For many, customer service and customer experience are seemingly interchangeable. Yet, one is a single touch point with a brand, while the other impacts feelings and emotion, and encompasses the entire customer journey.
A positive customer experience plays a crucial role in your ability to retain your customers and find new ones. What is the preferred mode of service for the vast majority of people? It’s Digital.
Can you guess what the top priority for a business is? It’s customer experience (CX)
Definition of Customer Experience
Customer Experience is one way of doing marketing or marketing by following customer equity and how customers perceive their interactions with your company. This perception that is formed from the overall interactions that customers experience with your company’s services or products is called Customer Experience. This method is basically introduced by Bern Schmitt in his book entitled Customer Experience Management.
Many organizations struggle with where and how to improve CX, as the focus shifts from CRM to customer experience. People always prefer a brand that keeps them happy and satisfied, so improving your customer experience will be beneficial. Many companies are already using the technology to handle customer service efficiently and cost-effectively – even if it is only to answer customer requests on Facebook. Beyond the costs, anecdotes of poor service experiences can echo through Facebook and other social channels, eroding hard-earned brand image.
Top class customer experience is the key to business success. This is the goal of every company, but in today’s environment it has become much more challenging due to the impact of the ongoing pandemic. Customer service is a major element in the success of business, and many companies see this as an important factor that can make or break a deal. Thanks to digitization, modern customers are very well informed and demand a high level of package service
As a marketer, you have to make sure that you ask the right set of questions at the right time to ensure a connected customer experience. As the workforce and consumers become more virtual, potential customers are increasingly turning to software and online services to meet their needs, and businesses need to find and utilize the right technology to serve them.
Every marketer must be able to arrange his business environment in a good way for customers and understand what customers need. By providing the right experience, each customer will get a sensation or various things in using the products or services of the company.
It starts with building a strong business technology foundation. Customer experience affects all areas of your business, but how do you get started? Here, we give you the 7 pillars of customer experience to help you create a great customer experience strategy. These seven pillars can serve as models for executives grappling with this fast-changing digital transformation so they can deliver extraordinary results. None of this is easy.
7 Ways Technology Can Improve The Customer Experience Strategy
1. Continuity
For example, when considering a global pandemic, understanding your customer’s journey as a process makes identifying your company’s business-critical processes much clearer. Businesses need to roll with the punches and maintain continuous operation when the situation is changing rapidly. If technology makes you fail when employees switch to work remotely, it is time to implement a secure remote access and equip your team with the tools and the appropriate software. In today’s volatile economy, it is important to find innovative ways to ensure customer continuity, loyalty, and profitability. Advancements in digital technology open up new avenues for technological innovation and digital transformation. Those innovations, in turn, create new forms of customer value, drive change in the marketplace, and force companies to rethink their customer continuity strategies. However, to achieve true value we need more than just pretty boxes with some free form text, sticky notes, and smiley faces. We need an actual business architecture supported by a platform that will allow for the interrelation of all the capabilities and components necessary to make that journey successful.
2. Communication
Your service experience should let customers start an interaction over one communication channel and complete it over another. Modern customers expect to be able to get in touch with you easily and conveniently. When they reach out, they want to make certain they are heard. Minimizing wait time for responses and resolutions makes people feel cared for, especially when there are systems in place that keep them updated along the way.Communication is the lifeline of a business. You need to choose the right communication mediums along with the right language and message to reach people at the time when they need you the most. All businesses need to seek to effectively carry out communication between the in-house team and their customers. Offer online receipts and accept monthly rents online. With an integrated dashboard, a property manager can request payments, generate receipts, have recurring invoicing in place and accept payments, all from the property management portal.
Good customer communication can be facilitated by giving employees accurate and up-to-date customer, business data and fulfilling their needs. It will help with clear and effective communications and relationship during the entire customer experience.
3. Software
One solution is for IT to apply the power of business process management to their customer service tools. IT can help service managers create repeatable business processes using visual modeling tools geared to the business users. Depending on the nature of your company, your software needs may go much deeper than communication. Your IT team or an outsourced Managed Service Provider (MSP), can get access to the right tools and advanced integrations that bring it all together. They can help customize software to configure it for your specific business needs. The company may find it challenging to control the way customers feel about their relationship with a given product. Improving and, importantly, personalizing the interaction, however, is not out of their reach, as more and more CX solutions providers decide to focus on enterprises as well. The company platform that helps you provide exceptional support experiences to your customers across channels. Enables you to quickly respond to customers across channels with bot-to-human and human-to-human interactions, improving customer engagement and satisfaction. The enterprise businesses find out how users interact with your mobile sites or apps. Your IT team are able to monitor large traffic without affecting site performance.
4. Security
While it may not be the first thought that goes through your head when you think security guard, good customer service is an important part of the job. Some consumers are still nervous about moving their customer experiences to the digital realm. They are wise to be cautious about security. A security guard is often the face of an institution’s brand. As cyber security becomes a more pressing concern, it’s time to make robust security a central part of product and service design. Companies need to secure their digital channels against malicious attackers—without creating a negative experience for their customers. The Companies able to offer all this while maintaining strong security standards will gain customer loyalty. An experience-driven secure journey can even become a competitive advantage. As lock-down measures have sent many of us online, companies have struggled to adapt, with many attempts to provide a more secure and scalable solution failing both in providing such security and also to provide an enjoyable customer experience.It’s prompting an overdue rethink of the customer journey so that experience and security aren’t unholy bedfellows. To reduce cyber risk across the customer journey, it’s important to use robust Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) controls. To successfully enhance personalization efforts, brands must consider data privacy as an integral component of a brand’s promise. This is crucial, especially with the consumer’s web experience rapidly becoming the primary interaction with a brand.The trade-offs between user experience and security in such straightforward examples are clear, and companies will need to decide where on this spectrum they want to sit depending upon its appetite for risk and its known customer pain points.
5. Training
Customer experience focuses on how a customer feels and the emotional responses they experience as they interact with your brand throughout their buyer journey. The very first step in doing this is training your team. Since service is one of the most important elements to creating a positive customer experience, each and every provider needs to be caught up to speed on how to adjust their professional practices to fit your company’s new approach.Many organisations have company or brand values or a customer focus statement, yet only a few bring these alive for their people in a way that enables them to bring it alive for their customers. The reason for this is that most organisations see training as the solution; but all too often, it’s actually part of the problem. Employees should feel confident and comfortable with the technology systems they rely on to do their jobs. Customers get uneasy when the staff is struggling and getting frustrated. The following customer service training games may seem trivial, but they do more than simply drive a concept or point home: they help foster a sense of teamwork and shared direction. In order for your company to be able to craft and deliver an awesome customer experience strategy, you’ll need the whole team on board. To pull this off, your service team will need the right tools and resources to learn how to deliver a top notch experience.Better tools, role-based configurations, and effective training will help eliminate headaches.
6. Data Protection
There is no doubt that customers are sharing increasing volumes of personal data across multiple aps, devices and platforms. They do so willingly, given the convenience the apps offer in terms of quick payments, home delivery and visibility. In modern digital marketing, personal data is a critical resource for generating profits. After all, this information is what allows organisations to create automated, tailored experiences that win customers.Before companies can improve customer experience and deliver the experience customers expect, they must work on building trust. Protecting data is a major focus on any customer service plan.The stronger the trust a company builds with customers, the more likely it is to succeed in its mission to improve customer experience. Trust is usually built on experience. However it is only part of what an IT team or an outsourced MSP can do. Better IT also produces better data in the first place, which allows you to refine business processes and improve the customer experience. The Data Protection Act states that businesses must take all possible action to protect the data they collect from customers. Not use the data in ways that have unjustified adverse effects on the individuals concerned.A company with a demonstrable track record of respecting and protecting customer data and privacy is already ahead of the game. If you’ve suffered a breach in the past, transparency about what was compromised and how you solved the problem will be rewarded, though it takes time to rebuild confidence among consumers.
7. IT Recovery Solutions
Downtime that lasts hours or days, though, is much more memorable and can create problems for employees and customers alike. In an effort to convert previously dissatisfied customers into loyal ones. Successful companies have a process that not only mitigates incoming customer complaints, but also make the customer feel really good about the experience. The goal of service recovery strategies is to identify customers with issues and then to address those issues to the customers’ satisfaction to promote customer retention. Instantly run physical and virtual systems with full failover and fail back capabilities on emergency or on an as needed basis.
It makes a lot of sense especially in our pandemic and lockdown situation we need technologies to ensure customers ordering from home and getting stuff delivered as fast as possible. Good post it was super interesting.
Really good tips for customers experience strategy. Thanks for sharing
Customer experience needs to be baked into any brand’s strategy.
With unhappy customers your business is destined to fail,. Because one unhappy person can tell 100 of their friend what you don’t want them to know.
Better safe than sorry.
Companies who successfully implement a customer experience strategy achieve higher customer satisfaction rates, reduced customer churn and increased revenues.
Great information! As a small business owner, I struggle with consistently offering an excellent customer experience. But it nice to know that technology can help.
An innovative mindset is very much needed to enhance customer strategy. Great post, you pointed out the correct methods for doing so.
Innovation and proper communication really help in conveying the brand’s strategies. It’s nice to also see feedbacks from them. We can definitely utilize the technologies.
Data protection is so important for customers now and days and insuring customer data is protected by continuity . Data is more valuable than gold now and days. Excellent article
If we want to have a successful business, we need to have satisfied customers. And investing in customer satisfaction is an ongoing process. You have excellently highlighted and described 7 options of how we can improve the customer experience with the help of technology. Great article!
Friendly greeting,
Nina
Good customer experience is always the goal of any marketer or business owner. Great tips! I’ll put that in my mind.