An effective customer experience (CX) is fundamental to attracting and retaining customers. 80% of customers now say that experience is as important as a company’s products and services. If you’re not meeting their expectations, you risk falling behind the competition.
However, delivering an impactful customer experience is not a simple task. Your CX encompasses all interactions a customer has with your brand, from the first time they land on your website to payment processes, customer support interactions, and beyond.
If you want to meet your customers’ expectations across all these touchpoints, you’ll need to make your CX a top priority. Below, we’ve got 7 essential steps for improving your CX, along with tips on implementing them effectively.
7 Key Ways to Improve Your Customer Experience
1. Start With Strategy
Customer experience is a complex, multifaceted thing. It touches on virtually every aspect of your business, from your marketing efforts and social media presence to your customer support processes and loyalty schemes. As a result, improving it will require a coordinated effort.
With this in mind, your first step should be to adopt a comprehensive customer experience strategy. This will map out a systematic, step-by-step approach to improving your CX. By identifying key priorities, a CX strategy allows you to focus on the changes that will make the biggest impact.
If you skip the strategy, you can easily end up investing resources into improving your CX without securing significant benefits. Whether you’re focusing on improvements that won’t move the needle or trying to change too many things at once, you are unlikely to see the results you’re hoping for.
How to implement it:
- Take a cross-functional approach. Your CX strategy should draw on input and expertise from across your organisation – otherwise, you might miss out on the kind of innovative solutions that only come through collaboration.
- Set clear goals. Your CX strategy needs to have clearly defined and time-bound goals. This will enable you to measure your progress and change course if necessary.
- Be flexible. To be useful, your CX strategy should provide a set of guiding principles – but it shouldn’t be taken as gospel. You should still aim to adapt to unforeseen issues or unexpected opportunities.
2. Map Your Customer Journey
An effective customer experience needs to be consistent. You don’t want customers to get exceptional service up until the point of purchase and then feel abandoned afterwards. Instead, you want to meet customer expectations across the full breadth of their journey.
To achieve this, you first need to understand what their journey actually looks like. And that means creating a customer experience journey map. This provides you with a clear picture of the different touchpoints customers pass through on their way to conversion and beyond.
Ideally, your customer journey map should integrate customer journey analytics. While the map provides a kind of visual narrative showing how customers engage with your business, customer journey analytics complements this with data.
Together, they provide a comprehensive picture of how customers engage with your business, allowing you to deliver CX improvements from start to finish.
How to implement it:
- Find the right tools. A comprehensive customer journey map should integrate data from across your organisation and translate it into actionable insights into customer behaviour. To achieve this, you’ll need powerful business analytics tools to help you.
- Seek customer input. The people who know your customer journey best are – naturally enough – your actual customers! Seeking direct input from your customers will ensure your customer journey map is accurate.
- Update regularly. Customer behaviour is not static – for instance, 44% of customers now say they would consider using chatbots to search for product information. Be sure to update your customer journey to take account of emerging trends.
3. Provide Omnichannel Support
Customers increasingly use a diverse range of channels to seek support, request information and make purchases. They might start a query through WhatsApp, move to web chat to follow up, and then make a phone call to seek further updates.
Needless to say, the last thing your customers want is to discover that certain types of requests can only be handled on one or two channels. By the same token, they aren’t going to want to go over information they’ve already provided just because they’ve switched from a web chat to a phone call.
By providing effective omnichannel support, you can empower your customers to engage in the form that suits them best. What is more, customers will be able to move between channels without any loss of service – and without having to repeat themselves.
How to implement it:
- Use skill-based permissions. Chances are your agents won’t all be equally comfortable with every channel. Your call centre software should allow you to restrict agents to the channels they’re properly trained to deal with.
- Monitor your channel mix. The demand for different channels will change over time. Monitor fluctuations in customer behaviour to ensure you have the resources you need to meet your SLAs across each channel.
- Ensure consistent messaging. An effective omnichannel strategy requires consistent messaging. Make sure your tone of voice and brand guidelines are adhered to no matter which channel your customers use.
4. Implement a Knowledge Management System (KMS)
If customers are looking for guidance, they expect your call centre agents to be a reliable source of information. If your agents can’t offer a timely response – or worse, they give incorrect information – it won’t just frustrate your customers. In fact, it can have a significant long-term impact on your brand.
A comprehensive Knowledge Management System (KMS) enables your agents to deliver the information customers need without delay. By providing them with a single, centralised source of company knowledge, your agents won’t be forced to spend valuable call time searching for the correct response.
How to implement it:
- Prioritise user-friendliness. To deliver real benefits, your agents should be able to navigate your KMS easily while on a call. A global search function and dynamic branching can help them find the information they need without having to put the customer on hold.
- Implement access control. All the information on your KMS must be accurate and up-to-date. By managing upload and editing access, you can ensure that only fully vetted and verified information is added to the KMS.
- Monitor your metrics. Are certain documents being accessed more frequently than others? This can indicate if more training is needed to ensure your agents have the most essential information on hand.
5. Support Self-Service Options
For many customers, speaking to an agent isn’t their first choice. For simpler queries, they may find it quicker and easier to directly access the information they need. By the same token, if customers are forced to speak to an agent to solve basic problems, your call centre is likely to face much higher demand and find it harder to deliver prompt service.
With this in mind, prioritising self-service options is an essential part of streamlining your customer experience. For instance, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system allows customers to access information through an automated system of pre-recorded messages rather than forcing them to speak to an agent.
By providing a tailored, comprehensive IVR service and other self-service tools, you can provide 24/7 support without additional expense. Customers with more complex needs, meanwhile, will spend less time waiting to speak with an agent.
How to implement it:
- Use a customisable IVR system. Your customers have unique demands, so an off-the-shelf IVR solution will have minimal impact. Use an IVR tool that allows you to easily design your own menus and routing options.
- Maximise the tasks customers can perform. There are wide range of simple tasks that don’t require agent support, from ID verification to tracking their order status. Support as many of these as possible to maximise the impact on your CX.
- Test thoroughly. Your IVR system might seem well-designed and user-friendly – but how well does it work in practice? Regular testing ensures your customers aren’t encountering unintended roadblocks or confusing instructions.
6. Invest in Employee Engagement
When it comes to delivering a top-quality customer experience, the enthusiasm and hard work of your agents is paramount. Motivated and passionate agents can turn run-of-the-mill interactions into satisfying and pleasant experiences that make your customers feel truly valued.
But how can you ensure your agents are willing and able to provide this kind of committed service, day in and day out? The answer lies in employee engagement.
If your employees feel valued and respected, they’re more likely to go above and beyond to deliver top-quality service. Similarly, if they know that their hard work will be recognised, they will be more driven and motivated to develop their skills.
Of course, this kind of workplace culture doesn’t just occur naturally. You’ll need to make a concerted effort to improve your employee engagement. But by prioritising a healthy and positive environment for your staff, you’ll secure significant improvements to your CX.
How to implement it:
- Encourage feedback. Your employees are the best guide to the state of your workplace culture. Checking in with your employees regularly and encouraging honest feedback won’t just help you implement targeted improvements – it will also show your team that you take their well-being seriously.
- Support learning. For most staff, ongoing development and career progression are key to feeling satisfied at work. By providing learning opportunities, you can demonstrate you are committed to your agents’ long-term professional development.
- Recognise achievements. A formal system for acknowledging high performance gives your staff confidence that their hard work will not go unrecognised.
7. Stay Ahead of the Curve
Before the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2021, very few people were aware of generative AI. Just three years later, more than two-thirds of workers say generative AI will help them provide better customer service.
This should make it clear just how fast the expectations for customer service are evolving. As AI-powered personalisation becomes more common, companies that fail to adapt will be left behind.
To avoid this, it’s imperative that you invest in emerging technologies. From AI-driven chatbots to advanced analytics software, becoming a first adopter of innovative solutions will help your customer experience stand out from the crowd.
How to implement it:
- Foster a culture of innovation. Encourage employees across your organisation to suggest new approaches or trial emerging software. This open and collaborative approach will ensure you don’t get stuck in familiar ways of doing things and fall behind your competitors.
- Establish strategic partnerships. Working closely with industry-leading call centre software providers will give you access to cutting-edge tools and expert knowledge.
- Benchmark against industry leaders. How does your CX stand up to your competitors’? What strategies have they developed that you could adapt to your own needs? Keeping an eye on the competition helps you get a clear picture of your current performance – and identify where you might be missing a trick.
Deliver an Innovative Customer Experience with MaxContact
Your customer experience is a key differentiator in a competitive market. It’s how you go beyond delivering a great product or service to make your customers feel truly valued. But with customer expectations shifting at pace and new technologies emerging, you need to make a concerted effort to deliver the kind of experience your customers are looking for.
At MaxContact, our sophisticated platform offers a full suite of innovative services, from revolutionary Conversational Voice AI assistants to sophisticated speech analytics tools and much, much more.
To learn more about how we can supercharge your CX strategy, book a demo today.
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