Understanding the various touchpoints you have with your customers is key to delivering a memorable customer experience.

Once you’ve mapped out your touchpoints, it’s often helpful to group them into channels. That’s the focus of this blog post.

The most common channels

Websites: refers to customers visiting websites to gather information about a company. Can include both mobile and regular versions of the website.

Native Mobile App: refers to customers who download a company’s iOS or Andriod app, and feedback is gathered about their experience with it.

Contact Center: an important touchpoint where customers call for more information or assistance. Online chat is another part of modern contact centers.

In Location: refers to an actual in-person customer experience, such as a retail store, restaurant, or hotel.

Field Services: customers interact with a company in their home.

Mapping your touchpoints

When you look at all the touchpoints on your map, each of them will likely fall into one of these five channels.

No matter how your customer interacts with you, the ultimate goal is to have a consistent “omnichannel” experience.

When your in-location experience is different from your web experience, or when your web experience is different from the experience a customer has with your native mobile app, this inconsistent CX will create problems.

Customers might feel like the company cares about them after a positive field service experience, but if the contact center fails to provide the same level of experience, the customer will be disappointed.

Keep in mind that if you’re working with a premium brand, all channels will need to deliver an outstanding customer experience. If you’re working with a mid-tier, value-oriented brand, the goal may be to achieve a certain standard throughout each channel, such as professionalism or efficiency.

Gathering omnichannel feedback

If you want a consistent omnichannel experience, make sure you are listening to your customers in each channel! You can gather feedback from these five channels in various ways.

For example, you might ask about their most recent experience with a field services representative through an email survey. How satisfied were you with our technician’s most recent visit to your home? Why? Were there any problems? If so, please describe them.

Or you can gather feedback via methods that are channel specific.

For website feedback, pop-up surveys can ask the customer for feedback while they are on the website or after they leave.

When a customer uses a mobile app, a survey can be embedded into the app asking them to provide feedback.

An interactive voice response (IVR) survey or a computer-generated survey can be used after a customer interacts with a contact center—the system directs the customer to the survey when the call is complete.

We are also seeing more and more text surveys, or Short Message Surveys (SMS), these days as a substitute for email surveys.

The goal is to obtain feedback from the customer in whichever way they prefer to provide you with that feedback.

It will largely depend on the customer. If your primary customers are millennials, they might prefer a text message survey. If you’re working with baby boomers, they probably prefer completing a survey via email at a time that’s convenient for them.

Share:
Reading time: 2 min

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.

Share:
Reading time: 2 min

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.

Share:
Reading time: 1 min

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.

 

Share:
Reading time: 6 min

What Does the Future of CX Look Like?

If you know how critical Customer Experience is to the happiness of your customers and your team, you’re probably already trying to anticipate the next big trends in CX.

Things That Won’t Change Anytime Soon:

1. Customer Experience Still Reigns Supreme

More customers are stating that customer experience is a big part of how they make purchasing decisions. This means more of us are demanding better treatment and are willing to pay for it.

According to a large study by PWC, 73% of us say the customer experience is an important factor.

68% of business-to-business marketers agree that delivering a consistent, high-quality customer experience is very important in today’s marketplace.

Despite this, only 49% of Indian consumers say they’re getting a good Customer Experience from companies.

These numbers will keep going up, meaning that if you aren’t on board the CX train by now, you are already behind your competition.

But don’t fret — Instead, think of closing the CX gap as a huge opportunity. If your organization can address and close the gap, you’ll have a massive advantage in the future.

2. Employee Experience Will Remain One of the Top Influences on Customer Experience

There is no doubt the way employees feel influences how they treat customers.

But this isn’t just touchy-feely stuff. Engaged employees are in demand, and frankly getting harder to keep.

Investing in employees can pay off in big ways, like how Google gives employees 20% of their time to dedicate to their own projects. These independent, employee-driven ideas have created products like Google Maps and Gmail!

So it’s not terribly surprising to learn that the organizations who earned “good” or “very good” employee engagement ratings in the State of CX Management 2018 report by the Temkin Group (now part of the XM Institute) are also much more likely to be ranked as CX Leaders.

In fact, the percentage of CX Leaders who earned “good” or “very good” employee engagement ratings is more than 5-times larger than the percentage of CX Laggards.

Your employees matter more than most pieces of the customer experience puzzle. Don’t expect this to change in 2020 or the future beyond it.

So… What Changes Will Come to CX in 2020?

1. Customer Experience Will Become Part of the Business Operations in More Organizations… But it Will Continue to be an Unpredictable Journey.

More organizations are understanding the importance of customer experience, but they are still struggling with what to do about it.

Some are assigning CX as an additional responsibility to leaders like Chief Marketing Officers or Retail Operations leaders. Some are just asking everyone in the organization to “own” customer experience.

We need to mature past these ways to really start operationalizing CX in our organizations.

This means creating a dynamic loop of gathering customer feedback, assigning real responsibilities and treating CX like we treat sales, marketing or technology.

It’s not an extra part of doing business, it’s simply a part of doing business well.

More organizations will move to this phase in the coming years, but we still have a long way to go!

2.  Agile principles will be brought to CX Innovation

As we (hopefully) move into an era when we’re responding to customer feedback and allowing for more innovation around experience design, we’ll need to act a lot faster than we are today. Organizations that prioritize quick improvements using agile principles will move to the head of the pack.

While agile is typically used among development teams, these same principles to harness change on behalf of customers can be used to innovate around CX.

It’s not just about the technology, it’s about innovation for things like in-store experience and better customer communications.

3. Technology WILL replace some roles in customer service and other departments. New roles will be created.

It’s true that the robots are coming for (some) of our jobs.

Automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will drive real, lasting changes to the contact center structure and overall org charts of many brands. Already, chatbots and other tools are serving customers in big and small ways.

The latest prediction is a 136% increase in the number of organizations that use AI chatbots from 2019 to 2020!

While this can sound frightening, the role of these technologies will actually help customer service agents and others to provide better experiences for customers.

When leveraged well, this means human agents will have customer histories and relevant data served at the appropriate time. The agent can then provide more personalized, relevant experiences in a faster, more convenient way to customers.

It’s critical to provide a seamless transfer between human agent and bot as we learn just what this type of technology can do best. Now we need a different type of role for some of these agents. We need humans to train and supervise the automated experiences these bots are creating.

We can’t think we’ll simply “flip the switch” and replace our human agent force. Humans are still required to connect with customers when they need us the most. Humans are also the only way these tools will be developed and designed in ways that truly put the customer first.

4. Customers will not tolerate outdated technology, processes or communications.

Customers understand so much more than they ever did.

Because we all have access to so much more information now, brands can no longer hide behind press releases or advertising.

As customers, we want brands to respond not just to our needs, but the needs of the world around us. Outdated technology is a signal to customers that the overall experience might not be a priority. Watching employees struggle with processes that don’t make sense is a point of frustration for customers.

Communications with customers also have to not only be seamless, but updated in their language and tone.

Customers don’t want to interact with formal, stuffy brands using industry-specific terms and acronyms. They want to be in conversation with them.

This means reducing the jargon and replying as a human does. It also means reviewing your communications for outdated terms around our shared humanity, with terms referring to gender, race, and ability given particular care.

5. Soft skills will stop being seen as a nice to have and become the important “Empathy Toolkit” we need in CX.

Let’s make 2020 the year we kill the term “soft skills” in business. This vague description of ideas like getting along with others and listening doesn’t serve us or our customers.

These soft skills – listening well, responding with empathy and understanding, proactively reading the emotional state of a person or situation – are absolutely critical to great customer experiences.

And let’s not forget this applies inside the organization, too. Engaged employees not only serve their customers with this respect and compassion but also serve their colleagues and partners this way, too.

Using the term “soft skills” make them sound secondary and unnecessary. CX Leaders in the future will prioritize them and give them the respect they deserve to hire, train and empower employees.

Share:
Reading time: 5 min
Page 2 of 13123410...Last »