You know that positive customer experiences increase your chances of repeat purchases and referrals – and you’d like to take steps to ensure that your customers have the best experience with your business. You’re wondering how to improve customer experience and get ahead of your competitors. Here’s what you need to know.
What Impacts the Customer Experience?
Customer experiences begin the moment they realise your business is out there. It starts with the marketing message that says “Hey, we’re here and this is what we have to offer.”
If your message resonates with them, customers begin to interact with your business. They may visit your website, give you a call, send you a message, or visit your premises. What they experience during this exploration phase helps them to decide whether they want to make a purchase.
Given that their experiences so far tick all the right boxes, your customer decides to make a purchase. The next experience they use to judge your company will be based on what happens now. Was it easy to buy or subscribe? Did they receive what they ordered quickly? When they evaluated your product or service, did it have the features and benefits you promised? If they had to contact support, were they given good service and a speedy resolution of their query?
Finally, your customer gets down to using what they bought from you. They’ve been led to believe that it will make something easier or better than it was before, but does it really? If it does, they’re still happy with their experience as a customer, and they continue to use your product until it’s time for a replacement. They’re already aware of your company. Will they support it again? The sum total of their experiences decides whether they’ll be back for more.
Empower Your Employees
Interpersonal contact is one of the key elements of a positive customer experience. From pre-sale enquiries to after-sales support, your customers will be expecting more than scripted responses that don’t quite fit their enquiries. While scripts have their place, your employees should know when to deviate from them and what they may offer to do in response to enquiries or complaints.
Even non-customer-facing employees should have the customer in mind when doing their work. Give them the confidence to raise concerns and reward them for suggesting ways in which customer experience can be improved.
Use Tech to Create Breakthrough Customer Experiences
If you’re wondering how to improve customer experience and satisfaction, tech will have some of the answers. Tech tools’ usefulness begins where the customer experience commences: with your marketing. Customer relationship management platforms help you to identify the messages that captivate your target market. They should also alert you to attempts to interact with your business, and prompt responses will be make-or-break at this stage of the game. The user-friendliness of your website or the ease with which they are able to locate and do business with your physical store will be the next element, and tech can be helpful in both instances.
Next, comes the business of doing business. Tech tools help your customer service operatives to know about any previous points of contact, and guide their reaction to further enquiries – and of course, your checkout, be it physical or virtual, should allow them to purchase what they want with ease.
Next comes the part of the customer experience journey that many businesses neglect: after-sales service. Tech tools can help you with basics like sending out a mail to check whether your customers are happy with their purchases; your knowledge base helps self-service clients to get answers; and your customer service and support staff intervene when queries transcend what bots and knowledge bases can assist with.
All the while, personalised recognition is made possible thanks to accumulated customer data organised on a single platform that allows staff an overview of the customer journey to date. Your customer has the benefit of in-person support that doesn’t require them to explain every detail of what has transpired so far. It’s a clear illustration of how to use data to improve customer experience.
Embrace an Omnichannel Mindset
Customers want convenience, good service, and a product that resolves a problem. No matter how good your product is, convenience and good service will be key to the customer experience. Miss a beat, and you’ve lost that advantage. So, if you’re geared for receiving calls and emails, but fail to respond to messages on social media, for example, you’ll lose out if customers reach out to you on the platforms where you have a presence but don’t carefully monitor communications.
Think of every possible way in which your clients may contact you, and ensure you’re geared to respond promptly and efficiently. And since your customers are quite capable of changing channels based on what’s convenient at any given time, be ready to collate information across channels before responding with counter-questions they may already have answered elsewhere, or recommendations they may already have tried to implement.
Your aim is personalised service that leaves clients feeling as well served if they are your 5 millionth customer as they would if they were your one-and-only customer.
Use Customer Journey Mapping
A customer journey map is a visual tool that presents your customers’ current position on their customer journey with your business. Understanding what has passed so far, where they are now, and what comes next, helps your customer service personnel to empathise with your customers and guide them towards a solution.
Analysing those maps helps you to spot areas that are inconveniencing your customers and work to address them. Nobody calls for help just for fun. Can you eliminate the reason why your customers are struggling with your business, its products, or its systems? You’ll not only have more satisfied customers, you’ll also be able to reduce the amount of time, expertise, and human resources you have to deploy in order to keep your customers happy. Clearly, it’s a win-win situation.
How to Improve Customer Experience in a Call Centre
Most customers prefer self-service options. By the time they reach out for support, they’ve probably explored your knowledge base and they may have had an unfruitful conversation with a chat bot. The last thing they want is to talk to a human being only to find that they aren’t really being listened to and that the responses they get are as mechanical as anything they got out of your chat bot.
They want to talk to someone who listens, responds appropriately, and takes the necessary action to resolve their issue. They could probably do with a bit of empathy too. After all, they’re feeling frustrated and stonewalled. That means hiring high-calibre call centre agents with good communication skills, technical knowledge and emotional intelligence in equal measure. To cap it all, they want 24/7 availability. Is it a tall order?
At RSVP, we’ve been equaling and exceeding the quality of business’s in-house call centre services for many years. We begin by achieving equivalence. We proceed by delivering excellence. We’re aided by advanced technology, and we represent your business with the help of articulate, highly-trained communications operatives. We persevere until enquiries and issues are resolved, and we do that as quickly and effectively as is possible when tech and great people resources combine. Who gets the credit? You do! And that’s just how we like it.
If you’re looking at how to improve your customer experience, we have the personnel, analytics, and dedication to help you take it to the next level – and call centre services are just one of the things we do. You’re invited to find out how to improve customer experience. Will you RSVP?