Signed, sealed, delivered
Jonathan Sharp is CEO of Britannic
Customer experience over the last few years has diminished by 57% (Customer Contact Week Digital) with one of the biggest challenges with companies not handling complaints well. The Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) stated 17.3% of UK customers are experiencing a product or service problem, the highest overall level since records began in 2008, costing British business £9.24 billion a month in staff hours.
Managing and handling customers’ complaints is essential to grow your business especially as 80% (Zendesk) of customers will leave you after one bad experience and then share their views online for all to see.
The culture of ‘signed, sealed and delivered’ appears to be upon us with companies disregarding customers once the product or service has been bought. By not closing the loop and following through to see if customers are satisfied and dealing with complaints efficiently and quickly companies are at risk of losing customers to competitors.
Listen up
Customer complaints are the answer to improving your products and services, by listening to what you are doing wrong you can correct it. If you don’t know what the complaints are then you can never improve and grow.
By listening to your customers, you are developing a strong relationship showing them they matter, 70% (McKinsey) of the customers’ journey is dictated by how the customer feels they are being treated so you have to exceed their expectations to demonstrate you value them.
First class journey
Customers’ expectations have increased tenfold they now expect instant personalised service 24/7 so it is vital that companies live and breathe a customer centric culture that is integrated into all processes and is essentially the beating heart of the organisation.
To ensure your customer experience journey is seamless it must be well designed at every touchpoint from finding out about the product or service, right from the ordering, shipping, after sales and dealing efficiently and quickly with complaints, and then closing the loop to see if they are satisfied.
Customer experience needs to be viewed as an evolutionary process that is continually edited and improved to build strong relationships with your customers ensuring they stay loyal to you. The answer lies in the planning, executing and monitoring the customers’ journey. It is this that will determine your success.
For tech’s sake
Companies must act fast and move with the times, but they also need to be mindful of slowing down to plan properly and not lose sight of what they want to achieve. Rushing out to buy and deploy the latest tech will not improve your customer experience overall.
Planning the customer experience journey needs to be approached holistically and not in isolation. Technology needs to be planned correctly on how and it will improve your customers’ journey on each touchpoint.
Customer experience needs to be viewed as an evolutionary process that is continually edited and improved to build strong relationships with your customers ensuring they stay loyal to you
It’s all in the plan
Too many companies deliver services without knowing what the objectives and success criteria will be. With technology services and solutions, you must understand the business needs and how that translates into the technology otherwise the tech will go unused and wasted; lost in translation.
Providers should work closely with customers and immerse themselves in their business understanding how their processes work and how they can improve them for the staff and the customers to make them more efficient.
An effective way is to run workshops working with the people that will use the technology and discovering what the pain points are and how they can be improved. Then you can set realistic strategic objectives and key metrics for success.
Data has the answers
Learn as much as you can about your customers analysing and monitoring your customers’ interactions. Whether that’s voice calls, emails, WhatsApp chat, web chat, online comments or text messages AI solutions can extrapolate key words and phrases from them identifying trends and patterns in the data so you can gain deeper insights into their behaviour, perceptions, purchasing history and personal preferences.
Data analytics let you get under their skin, enabling you to benchmark where you are so you can ask – where do we want to be and how are we going to get there? The critical element here is to ensure you deliver that change and how you measure it at the different touchpoints throughout their journey.
Helping you to manage change
Digital transformation is no mean feat, but it is a vital to ensure you succeed and deliver ROI. Consultative technology partners help you manage change through workshops, pilots, training people and setting measurements and performance indicators, and evaluation reports to ensure you get the outcome that you set out to achieve.
Invest in employee training
By holding training sessions and appointing mentors you can roll out the technology solution with the assurance that it will be used.
When deploying AI and automation in the contact centre it is important to stress to your agents that AI will not replace them but will allow them to hand over the daily mundane tasks to the AI solution enabling your agents to handle the more complex high value tasks. Making their job more interesting so you can retain them for longer.
AI solutions are an excellent way to improve the communications processes in the customer and agents’ journey so they can self-serve and they also provide the ability to capture more data to use as business intelligence. Accenture revealed that 57% of business leaders feel that conversational AI deliver a large ROI and 77% of businesses are using or exploring AI.
Closing the loop
Customer experience is all about perception and how companies manage the entire sales process, we like to refer to it as the ‘success process’ because that is what all parties want to achieve a success relationship. Success in communication, ordering, fulfilment, after sales, dealing with complaints and the cycle of improving and evolving to result in a strong relationship where you will continue to nurture them and reap the benefits. Look after your customers and they will look after you!
