How To Perfect Your Customer Service In The Digital Age

Excellent customer experience should be the fundamental requirement of any business, simply put—the better the customers’ experience, the better the revenue.

Today, businesses are operating in a people-centric environment. Hence, without an excellent customer experience strategy, all other business operations would mean nothing.

Here are some stats to emphasize why the customer and their satisfaction is essential for a business:

70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated. — McKinsey

The probability of selling to an existing customer is up to 14 times higher than the probability of selling to a new customer. – Marketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance

Around the globe, 96% of consumers say customer service is an important factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand. — Microsoft

The customer experience (CX) refers to how an organization engages with the visitors and customers throughout every touchpoint of the customer journey.

The end objective of every customer experience strategy is to make the patrons feel good.

Let’s now look at the benefits of good customer experience to a business:

1. Increased brand loyalty
2. Increased customer satisfaction
3. Increased customer affinity
4. Better word-of-mouth marketing, positive reviews, and
5. Increased ROIs

When Adobe and Ecoconsultancy in their Annual Digital Trends report, asked B2B leaders to state which is the most important opportunity for them to drive revenue in 2020, these were the findings:

Customer experience topped the charts, even surpassing content marketing, video marketing and social media marketing.

So now, let’s understand the 5 important ways to deliver the best customer experience.

Here are the five timeless tried and tested ways to enhance your CX without fail. To see results, you must integrate all of them into your customer experience strategy.

A clear CX vision enables businesses to know what to strive for when it comes to customer experience and engagement. It is a foundational concept or an idea that your company can look to when making decisions about the customers.

CX vision generally materializes into a vision statement.

A well-established and communicated vision statement will inspire action in everyone at every level of an organization. A customer experience vision statement defines an organization’s belief system and how it affects its customers.

• Easy to understand by everyone
• Crisp and clear
• Should have leader buy-in
• Showcases the organization’s beliefs and how it will affect the customers
• Could be associated with a clear roadmap of milestones

Here are some inspiring CX vision statements to give you a better understanding:

“In-store or online, wherever new opportunities arise, Nordstrom works relentlessly to give customers the most compelling shopping experience possible.” – Nordstrom

“At American Express, we have a mission to be the world’s most respected service brand. To do this, we have established a culture that supports our team members to provide exceptional service to our customers.” – American Express

“Deliver exceptional experiences with every interaction, creating lifelong clients who stay with Hagerty but tell their friends about it.” – Hagerty

“We believe that buying glasses should be easy and fun. It should leave you happy and good-looking, with money in your pocket.” – Warby Parker

Since customer experience is the total of all customer interactions with an organization, an organization needs to have a customer experience strategy that works equally well across all platforms — digital or otherwise.

The best practice for it is to be available on all potential points of interaction. The most promising device is a mobile phone, as it opens several doors of opportunity for customer service agents to connect with visitors and customers.

Text messages, chatbots, phone calls, live chat, video calls, emails, etc. are how smartphones can enable customer-agent interaction. Therefore, while structuring a customer service experience it should be seen that it works well across all devices.

• “57% of customers won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website on mobile.”
• “If a website isn’t mobile-friendly, 50% of customers will stop visiting it, even if they like it.”

Companies now understand the importance of delivering a digital customer experience as well as an in-store experience. In its 2020 report, PWC found that the number of companies investing in the omnichannel experience has jumped from 20% to more than 80%.

Src: https://www.superoffice.com/blog/customer-experience-statistics/

Here’s an example of how Dilawri, the largest car dealership group in Canada, created an omnichannel experience for its customer during the Coronavirus pandemic. Here they’re seen promoting their omnichannel potency on their website:

The people at Dilawri to repurpose their business needs, were quick to leverage the use of technology.

Kirk Linkletter, Head of Digital Strategy and Integration, on how Acquire has enabled them to have an omnichannel platform says, “Website chat will help us generate new inquiries and leads, cobrowsing allows us to explain vehicle options to potential customers, and video chat will allow us to conduct remote vehicle walkarounds.”

He adds, “out of the gate, the sales bot will help us engage customers after hours, and we look forward to exploring our use cases for the service bot.”

The No. 1 problem that businesses face, especially when they move online, is the ability to deliver an excellent customer experience. It is because they think that without human-to-human connection like the kind that happens in a physical store is not possible online. And, without such a personal connect delivering good CX is not possible.

While the concern and the thought process is correct, the problem is easily solvable.

Here are two of the most effective solutions:

• Through AI

AI-driven chatbots can greet people by their names on their return, even though it may sound benign, it is very effective. These chatbots can also converse with customers and visitors, and recommend the products/services based on their past behavior, queries, interests, etc.

Here’s how a chatbot by Acquire, a unified customer engagement platform greets customers or visitors when they return.

1. Through actual human interaction

A video chat platform can be beneficial as it supports face-to-face communication. Modern-day live chat platforms can enable HD video calling in just a few clicks. Video customer support helps calm angry customers and make them leave happy. They also help with more customer retention. All thanks to the connection and personalization, a video chat platform creates.

For example, The people at Dilawri, especially acknowledge how video chat helped them simulate a real-time, in-person experience. People can first-hand see the cars they are interested in or want to buy.

Src: https://www.carwow.co.uk/blog/buying-a-car-during-the-coronavirus-covid-19-outbreak

The only way to see if our customer service strategies are working is to know from the customers. For this to happen, a reliable procedure of collecting regular insight from customers after every interaction is needed.

This customer feedback could be a customer’s experience with your product, service, agents, website, or business. This data is collected and analyzed through several metrics, which we will elaborate in point number 5.

It is simply ineffective and a bad business practice when you fail to record and analyze this feedback. It makes you lose out on improving customer experience and making data-driven informed decisions.

Broadly, you can do collect and analyze customer in two ways:

• Automatically record through various metrics

One way is by allowing a mechanism in place to automatically record customer feedback. It could be a pop-up question after a conversation on chatbot, live chat, or an email after a phone call or a video call.

• Actively ask while interacting on a phone call or a video chat platform.

You can also ask your agents not to miss an opportunity to ask customers about the experience while on a phone call or a video call chat. Customer support tools like a video chat platform allow you real-time insights into how you’re making the customers feel.

There are more ways to get customer feedback than the ones mentioned above. You should teach as many as possible in your customer experience strategy since gauging experience is a very subjective thing.

Putting all the CX metrics together, you can get a more unambiguous indication of how good your CX efforts are.

Here are four top metrics used by CX professionals to track customer experience over time:

• Customer Effort Score (CES)

This metric gauges how effortful it was for the customer to perform a particular task with your business. The question asked here is: “How easy was it to get your issue resolved today? With 1: very difficult to 7: very easy”.

• Net Promoter Score® (NPS)

You can get the NPS score by asking one simple closed-ended question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?” It helps measure how likely a customer is going to help you with word-of-mouth marketing.

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT surveys measure customer satisfaction regarding a particular product or service from you. A CSAT score is measured with a 5- or 7-point scale or through binary yes/no answers.

• Time To Resolution (TTR)

This metric measures how quick to respond were your sales agents to solve an issue.

Customers these days have more power and choices than ever before. Thus, you are responsible for understanding and acknowledging their needs. Once you know your customers well enough, you can use it to enhance their customer experience. And that is a definitive way to stay relevant and drive high ROIs.

This post was written by Marcus Clarke and originated on Thrive Global.