According to Forbes’ list of CX statistics, 75% of customer experience management executives believe that customer experience, or CX, is extremely important for the company.
There is always space for improvement when it comes to best practices for the customer experience. With a wide variety of touchpoints available for customers to connect with your brand, every channel is an opportunity to impress them with seamless, effective integrations.
But why is improving the contact center customer experience so important? Studies show creating a positive customer experience makes loyal customers. And loyal customers are more likely to repurchase & become brand ambassadors, spreading your company’s culture and values as their own.
According to data by Dimension Data, 84% of businesses that seek to enhance their customer experience report an increase in income.
To improve the customer experience CX in your contact center, envision and develop the ideal experience & ensure your team is prepared to follow through & deliver outstanding service.
Why is it important for businesses to improve the Customer Experience?
A good customer experience is essential for the success of your organization since happy customers become devoted ones who increase sales. It may seem like more work, but concentrating only on the client experience is worthwhile.
Here are the important reasons listed below which are important for improving CX:
⮞ Increased Sales Conversions
Customers who had the best experience in the past spent 140% more than those who had a negative experience. An enjoyable brand experience increases consumer lifetime value (CLTV).
⮞ Increase Customer Loyalty
Any organization may benefit from a great experience. Costs for new customers are seven times higher than those for keeping an existing one. Hence, creating a good experience delights customers & makes sure that they keep doing business with you in the future.
⮞ Higher Client Retention
Prompt service increases client satisfaction and motivates them to stay with you. Customer support issues have drastically decreased as CX has increased. Customers that are happy with the brand decide to stick with it forever.
6 Proven Techniques to Improve Customer Experience
When a customer interacts with your business, whether online, through a referral, or through an advertisement, the customer experience (CX) journey begins. It is crucial for businesses to take all reasonable steps to provide excellent customer service.
Here is a list of the top 6 techniques businesses can use for the best outcomes:
1. Create a Seamless Omnichannel Presence
Providing your customers with a consistent and connected experience across all channels can help you turn customers into more than just happy. Imagine your customers initiating conversations on one channel or device followed by another channel on a separate device and yet receiving a consistent, personalized experience. Not just customers, but adopting an omnichannel strategy can also offer immense benefits to agents. Having a unified space for all interactions ( voice and digital ) can significantly save agents’ time and effort while enabling them to delight customers with more contextual conversations leveraging the unified customer information & interaction history.
How do you achieve CX consistency in your organization?
Here are the top five things you can do to lead your team to achieve a consistent customer experience:
⦿ Track the customer journey across all channels. A thorough understanding of any flaws, weaknesses, or inconsistencies in the customer journey can guide decisions on where resources should be directed and what needs improvement.
⦿ Invest in the right technology to present a single view of the customer. From predictive analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to speech analytics and knowledge management, technology helps you better manage customer data, operate more effectively and efficiently, and close the gap in delivering consistency in the customer experience.
⦿ Create an integrated hub that simplifies data management and governance and brings coherence across channels. This single source of truth not only helps you provide customers with a consistent experience, but it also allows the data to be analyzed and — more importantly — insights into customer engagement to be shared freely throughout your organization.
⦿ Provide employees with the tools and data they need to deliver a better service. Tools that help with load balancing and provide visibility into operations can improve productivity and efficiency across the board. This boosts employee engagement and, in turn, allows for a more consistent customer experience.
⦿ Address other types of silos and work to break these down. Whether between departments, teams, or functions, disparate internal processes can interfere with the implementation of technology and the digitization process. Leaders at all levels must work together to eliminate these silos so that the organization can deliver a better customer experience and forge ahead as a single entity.
2. Personalize Your Customer Service
Today’s consumers desire personalized encounters. In fact, according to Epsilon research, 81% of consumers want brands to understand them better & know when and how to approach them. According to Accenture, 81% of consumers want brands to provide flawless CX.
Personalized customer service can help you effectively bridge the gap between your customers and brands. Customers expect a prompt and reliable resolution to their issues when they approach service agents. Personalized service helps your agents respond faster to customer queries and solve them as per their preferences. This can improve customer service satisfaction and help you reduce cart abandonment and churn.
Customer journeys become smoother, and the relationship between the brand and the customer is strengthened by personalization, which involves adapting the experience based on information about the customer. The power of personalization can be felt if you’ve ever received a marketing email with offers and recommendations based on your past purchases or been able to control what material appears on a website from your user profile.
How can equipping agents with integrated applications or unified customer views help them deliver personalized CX?
Unifying the agent workspace is among the best ways to achieve a unified CX. Unified Agent Desktop equips agents with complete access to customer information in a single window, including data from disparate systems and applications like CRMs, backend data sources, core-industry applications, etc. The best part is that the agent doesn’t have to toggle screens to fetch this data. Instead, a unified view of complete information is showcased on the agent’s screen, which helps drive contextual conversations and deliver personalized customer support.
3. Face-to-Face Connections Through Video Chat & CoBrowse
With face-to-face connections through video chat & co-browse technology, agents can make customer interactions delightful. Video chat and co-browse solutions help customers initiate a video call from the website chat widget so that queries can be explained and resolved efficiently. Also, to assist customers with on-demand handholding, the agent or customer can request a co-browse session, enabling the agent to determine by looking at the customer’s screen. Video chat and co-browse help eliminate long waits and incorrect communication with personalized, face-to-face engagements, improving CX and AHT scores.
4. Leverage the Potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Currently, voice-processing chatbots powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning make the experience much simpler for customers. Around 16,000 interactions are handled by a single bot, eventually improving customer service in the contact center industry. These conversational chatbots assist customers virtually by resolving their grievances in a more refined and personalized manner and liberating them from the web of excruciating waiting games. For customers who are reluctant to interact on phone calls, chatbots address their issues via messaging platforms.
AI-powered chatbots can comprehend the intent behind your customers’ requests by utilizing machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). They can also account for each customer’s full conversation history when dealing with them. Chatbots can help businesses by reducing response times and providing answers to up to 80% of frequently asked questions, saving up to 30% on customer support costs.
Why does the contact center industry need Chatbots?
Not only do B2C businesses utilize chatbots; in fact, the B2B market has a greater adoption rate. Relay’s analysis revealed that 58% of businesses utilizing chatbot features were classified as B2B.
The contact center industry as a whole is majorly influenced by the quality of customer service delivered by service agents. A company needs to provide proficient customer service to develop customer loyalty for its brand.
However, it is accepted and acknowledged that responding to all customer queries without delay is an immensely challenging task for contact center agents. To dodge through the endless pile of tickets and queries, AI-based chatbots came to the rescue. Chatbots are an important investment for agents to address such challenges, and here’s why the industry needs them.
5. Deploy a Self-Service Approach
Too many complicated menus, which increase call resolution rates and cause annoyance for your customers, are the most obvious problem with IVR communication. In contrast to IVR, visual IVR reduces active call time and assures that customers have access to self-service options via digital IVR menus. This approach offers a clear awareness of possibilities for more precise responses. Since most customers prefer to contact brands via their smartphones, tablets, and computers to ask questions or report problems, businesses may profit from omnichannel customer engagement using Visual IVR’s basic capabilities. Customers may simply access Visual IVR through it and use it at their own pace. Additionally, this self-service IVR procedure speeds up outbound call processing time and enhances call resolution. Hence, Visual IVR gives customers the best digital way to self-serve queries more comfortably.
6. Nextgen Social Media Experience Management
Social media is a powerful tool for communication, enabling businesses to connect with customers wherever they are, establish their brands, and grow their clientele. If done properly, social media marketing may also boost the effectiveness of other marketing strategies, such as SEO and SEM, by assisting in the development of natural connections and generating traffic, awareness, brand recognition, and positive word-of-mouth. Social media usage has changed as digital marketing becomes more sophisticated. It is no longer a means of making friends or communicating with individuals throughout the world. Much more than that is involved.
Grow your business and connect with potential customers. Brand influence on social media always increases thanks to various social platforms. For example, when customers tag agents on social media, they receive notifications & through that, they can respond to those queries. Through this social media, experience management agents are reaching out to customers & solving their problems which in turn helps improve CX.
Wrap-Up
The above six proven techniques are the best strategies businesses can use to provide a superior customer experience in the contact center industry. Companies can create a competitive advantage & build long-term relationships by personalizing customer experiences. It involves making it easy for customers to get help, being responsive, training employees, & using customer feedback to improve.
With the proper CX plan in place, your company may improve customer experience and become more customer-focused, both of which have long-term benefits. Therefore, concentrating on enhancing the customer experience will go a long way, regardless of whether you run a small firm or a large enterprise.
