4 Ways to Help Enhance Customer Interactions
No matter their profile, companies are improving their customer experience (CX). As customer expectations increase, companies are rising to meet them but within increased technological literacy, customers continue to expect more.
Today, 75% of organizations claim an increased investment in CX technology. With many software solutions available that promise smoother customer interactions, it’s difficult for organizations to pick the right technology in support of their customer experience strategy. Fortunately, this shortlist of essentials will help your company deliver exceptional experiences—even to the neediest of them.
1. Cross-Company Initiatives
Traditionally, organizations viewed the customer experience as the responsibility of customer service, but that has changed with a shift in customer attitude, generated by technology and vendor options. The market is changing rapidly to keep pace and broadening the idea of the customer experience to the entire team.
According to Deloitte, the main drivers of consumer change resides in consumer identity. The study finds, millennials are the broadest segment of the B2B and B2C providers’ customer base. As the most heterogeneous and educated consumer category, millennial needs are specific and informed, with their spending habits varying from previous generations.
What does this mean for your company when aiming to enhance customer experiences?
Your organization can no longer rely on a single department designated to take care of your customer. From now on, such initiatives have to be taken at a cross-company level with appropriate implication levels from sales, marketing, and support.
It also means that there is no longer a single ideal communication channel that will consolidate your position in customer interactions.
As your customers are getting more informed, complex, and impatient, supplying various communication means becomes the best practice. Everything from chatbots to social media interactions, live assistants, and self-service support options matters to today’s customers. Branching out communication channels also means more involvement from all departments in customer interactions, but it also allows you to add a human touch to your CX. As we previously discussed here, this is fundamental for your CX strategy to succeed.
2. Be Mindful of Recurring Customer Interactions
Pay attention to your existing customers because renewals or repeat purchases generate a significant proportion of company revenue. Acquiring new customers can be 5x to 25x more expensive than maintaining existing customers satisfied.
But how can your company ensure that existing customers remain in your portfolio? By offering streamlined, effortless interactions with your brand and a high CX level.
According to Gartner, happy customers are almost 75% more likely to renew subscriptions than dissatisfied customers. Thus, increasing the service quality, you deliver to existing customers the best service you can, so your organization retains them and accelerates revenue.
To ensure proper support and service throughout your customer relationships and boost renewal chances, invest in advanced CRM and customer support software. Generally, sales and customer support automation software supplies all the tools and features to streamline the customer support and renewal process. For example, some customer support software products offer quick overviews of all your company’s subscriptions and automate the renewals process, contributing to delivering higher levels of customer experience.
3. Lower Customer Effort Scores (CES)
How long does it take for a customer support inquiry to be solved? If you’re not aware of the answer, you’re probably not tracking your Customer Effort Score (CES). CES is a customer experience survey metric that measures the ease of customer interaction and resolution during a request. The better this benchmark is, the higher the increase in customer loyalty. Helping your customers is not limited to solving all their support inquiries. It also consists of reducing their callback rates, thus effort score. Let’s say that your customer calls for a technical issue they are encountering. You successfully solve it, but you notice that their subscription is about to expire. Instead of waiting for another call to renew (or not) their subscription in the future, you ask about their intentions in advance and prevent a callback.
Now that you know what CES is and why it matters to meet your customers’ needs let’s see which is the quickest way to lower CES. Unsurprisingly, this can be efficiently achieved with the right technology and action protocols. Some solutions you want to make sure your business software can provide to help you lower CES are listed here:
- Self-service solutions
- Live support agents
- Global support teams
- Social media outlets
4. Employee Empowerment
Employee empowerment will take you further than just raising the happiness levels within your teams. It has been previously linked to stronger job satisfaction, workplace commitment, and higher job performance. This leads us to conclude that empowered employees are more likely to put more effort into work and if we discuss customer support and experience, more likely to work harder to achieve it.
Now that we know why this benchmark matters within your organization, how can you empower your employees? Offer them easy access to the necessary resources, tools, and systems that help them evolve in their positions and help them help your customers.
Fostering an innovative culture also creates an enabling environment and encourages employees, regardless of department, to look into novel solutions for customer inquiries.
Sometimes those customers that can be the most “needy” are those who might bring your company the best opportunities if the relationships with them are properly cultivated. Fostering the right company culture, being mindful of your recurring customers, and improving your organizations’ critical benchmarks are just some easy ways of helping this client category.
Want to learn more strategies on handling your customers’ needs? Our Essential Strategies for Customer Service Success eBook has all the answers you’re looking for.
