Customer experience (CX) is everything. It directly drives the cost of acquisition, improves activation and engagement and increases retention and business growth.
CX isn’t just the moral thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do. It’s not just about ‘making life easier’ for your customers and prospects. Improving the way you interact with customers on every level and across every channel fundamentally ensures that your business can grow.
“Customer Experience is an intangible feeling with tangible results.”
– Vaishali Dialani, Customer Experience Analyst at Konabos Consulting
Feelings are the foundation of CX but it’s not just a feel-good function. Here’s how your organisation can improve customer interactions and subsequently reach new heights.
Historic context is vital
Customers don’t often manage to interact with the exact same contact centre agent every time they call. Seldom do customers get to speak to the same employee from an organisation each time they get in touch via a website chatbot. However, that doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that no matter who the person is that picks up the phone, or opens the chatlog, they must understand the customer’s query or issue. That’s how resolution occurs.
To understand the current issue, and the scenario and relationship as a whole, there must be context.
By storing contextual data on every customer and their historic relationship with your organisation, you unlock the ability to respond not only in a human way, but in an intelligent way. Thus, improving the efficiency of the interaction and supporting your staff.
Work cross-functionally
All departments must work together to ensure that customer data is shared and understood organisation-wide. For example, if a complaint is made about a payment feature, contextual data should be shared across multiple departments including:
🆘Customer care so that they can help the customer resolve the issue and reassure them that it will be sorted.
🖥️Marketing and IT so that they can fix the problem with the payment system on the website.
💰Finance so that they know this individual payment may be late, and that other customers may have the same problem.
This not only ensures business productivity and faster problem resolution for the customer, but every department within the organisation understands the context that may have a knock-on effect, and the valuable learnings and data can be stored for future analysis. If similar issues arise with customers in a particular age bracket, or in a particular country, the business can find the definitive solution faster.
For example, elderly vulnerable customers may just be having trouble navigating the payment system, or there may be a regional problem with the payment systems in certain countries.
Communicate with consistency
From the early stages of the customer journey, the business should communicate with consistency. Research suggests that…
46% of customers believe consistency is the most important factor in CX. [Reve Chat]
Consistency from Day 1 ensures that customers have realistic expectations of what is likely to transpire. A customer knows that when they ring up their bank, they will have a security check, and then speak to an agent. If the security check didn’t occur every time, the customer may ring up in haste one day, only for their problem to be delayed while they complete their checks.
Tangibly, it may seem that a customer would be more satisfied that they didn’t have to spend two minutes answering questions and inputting numbers on the keypad every time they call, however, the consistency of this means customers expect it, and are more than happy to comply.
Consistency of communication goes beyond just the consistency of processes. It also extends to the words agents say and the style they converse in.
This is also why understanding historic context is key, and why customer data is so valuable to an organisation.
👴An elderly customer may want to be asked how they are and have a moment of small talk at the start of the conversation.
👨💼A corporate customer may require a speedier resolution, for which small talk would negatively impact the perceived value of the fix.
👦A younger customer may require some additional support or explanation to understand the terminology being used when describing specific product features.
How can Liquid Voice help?
When we look at these three primary areas, we can clearly see a trend that data is vital in ensuring a high quality CX. Historic and contextual data is paramount when interacting with customers regularly, especially when the agent in question changes for each interaction.
If you would like to find out more about how you can improve your customer interactions with data and analysis, you can browse our innovative solution that enables the recording, storage and analysis of interactions.
