Below is part 2 of our 4-part series aimed at helping you kickstart your journey of creating a Customer Experience Excellence strategy for your business. To read part 1 of the series, click here
Creating Customer Experience Strategies
Creating customer experience strategies for your business should be as unique as your business itself. While in this blog post, we share some key characteristics, you will want to consider each of these and how they align with your customer’s and your business’s needs. When you have determined your customer’s behavioral patterns consider the following key characteristics as components of your strategy.
Exceed customer expectations
Ensure that your products and services align with the customer’s needs and you can deliver beyond that expectation.
Make their experience easier.
This should transcend all layers of engagement, from learning more about your product or service to getting customer service or support and the purchasing or negotiating process. Look at the customer experience from their lens and tailor it to be as simple as possible.
Listen to your customers.
Regularly provide an easy means to collect their input. Entrust your service personnel to capture customer sentiment and internalize it into the organization for purposeful improvement. Don’t let yourself become trapped in the mindset to ask questions aimed only at a good customer review. You want honest feedback on improving your product, service, support, and purchasing experience. Organizations that embrace an open and inclusive model of constructive criticism learn how to stay in tune with their customers’ needs.
Personalize the customer services experience.
Provide a bespoke customer experience relevant and timely to their current disposition.
Organizations spend a great deal of their energy trying to learn the nuances of their prospects to pitch a sale. Once the sale closes, in our experience, organizations benefit greatly by committing resources to learn more about the customer. Personalizing the customer experience will allow you to achieve the following:
- Customer retention and delighted sentiment
- Customer renewals and brand loyalty
- Customer referrals and brand evangelism
First response closure and timely follow-up.
Providing the correct answer at the first engagement or with a timely follow-up will boost the customer experience in ways that go beyond sentimental offerings, such as a discount coupon.
Organizations that excel in customer success can provide amazing customer support that holds up to expectations in the eyes of the customer. Admittedly, this area is one of the hardest to master. It is tough to please every customer, but you can put in place the tools and strategies for success.
Achieve higher first response closure by
- Implementing well-documented knowledge management tools and materials that empower your staff to answer customer inquiries quickly and correctly
- Provide online or customer-accessible means to the knowledge management materials such as online help guides, product manuals, and FAQs.
- Implement strategies to handle inbound customer requests via various channels such as phone, email, chat-bots, and inbound forms. Use these tools to provide tiered support with regularly monitored Key Performance Metrics (KPIs) that provide insight to measure what is working and how to fine-tune your service team’s ability to provide the best support without burning them out.
Enable customer service engagement from anywhere, anytime.
In a digital universe, you can provide impeccable customer service from anywhere. With a wide range of technologies, you can deliver customer service engagement tailored to your business capabilities and in line with your customer’s expectations.
Organizations can invest in this area over time. You don’t need everything under the sun to be successful, but you need to understand what your customer is looking for when receiving the best customer service given their needs.
Enable, empower and reward employees.
As one of the most important resources that make sure your customers are happy, the service team in your organization should not be treated as a commodity or an afterthought. We find that customer service employees are, more often than not, an extension of a business’s image and how customers evaluate your business as a whole. You sell an amazing hardware appliance, but if your customer support is non-existent or unknowledgeable when a customer needs help to resolve an issue, this will dim the perception of your business.
Automate but don’t replace the human experience.
It is a fear that many service agents often think about when they hear about digital transformation or AI becoming investments within their organization. In our experience, eliminating customer service’s human element turns into customer frustration. More often than not, this becomes a mistake altogether. We have found organizations becoming wildly successful when they enhance the human experience with the right automation. Having just enough technology in the right places can make a customer experience impress and shine, but in the wrong places can become a complete turn-off for customers.
How StrataNorth can help
Are you thinking about improving the customer experience for your business? Do you have a Customer Experience Excellence strategy defined and the technology roadmap to get you there? Let us help you. We can help you go from an idea to execution. StrataNorth is an IT Advisory Consultancy. We help businesses of all sizes adopt the right technology to help them grow, work smarter and deliver the best customer experience. Our consultants have decades of experience in the industry. We are cost-competitive and fiercely independent in our analysis.
If you are ready to transform your business’s operational efficiency and are looking for experts to guide you, StrataNorth has Customer Success Management consultants with decades of experience. We can help you reach Operational Efficiency nirvana and give you a roadmap for success. Reach out for a no-cost, no-obligation chat with a Customer Success Management expert today.
