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Businesses must understand that the growth of their brand is directly proportional to the satisfaction of their customers. The market is saturated daily with plenty of great ideas and
many have fantastic features, just like yours. One ace in the hole to stand out is by building a brand that caters to your customer's needs, including ease of use. You risk losing revenue and relationships when customers are unsatisfied with their experience of your brand. In fact, in our 2022 Financial Services CXM Impact Report, 3 of 4 businesses have actually walked away from a financial services product or service onboarding when it became too complicated or confusing. Imagine putting the effort in to land a customer and losing them before they even begin using your service!
According to other research, over 60% of customer-centric companies are more profitable than their competitors. Customers are constantly modifying their tastes and demanding more from their CX; only brands that put their customers first may hope to survive the market's volatility.
Therefore, creating solid strategies to build customer experience best practices is key to proving yourself as customer-centric, winning trust and loyalty to your brand. To have a successful customer experience management (CXM) transformation, you need a realistic idea, a powerful strategic CX framework, swift execution of created solutions, and adherence to the following CX management tips.
Best Practices to Increase Customer Experience
As pointed out earlier, your business is vulnerable to becoming lost in a sea of lookalikes if you do not practice an authentic customer-centric culture. It also reduces loyalty to your brand and your customer retention metrics. See these five best practices to boost CX management.
Create a Customer-Centric Strategy
Generally speaking, customer experience is the overall quality of interactions during a customer's lifecycle in your business.
Everything from brand discovery to purchasing products or services must be streamlined to foster customer satisfaction. An excellent CX strategy, leveraging technology like Ovation CXM
increases the productivity and reduces friction among every team, channel, and platform to deliver a good experience. It anticipates the customer's needs and provides solutions effectively, thereby avoiding bad customer experiences before they happen.
Here are some tips for creating an efficient strategy that understands your clients' needs.
● Be proactive. Predicting the needs of your customers and providing services that will help solve their problems even before they ask you is very important. One way to do that is to increase the visibility of your customer journey from end to end, even if part of their buying, onboarding or support journey is fulfilled by another partner in the ecosystem.
Own the entire CX by utilizing technology like OvationCXM to aggregate interactions from all of the systems you use into a single pane of glass so you have a 360-degree view of the customer. That comprehensive view provides a much clearer picture of what the customer needs today and highlights gaps where you can meet unspoken needs.
In addition, proactive customer service allows clients to solve their problems without waiting for help. How? Provide on-demand knowledge that they can self-serve in the moment they need it to keep moving forward. If you can employ AI to anticipate needs at different stages of the journey, even better.
● Don't brush aside customer feedback. Expeditiously collect feedback data from all interaction touchpoints such as emails, chat, phone, SMS and more. If you can have a single thread of all of the conversations you have in one place in which teams can collaborate, that will help to maximize insights and identify trending questions or issues.
● Be accessible and available. Be easily accessible to provide rapid responses to your customers' queries. In our CXM Impact Report, we learned that 30% of businesses will wait just 24 hours before giving up and finding another option if their issues or questions with a banking product are not addressed.
Provide Quick Response Features
Over 62% of users reported that they are more likely to return to a website that answers their burning questions quickly and offers real-time assistance. Delayed responses to consumers negatively impacts your customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. The consequences of a low CSAT score include bad word of mouth, negative reviews, and an overall bad customer experience, which in turn, poses a risk to your business. Therefore, it is imperative to empower your support team with tools and technology that allows them to find the answers to help customers and then provide them in the moment they are most needed.
Here are some vital customer experience management best practices for handling response time.
● Use chatbots to address customer queries round the clock. They will deliver responses to customers instantly if you automate repetitive support customer tasks or questions with AI chatbots. Making those conversations available to everyone involved in the customer journey so they can pick up and help the customer seamlessly without asking for infomation or trying to figure out where the process left off will be imperative. This medium can help identify the problem quickly and boost your quick response score.
Implementing a live chat feature to answer your business customers' queries in real-time is always a positive, especially today as consumers expect more intuitive, responsive service.
● Organize an extensive knowledge base. Businesses told us in our Financial Services CXM Impact Report that some of their greatest frustrations during onboarding was centered around missing instructions, confusing information or simply not being able to get responses to unclear information fast enough. On-demand knowledge that allows consumers to self-serve what they need (and the teams that serve them, too!) allows them to break through obstacles without leaning into support teams. It can create a better customer experience as well as treamline operations and costs for your business, positively impacting your bottom line. Knowledge bases can include the FAQ and your troubleshooting section, but it can also be articles served up with how-to’s on common milestones and next steps.
For many consumers, fast response quality is a determining factor in deciding if they want to continue to engage with a brand.
Analyze Customer Experience Metrics
How do you know if your customer experience management strategy works if you don't measure its impact? Beyond measuring the return on investment (ROI) that your CX strategy produced, you need to analyze which techniques had the greatest positive impact on customer satisfaction and improve on them. Surveys, CSAT, CES and of course, Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are great tools for measuring customer satisfaction.
You could set up a periodic customer satisfaction assessment (CSAT) score questionnaire or poll to gauge your customers' perception of your service. It will also show you which of your best practices work better with your audience.
You could also use a customer effort score (CES) survey to gauge the customer's experience during an interaction with your brand, whether positive, neutral or negative.
You could auto-deploy an NPS- Net Promoter Score- across all your customer touchpoints with "likely to recommend." The questions are scored with a zero-ten scale where “zero” shows a
bad customer experience and the likelihood to not recommend. In contrast, a “ten” shows immense customer satisfaction and likelihood to recommend.
Whatever you do, ensure you understand your customer's satisfaction levels by asking them what they say they need to keep them happy. Take an outside-in view, seeing how they experience your company through their eyes.
Regularly Train Your team
An untrained team is a challenge to business success, and it can be hard to ensure they have the information and tools they need. You can lose customers' trust when your team is ill-equipped to handle their problems. Business owners surveyed in our Impact Report reported that they often felt their bank account team didn’t understand the financial product or service they had. Uh-oh. That is not good.
Not only should teams be involved in ongoing training to keep them updated on new customer service tools. But, they should also have easy access to product and service information served to them so they don’t have to spend time hunting it down. Adequately equip your employees with all the necessary information and skills requisite for communicating with customers on all levels.
Here are some customer experience management best practices for the practical training of team members.
● Teach them how to listen, understand and proffer the right solutions to customers' needs. Effective listening and comprehension skills are crucial to understand where the
actual problem lies and then ensure a smooth resolution to the customer interaction.
● Ensure that all your employees (not just customer service reps) get the same high-quality training on products and services to handle tough queries with the right tools.
● Use activity-based techniques such as role-playing to provide opportunities for your service reps or agents to practice their knowledge of your product or services in real-life
situations. In other words, merely teaching them what to do is not enough; create a medium for them to practice what they have learned.
Foster Loyalty to Your Brand
The servicing and support journey will become the actual day-to-day thermostat of your relationship with your customer. As they say, your best customer is the one you already have,
so be sure to map out your support and servicing experiences to determine if there is friction or obstacles that create frustration. Not only can you identify challenges with customer journey mapping, but very often, mapping the journey also showcases opportunities to better serve them with a product or service that’s a good fit.
Often, companies we work with are amazed at gaps in service that were simply not evident until they could see the entire customer journey and conversations that took place across different channels in one thread.
This type of advanced visibility - in which interactions can be viewed anywhere they happen - with any partner- in any channel - is what makes CXMEngine, our CXM platform, different from any other. While legacy systems, like CRMs, show interaction data within a business line or department, it does not have functionality to display the full journey in the ecosystem. Our
platform plugs into the most popular legacy systems, like Salesforce, ZenDesk, phone systems and more and pulls all of the interactions that take place in different systems into one view so all of the teams within the organization can see a complete view of the customer. Your teams always know where the customer is in a journey, concerns they have, what’s the next step to solve them, and who is responsible. Every conversation is also visible, whether it started in chat but moved to phone and then email. You can move along with the customer, responding in a single thread easily. All of these multi-channel conversations are displayed in one place, so teams don’t have to ask the customer for details of their situation - they can see it clearly!
The business outcomes from delivering exceptional customer experience using OvationCXM are nothing short of stellar. Our clients report 10% increase in revenue, 25% decrease in
support costs, 60% boost in NPS scores which lead to retention and 50% increase in employee satisfaction.
Follow up is vital to show customers more exciting features, products, or services that may provide solutions to their recent problems. Even if they end up not purchasing anything, follow up! When you follow up with your customers, it gives them the feeling of being cared for, and that's what you want to inspire in them if you want your customers to remain loyal to your brand.
Lastly, consider creating incentives through loyalty programs or campaigns to keep your customers engaged with your brand and entice potential clients to convert.
Conclusion
Today’s business customers have higher expectations than ever before as they compare the interactions they have in their personal lives with those in their working world. OvationCXM’s
CXM SaaS platform emerged from this growing need to level-up customer experience management to keep pace with technological innovations and expanding, complex third-party
ecosystems of third-parties that are increasingly involved in delivering part of a product or service.
You must meet customers' increasing expectations, but in doing so, you can boost rising revenue for your business. Investing in CXM technology is the only way to do so effectively and efficiently. It’s an investment that allows businesses to pull more value from their legacy systems so they can do more with what they already have and enjoy the business outcomes.
Ovation CXM with its exclusive journey orchestration module will also allow more simplified, streamlined and personalized customer interaction than that of your competitors. An effective CX strategy, leveraging CXMEngine, ensures clients see your brand as more professional than others, and that increases the liklihood that they will share the good news about your services with others.
To learn more about CXMEngine, visit our overview page.
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