Creating the best customer experience may sound like a tall order to some, but that’s not the case. When planned and executed well, a good customer experience (CX) adds value to your brand, increases your customer base, and promotes loyalty, thus increasing customer lifetime value (CLV) and, with it, your business’ turnover.
Before you get started on your mission to provide only the best experience for customers, you should try and answer these questions:
- What kind of experience do you want to deliver to your customers?
- What are the challenges faced by you while attending to customers?
- How will you ensure your team delivers on your promise to customers?
- How will you collect customer feedback, and how will you act on them?
These questions will help you create your customer-experience vision.
Your business objectives should be clear for your teams and customers. Your strategies should hold value for everyone associated with them. Who better than customers to decide whether or not a brand adds value to its deliverables?
Value here doesn’t imply cheap, inexpensive or subpar. It means prioritizing and making sure workflows benefit customers before anyone else. Most contact centers share similar values and function with a “customers first” mindset.
Core values
If you are a beginner and unsure how to add value to customer-centric functions, this list may be helpful.
Common core values seen in most contact centers:
- Put your customers at the heart of all business-related decisions.
- Empower agents and ensure nothing short of excellence is delivered to customers.
- Foster a healthy work environment. Train agents on how to work on difficult cases calmly.
- Listen to your customers. Understand their pain points. Empathize with them. Put yourself in the customers’ shoes and gauge what kind of resolution you want. Offer that to customers.
- Be transparent in every customer interaction. Communicate clearly and apologize for inadvertent delays and issues beyond your control.
- Be patient with every customer. It’s a great virtue and helps diffuse tense situations.
- Uphold customer trust. It’s for you to protect and cherish. Second chances are extremely rare in customer service. It takes a lifetime to build trust, and mere moments to break. When you realize a folly, it’s too late to make amends.
- Foster a culture where knowledge is valued. Contact center agents should have a mindset summarized as “learn, adapt, improvise.”
Now that we have the foundation for a functional contact center in place let’s understand what sets a successful support center apart from its peers and how to create a helpdesk with minimum effort.
Also Read: Why Workflow Automation Is Imperative For Your Business
Contact centers enshrine a few axioms that double up as guiding principles for the entire organization. A few principles are given, like:
- Knowing what it takes and doing it to ensure the best possible experience for consumers.
- Being privy to consumer emotions and respecting them through responsible handling of customer data.
- Support agents with accurate customer insights relevant to the cases being worked upon by agents.
- Identify priority cases and allocate agents for a quick resolution.
- Assure customers of timely, if not faster, case resolution in the future.
Value Addition Through Tech
Integrated customer service experiences drive agent satisfaction, promote customer delight, and ensure organizational growth. Businesses, especially contact centers, often accumulate multiple technologies or martech stacks—a combination of one or more software programs that aid marketing and customer service—throughout their journey.
Without vision and holistic strategy, these technologies can disrupt the smooth flow of service delivery and create wrinkles in the overall customer experience. Multiple technologies can create communication barriers amongst themselves and subject customers to fragmented interactions that further complicate their relationship with your brand.
The first step towards ensuring a holistic experience for your customers starts with blending multiple channel interactions and streamlining them to enhance external experiences. You must remember that customer preferences can and will change, and your technology needs to evolve and keep pace. Digital and mobile-first channels of shopping and engagement have heralded “contactless” experiences – from product discovery to service. Conversational and social commerce takes center stage in the customer journey.
Social commerce is not e-commerce. With social commerce, the entire customer journey takes place on a social media platform.
Conversational commerce, on the other hand, uses tools and features that mix martech and artificial intelligence (AI). To facilitate sales and provide quality service, you need to have a comprehensive presence across social channels and tools that promote engagement.
Also Read: AI Helpdesk Software is The Backbone of Service Companies. Know Why!
Increase employee efficiency and customer convenience with a resourceful knowledge base and self-service portals with a human touch. Customer service technologies are ever-evolving formulating a goal-oriented CX strategy for your service teams can help you provide first call/contact resolution (FCR), and achieve desired results. The key to successful AI implementation is having the right data and combining all relevant customer data sources to enhance the customer experience.
The continuous increase in consumer channels and touchpoints has made companies rethink their strategies. Putting the customer in the center and taking all relevant data sources into account is critical to the entire business.
To summarize, you should practice the following skills to ensure your contact center is truly the best:
Adopt Omnichannel Strategies
Ensure the following channels are properly monitored at all times.
- Chat - Live as well as bots
- SMS - (include messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Twitter, and Instagram DM)
- Video conference tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, etc.,
- Knowledge base
Train Your Teams and Imbibe Digital Customer Service Skills
Teach associates how to be:
- Tech-savvy
- Concise and oriented towards problem-solving
- Empathic and proactive
- Intelligent and knowledgeable—Customers are inclined to listen to and speak with knowledgeable agents. This is the most important aspect of customer service.
Be conversational in your customer interactions. This means knowing your customers and their history of interactions and communicating with them contextually. Don’t reduce customers to mere support tickets or inquiries. Maintain a good relationship with them. Be human!
Use the latest technology and intersperse it with AI to deliver a premium service experience.
Use a servicedesk software that’s powerful and smart, automates most manual tasks, and increases your team’s productivity. As AI guides your agents through difficult tasks, you score high on the customer service scale.
Close The Loop With Your Customers
Collect feedback and take action on them. The feedback collected from surveys reflects specific pain points and assists in constantly recreating good customer experiences.
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