a customer has with your business, from exploring the website to conversing with customers and getting the item they purchased from you falls under customer experience. All that you do impacts your customers’ discernment and their choice to continue to return or not—so a unique and exceptional customer experience is your key to progress.
Customer Experience Successful Strategies
The first stages of interaction between a brand and a customer generally involves the sales people. This gives your business an edge in accomplishing new heights through customer experience strategy.
However, customer service is only one aspect of the entire customer experience. For example, if you phone Pizza Hut hotline and ask them to give detailed descriptions of each item and you receive it accordingly – this is good customer service. If the representative assists you in your order by coming up with suggestions based on your preferences, that’s good customer experience. Many tend to mix the two up, but this is how customer experience differs from customer service.
Some of the most popular CX strategies in 2021 are discussed below:
Measure, Prioritize, Scale
Regardless of whether it is a post-service customer effort score (CES) survey, an NPS overview auto-deployed across points of communication of customer, a quarterly survey, item experience criticism – you need to gauge the effect of your client experience procedure, to quantify your ROI as well as to comprehend which methodology is contributing most to raise CX.
Today there are ample ways to understand customer intent, churn potential and level of satisfaction. ML powered predictive analytics and AI powered technology platforms that pick up behavioral signals and predict negative (or detractor) behavior before it happens.
Customer-Centric Culture
Customer experience is the sum-total impact of all interactions during a customer lifecycle. This means that brand discovery (marketing and UX), sales experience (sales and accounting team), onboarding and product experience, and post-sales servicing will all be undertaken with the common goal of providing a better CX.
Memorability
Consumers need to see a new brand ample times before they’ll trust and buy from it, and three-quarters of consumers make their purchasing decisions because of a brand. This is why your visual brand identity must be memorable, and your business doesn’t have to have huge advertising budgets to achieve it.
By focusing on your brand’s values, story, content, excellent customer service, high-quality products, and authentic marketing strategies created around your customer’s needs, you can build a memorable visual brand identity.
CX Intelligence
Customer experience intelligence means finding and taking advantage of rich sources of continuous intel that goes past prescient experiences or reviews. When a company is driven by the feedback of its customers, it leaves a good impression on the customers as it makes them feel more connected to the enterprise. Using CX intelligence to heighten the company’s reputation in this regard can do wonders.
5G Experience
Mobile multimedia has always been around since smartphones rose to prominence. However, the most critical infrastructure to enable mass consumption of multimedia on mobile devices has been lacking – fast, undisrupted and affordable mobile internet. You need to prepare your CX strategy to utilize this disruptive wave of tech-infra headed your way, without waiting for competitors to lead the way. With the introduction of 5G, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality will become table stakes and this can be used greatly for better CX.
Deliver Smarter CX Surveys
Yes, your customers like to provide feedback, whether they are really happy or plain unhappy. While that is a given – the quality of their responses depends on the question and how it is asked. Be completely neutral in your line of questioning.
Also, don’t expect your marketing or even a customer success team to write survey questions – invest in tools that provide templates or better yet – invest in a real researcher who is an expert in designing effective and unbiased questionnaires.
Technologies for Better CX
We have discussed the most acclaimed technological advancements a company can bring to the fold for heightened and improved digital customer experience.
Artificial Intelligence
Many of the technological advances available to contact centers come down to how you choose to implement artificial intelligence and robotic automation. These applications reduce costs and increase agent productivity by automating common and repetitive tasks.
Chatbots
AI-based chatbots are one way to automate simple tasks, with one caveat: successful chatbots are continuously fed by powerful data sets that collect vast amounts of information gathered from various company-wide systems. For example, the Hong-Kong based Waterhouse Wade uses chatbot for their website which is integrated through Facebook.
Speech-Enabled Voice Recognition
Natural language processing and understanding functions allow customers to have full conversations with bots, which provides another method of handling common interactions and letting live agents spend their time helping customers with more complex concerns.
Video Chat
Sometimes it’s not enough to read or hear about a customer issue; sometimes it’s the most effective to be able to see it. Providing visual customer support can cut straight to the root of a problem and get it solved in an efficient, frictionless manner that will turn casual customers into fans of your brand.
Seamless Channel Integration
Customers want to be able to switch easily between channels, depending on their own context: where they are, what device they’re using, what action they want to take, etc. Furthermore, channel integration is not just a tool for improving customer experience, but also an important component of improving your agent’s work experience.
Customer Expectation & Customer Experience
Statistics illustrate a huge gap between what companies perceive to be good customer service and what they are actually able to deliver. This discrepancy in perceived customer service is one of the biggest challenges that businesses face today. But there are ways you can bridge the gap between the two. A few notable ideas are discussed below:
Customer Feedback
Implementing a customer feedback survey that covers questions about your services, products, employees, return or delivery policies and even website usability is critical to understanding what you can do to improve your service.
Understand Your Team
The best customer support will ultimately depend on how well your frontline team members are able to deliver support to your customers. Therefore, it’s important to find out if your own employees are aware of what’s expected of them throughout the entire customer support journey.
Firsthand Experience
If possible, try to experience your brand’s customer support journey firsthand. This often serves as a big eye-opener for business owners as it is an authentic opportunity to identify possible problems in your current processes.
Changes in Business Strategy
The whole point of identifying these gaps is to enable you to make changes in your existing process and take actionable steps to address them. Providing team members with support tools designed to make customer service more efficient will ultimately help them better meet customer expectations.
Ongoing Process
Learning, understanding, and implementing changes to close the gap between the level of support customers expect and what they actually receive can improve your customers’ satisfaction. But know that this is an ongoing process and it will take time.
