• It costs up to 25X more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.
• Improving customer retention by just 5% can send profits soaring up to 95%.
• Loyal customers are 5X more likely to repurchase, 4x as likely to refer and 7x as likely to try a new offering.

With figures like these, it’s no surprise customer retention is a primary business objective, and the stakes are extremely high. Two-thirds of customers are willing to switch brands over a poor customer experience.

It’s no wonder, then, that customer experience is a top strategic priority for driving growth in 2020. The problem is, most companies are ill-prepared to execute on that strategy. While some 87% of senior business leaders say CX is a top growth engine, only one in three feel prepared to address it.

What’s holding them back? Poor data. Customer feedback is notoriously difficult to collect, pinpoint, and track, which makes it difficult to accurately measure customer sentiment, understand issues, and make corrections to drive appreciable improvement.
So, what’s the solution? It’s certainly not burdening customers with more of the same lengthy, generic surveys. If the data companies are producing now isn’t working to reduce churn, the solution isn’t more data–it’s better data with more insights in less time. Here’s how to get it:

  • Make it quick.

    Customers are busy. If they feel it’s going to take too much effort to provide feedback, they simply won’t. Keep your feedback requests short and sweet: a quick 1-5 overall experience rating and a few easy-to-choose attributes will provide the specifics you need without burdening your customers with a lengthy survey.

  • Be immediate.

    Send feedback requests immediately after an interaction and over an immediate channel: mobile devices. By sending quick surveys via SMS as soon customers leave your store or complete a transaction, the experience will be fresh in their minds, resulting in higher response rates and more accurate feedback.

  • Tie experiences to specific employees.

    Give your customers the opportunity to name the specific employee they dealt with—or better yet, include that information in your request for feedback, so the customer can rate and describe the specific person who helped them. By tying the customer experience to the specific employee, you will get measurable, actionable data on each customer-facing employee. By connecting this to internal talent management systems and performance reviews, you can also set goals to improve CX at the individual employee level.

  • Identify employees who impress customers.

    By capturing employee-specific customer experiences, you can clearly identify who interfaces well with customers and who needs training. Without this data, you’re operating on the assumption that no news is good news; i.e., no customer complaints means an employee interacts well with customers. This leaves you in the dark about problematic patterns until they manifest as major complaints or lost business. By tracking CX performance with hard data for each employee, you can correct these patterns before they become full-blown problems and reinforce behaviors linked to higher customer ratings.

  • Reward performance.

    We hear about customer complaints all the time, but rarely do we hear about an employee doing a great job or going above and beyond to deliver superior service. CX isn’t just about how you correct problems– it’s also a function of how you encourage excellence. With an effective customer feedback program that ties CX to specific employees, outstanding performers can be formally recognized and rewarded for their impact.

  • Monitor trends vs. isolated incidents.

    When customers report a bad experience, it can be difficult to determine whether their experience was an isolated incident, or if they’re a particularly difficult customer, or if their experience is indicative of a larger problematic trend. By tracking customer feedback as measurable data, companies can get a clearer picture of what’s happening at the point of every employee/customer interaction. This keeps you from catastrophizing one-off experiences and helps you focus on consistent issues.

  • Intervene immediately.

    Customers can be quick to abandon your brand, so it’s crucial to respond to their issues immediately. However, most customer feedback platforms are cumbersome and slow which means the experience has long-since-passed by the time it shows up on your radar. By implementing immediate feedback solutions, companies can take swift action to intervene if a valuable customer relationship could be in jeopardy.

In an age where keyboard warriors can destroy a brand’s reputation with a single scathing review, and customers seem to be increasingly fickle, customer retention is both more challenging and more important than ever. Particularly in customer-facing industries like retail, hospitality and financial services, it’s imperative to gather actionable feedback to continuously improve upon the customer experience. By implementing a comprehensive people-centric feedback approach, companies can deliver the exceptional service that keeps customers coming back.

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In its simplest definition, customer experience is the sum of all the interactions that a customer has with a company over the course of the relationship and includes the customer’s feelings, emotions, and perceptions of the brand during the course of those interactions. Some people question whether product and price are part of customer experience.

Customer experience is actually the “umbrella discipline,” so to speak, while customer service falls under that umbrella. Customer service is just one of those interactions, one touchpoint in the overall customer experience; servicing customers is one action of many that comprises the customer experience.

Journey maps are a way to walk in – and to capture – your customer’s steps and chart her course as she interacts with your organization while trying to fulfill some need or complete some task, e.g., call support, purchase a product, etc. The map (created with customers, from their viewpoint) describes what customers are doing, thinking, and feeling at each step in the journey. With the right data integrated into the map, you can identify key moments of truth, i.e., make-or-break moments or moments during which the customer decides if she will continue to do business with your or not, and ensure that those moments are executed flawlessly going forward.

Important to the journey mapping process is to have the right customers and the right stakeholders in the room to create the maps. The right customers are those for whom you’re mapping, obviously. We typically identify the personas for which we’ll map before beginning any mapping workshop; the right customers will represent those personas. The right stakeholders include individuals from the cross-functional departments that are either directly or indirectly involved in the journey that you’re mapping.

The customer service experience is one of my favorite journeys to map because it is such a rich experience; it affords such a huge teaching and learning opportunity.

People contact customer service when the product isn’t working right; the documentation isn’t clear; marketing set expectations that the product didn’t deliver; sales sold the dream and not what the product actually does; the invoice is not accurate or hard to decipher; or for a variety of other reasons. Something (i.e., the experience) broke down somewhere upstream, long before the customer even thought about calling – or even wanted to call – customer service.

In other words, when messages are misleading or confusing, when the customer has a complaint about an interaction or a transaction, or when something doesn’t work the way the customer expects, the experience is broken. The resultant action: the customer calls customer service to get help or to get answers.

This call isn’t customer service’s fault. This isn’t a breakdown in service; this is a breakdown in the experience. And so, customer service takes the beating and the anguish from the customer for something that could’ve been designed better upstream. Had that proper design occurred, the number of frustrated customers calling the call center would have been drastically reduced.

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Is your company operating in chaos or clarity? The difference often comes down to creating a knowledge-rich culture.

Modern customers and employees want information on their own terms. In order to best educate employees and provide answers and tools to customers, many customer-focused brands create knowledge-rich cultures. These cultures pride themselves on offering learning and growth opportunities for employees while empowering them to solve customer issues. Many companies have knowledge-rich cultures in silos, which creates chaos and lost opportunities.

When knowledge is kept within departments and not shared with the rest of the company, it creates more escalations of customer issues. A customer could call the contact center with an issue that could be easily fixed by someone in the engineering department, but without that information being shared across the entire organization, the customer’s call is escalated and takes longer to answer. Hare says that companies that build cultures of knowledge sharing solve more calls on the first contact and do it faster with fewer escalations.

When silos are broken down and information is shared across the entire company, employees and customers benefit. Employees have the tools to help customers right away or know where to send customers to answer more technical questions quickly. That knowledge creates job satisfaction for employees and instills confidence in customers that the company knows what it is talking about. For customers, a knowledge-sharing culture creates less frustration as issues can be taken care of accurately and much more quickly.

One of the biggest aspects of customer experience is making the customer successful without regression or pain. That can only be done by instilling confidence in the customer that the employee is their advocate into the company. Employees, no matter if they are in the contact center, finance, engineering or anywhere else in the company, need to use every resource to resolve customer issues. That comes from building a strong culture of sharing knowledge.

Customer experience is the most powerful tool companies have. When customers sense chaos at a company, they will quickly take their business elsewhere. To turn that chaos into clarity, brands of all sizes need to build a knowledge-rich culture that breaks down silos and shares information across borders with employees and customers. Sharing knowledge and instilling confidence benefits everyone in the organization.

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Customer behaviors and expectations develop quickly. To distinguish themselves, companies have to adjust their strategy continuously. The need to fulfill outstanding customer service has nevermore been more significant than now – customers use digital channels more than ever. They expect seamless journeys through their transactions, even when switching between those channels.

So, what are the new expectations of customers? How do you stay ahead of the competition in 2020? Take a look at our essential trends to consider in 2020.

1. Customer service is not limited to a department

As customer experience becomes the main criterion of choice, this area is gaining more importance within companies. While it used to be seen as a cost center solely dedicated to answering customer inquiries, it now has a more central role and is transitioning to a profit center.

We can see a growing interest in customer experience from the C-suite. A YouGov survey found that 97% of executives believe customer satisfaction is key to business success. When top management understands the value of CX, this transposes to the company as a whole. It contributes to driving investment in this area and develops a culture centered around the customer.

To further this vision, companies must rely on a connected ecosystem of tools. An open customer engagement platform provides a seamless experience and promotes the flow of data across divisions. Integrating this tool with CRM or BI enables the leverage of information from customer interactions, which can be used by other departments such as sales and marketing.

2. Customer experience becomes the main criteria of choice

In 2015, a Walker study predicted that, by 2020, customer experience would overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

Modern trends have confirmed this shift. With more competition and fewer opportunities to compete on product and price, customer experience is more important than ever. We now live in “the Experience Economy,” where customers value experience more than the actual product. Leading companies such as Netflix and Amazon reflect this evolution by providing a convenient experience minimizing the customer’s efforts.

HubSpot found that 93% of customers are more likely to be repeat customers at companies with excellent customer service. On the other hand, CITE Research found that customers have ceased doing business with brands an average of four times (five times if we focus on millennials) in the past year after a bad customer service experience.

Prioritizing customer experience is determined to have a positive economic impact: 84% of companies that work to improve this area report an increase in their revenue.

3/ UCaaS + CCaaS make customer experience better

The transition from on-premise to cloud solutions brings several benefits for companies, such as reduced implementation time, costs reduction, and more open frameworks for integrations. UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) and CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) are two of these main cloud services.

UCaaS is dedicated to internal communications between employees, and CCaaS facilitates interactions with customers. They used to operate in two distinct spheres, and these areas are now linked thanks to the Cloud.

This integration encourages a more satisfying customer experience. As aforementioned, customer experience is achieving a more central role and is not limited to a department. In that way, any employee can now have an impact on CX. When frontline employees lack information, they need to access those with the right expertise inside the company, ideally while engaged with the customer. Still, 70% of employees report they have to leave the customer communication app to consult with coworkers – increasing customer wait times and time to resolution.

Having a single platform for both CC and UC reduces the time needed to switch between appsimproving both the employee and customer experience. In a customer-centric organization, all employees have an impact on customer service. Integrating UCaaS and CCaaS is a necessary step to support this vision and is contributing to improved customer satisfaction, retention, and sales growth.

4. The majority of customer interactions are becoming digital

Digital channels are gaining more and more important for customer interactions. Email, social media, and now messaging has emerged as options to phone calls. Customers are used to these channels to communicate within their private circle and anticipate to use the same with organizations.

The multiplication of channels for customer service and new customer habits are supporting the growth of digital. More adapted to customers’ lifestyles, these channels allow them to contact brands on their terms. While the phone is still used, there is a general decrease in its use.

By 2022, Gartner predicts that 72% of customer interactions will involve emerging technologies such as messaging, mobile applications, and chatbots, up from 11 percent in 2017. They also predict that, by that time, phone conversations will make up merely 12% of customer service interactions – vs. 41% in 2017.

The growth of digital requires not only to adopt new channels but also a completely new approach. The new challenge for companies is to go beyond omni-channel to offer multiexperience. It suggests being able to provide seamless and effortless experiences across all digital touchpoints. It becomes apparent that customers are not thinking in terms of “channels” anymore: they naturally choose the contact method that is the most convenient to them.

To adapt to this evolution, brands must adopt an omni-digital strategy that allows you to centralize the management of channels. With this approach, silos disappear, and agents manage any channel with a single tool. We don’t know what customers’ preferences will be tomorrow: by becoming channel-agnostic, brands gain the flexibility to deploy new touchpoints where and when customers expect them quickly.

5. Live-chat use is declining

The death of live-chat is not happening anytime soon. Live-chat is still widely used and relevant for customer service, especially for sales. However, it has some limits, such as its synchronous character, the lack of conversation history, and the limited compatibility with mobile devices.

Messaging is the fastest-growing channel for customer service and tackles these limits. Its asynchronous character doesn’t require customers and agents to stay focused on the conversation. It keeps the conversation history with compatibility across multiple devices. Like live-chat, it can be offered while customers browse the website to answer their questions quickly.

Even though, Messaging is mainly adopted through external channels such as WhatsApp and Messenger. Plus, you can add messages to the brand’s mobile app, thanks to in-app messaging. This provides more control and flexibility on the features and data. The next wave of this technology will be cross-platform: in that way, the brand will be able to deploy its proprietary channels on mobile and desktop with continuity in the conversation.

6. AI empowers customer service agents

As a Forrester study points out, companies must start creating Human-Machine collaborations to free employees to do more meaningful work. There are many ways in which AI can be leveraged to assist agents in their daily tasks. By routing messages, collecting customer information, or providing a knowledge base, AI is saving agents much time. This approach allows them to focus on more value-add tasks such as solving complex issues, identifying opportunities for upselling, or creating a more personalized experience.

A collaboration between chatbots and agents also answers to customers’ expectations: 86% of customers believe there should be an “escalate to agent” option when talking to a chatbot. In that way, they enjoy the best of both parties: instant answers from chatbots for basic requests and interactions with an agent for more complex situations.

Customer experience will rule 2020

2020 will be defined by the central role given to customer experience. This shift began a few years ago and now becomes a reality for most companies. Brands convinced of the value of CX are prioritizing this area to match customers’ expectations more accurately. It is a challenge now to adopt the right strategy and tools, providing multi-experience.

 

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Reading time: 6 min

Customer Experience often lives within Marketing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the two are always aligned. There is even more room for disparity when CX lives in departments other than Marketing. Today we’re talking about your advertising and marketing versus your customer experience, and the importance of making sure that the experience being advertised to your customers is consistent with what your customers actually experience when interacting with your brand.

When advertising doesn’t align with experience

A lot of money and resources are spent on marketing and advertising — creating wonderful visions within customers’ minds about what an experience with any given brand is going to feel like and look like.

We’ve all been to hotels, restaurants and other businesses that provide incredible pictures and a feeling on their website, but then when we get there it doesn’t quite feel the way it did online.

This leaves us feeling like “Wow – our expectations from this brand’s advertising is very different than what the actual experience is.”

That’s an extremely dangerous place to be

When the expectation set by marketing is incongruent with the actual experience, it will not only deter people from returning to your business, but it will also drive those people to potentially go online and share it with the world.

When we say that customer experience is all about consistency across every channel, that includes marketing and advertising. Don’t let your marketing team or advertising agency position you in a way that you can’t realistically deliver. Customers will not be happy, they won’t come back, and you won’t get the ROI from your Voice of Customer program.

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