Customer experience is more critical than ever, and the numbers don't lie. According to Forrester Research, companies delivering great customer experiences saw a 17 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), whereas poor customer experience delivered just 3 percent over the same period.
Following are five ways businesses can provide an experience that shows their customers that they care and keeps them coming back:
1. Make it Personal.
Continuous product rollouts and enhancements combined with an overly saturated market have made it more challenging than ever for companies to distinguish themselves solely based on their functionality and capabilities. Customers today don't just look for cutting-edge features, they want to feel like the companies they love not only value their business, but value them as an individual.
Make sure you have a support system that can seamlessly integrate into existing tools, such as a CRM platform, workforce management solutions, reporting and analytics, and more. This not only will increase operational efficiencies but will make it easy to securely surface key customer information and contextual data to support agents in real time so they can deliver a more personalized touch when interacting with customers.
2. Go the Extra Mile.
As advancements in cloud computing, natural language processing (NLP), and deep learning continue, the ability to gather and surface contextual awareness in real time to support teams will become key aspects of delivering a VIP-like style of customer support.
Imagine an experience where support teams not only help resolve outstanding issues but safely access customer profile data, such as account information, purchase history, product settings, and more, can proactively provide suggestions or recommendations to help customers get the most out of their products and experiences.
3. Be Responsive.
Having customers sit in queues or placed on hold and rerouted to different support teams or agents is not only incredibly frustrating for customers but it can substantially impact contact centers' bottom lines.
To properly staff support teams and reduce wait times, make sure to not only account for peak hours and busy seasons but channel-specific staffing as well. For example, customers reaching out via SMS, web chat, or social media should have the same experience and response time as those who are calling in.
4. Meet Them Where They Are.
Part of showing your customers that you care involves making it easy for them to reach you, and the easiest way to do this is to meet them where they are. Customers shouldn' have to maneuver between channels to find the support they need. Instead, companies should make support easily accessible across all channels, platforms, and devices.
Whether a customer is within an app, on the web, or using one or more social media channels, meeting customers where they are creates an experience where companies are going out of their way to connect with the customer, not the other way around.
5. Let Customers Be Themselves.
Think about how you communicate with friends and family? You make calls and send texts, photos, videos, and more. In many cases, numerous multimedia capabilities are used within the same interaction. Yet while the way customers interact with one another has evolved, the way customers interact with companies has remained stagnant.
Create an experience that allows customers to communicate with you in the same way that they communicate with each other. Real-time multimedia sharing and connecting across multiple channels can help create a more natural flow of communication and interaction between companies and customers and helps deliver a one-of-a-kind customer experience that goes above and beyond the competition and makes customers feel unique and special.
Anand Janefalkar is founder and CEO of UJET.