In today’s world of demanding customers, transparency via social media and a challenging business environment in general, customer experience is more important than ever. Delivering the right customer experience is one way that companies – your company – can differentiate from the competition, build their brand and create loyal customers. The right customer experience takes five things into consideration.
Your Brand
Your brand is who you say you are. It’s the promise that you make to your customers and it sets expectations. Your customer contacts are the proof. It’s imperative that the overall experience that your customers receive in customer contacts across all channels delivers on your brand's promise. Customers need to feel your brand values in practice.
If one of your brand values is ‘TRUST’, how are you conveying this in phone or email contact? Take time to think about how you want your customers to experience your brand values and how you want to bring these to life in your organization. The first step is knowing what your brand values are. Then you can mobilize your organization to proactively translate them into your daily activities.
The right customer experience delivers on your brand promise.
Your Customers
It’s important to think like your customer. Not the one-size-fits-all customer, but different types of customers. As customers, we are a sort of summing up of a number of things:
Who we are (work, education, experience)
How we behave (impatient, shy, self-directed)
What drives and influences us (money, love, family)
Because we are different and bring these differences into our relationships with companies we do business with, we have different expectations and needs in terms of what for us is the right customer experience. In the contact center world, it’s important to understand these differences and to use them to your advantage in making choices in how to treat your customers.
The right customer experience is dynamic based on who the customer is.
The Customer Need
Companies have become extremely good at translating customer needs into internal processes so that each employee understands what the company wants them to do in their daily workflow. One of the dangers of this is that we forget what the customer need is behind this process. The key to keeping the customer need front and center is to think like the customer. In this case the ‘I’s’ have it. Customer’s state their need from the ‘I’ perspective:
Take the time to translate your internal processes back to the customer perspective. It will help your agents understand where the customer is coming from so that they can take them by the hand and lead them through the internal process in a way that is right for them.
The right customer experience recognizes the need from the customer’s perspective starting from the very first word…’I’.
The Channel Strengths
Channels are different and have their own characteristics. Customers don’t have a channel preference but have different preferences depending on their needs and their circumstances. They will choose the channel they want to use based partly on the characteristics of the channel. A couple of examples:
A customer who is looking for information about a product will jump on the internet and research their needs. There’s lots of content, it’s simple and they can do their research when it suits them.
A customer who urgently needs advice will choose a channel that supports interaction and personalized advice based on their own situation, such as the phone.
The right customer experience recognizes and leverages the channel strengths.
The Context
Customers are dynamic. They are affected by circumstances and this can influence their behavior in choosing a channel and in how they act in that contact moment. Context is extremely important in understanding how to interact with the customer. For example, a customer who prefers to do everything themselves via internet is unable to access the channel because there is a service disruption. What will they do instead? Call. But they may not be happy about it.
The right customer experience takes the customer’s context into consideration.
The synergy between the five keys is the right customer experience
The right customer experience is a balance between the best interests of the customer and the best interests of the company. By using the five keys, companies can achieve this balance and deliver the right customer experience and drive business performance.
