It is often easy to lose sight of why we’re in business.
In the midst of handling the day-to-day expectations of the business, fending off the competition, monitoring your customer base, managing the variety of employees and their concerns, it is important to remind ourselves of why we’re here at all.
But Customer Experience Managers know it best; we’re here for the customer.
Developing and keeping a customer-centric culture is the key to your business’ success but that means that you need your leadership to be as committed as you are to developing and enforcing the customer centric values throughout your organization.
Your employees are going to respond to leadership who value and sustains a strong CX. Leaders of an organization have the ability to define the culture of an organization. If part of that culture involves staying close to your customers and listening to their needs, you can create a dynamic customer centric online experience.
Here are three key steps to a customer centric experience online
1. Check Out Your Competition Because Your Customers Will
In this market, products are changing rapidly and they are also being copied and revised at an exceptional rate.
Customers recognize brands and they recognize value, but they also recognize a comfortable and easy online experience as critical to their purchases. They also know that if your experience does not own up to its promises, they can find a competitor and find them quickly.
So delivering exceptional experiences remains as critical as providing excellent product. Remember, you are working on exceeding your customers’ expectations before they have even formed them.
Check out your competition because your customers will. How is their site designed? Is it more user-friendly? If you are noticing that your customers are migrating, be sure that you understand why. By checking out the competition and acknowledging any possible “edges” that the competition may have in the area of user-experience, you can identify any gaps in your own UX.
2. You Don’t Have to Do it All Yourself- Incorporate CX Boosting Technology
Just like having the right staff at work to provide superior customer experience, having the right technology is extremely important as well.
Gartner Recommends: Chief customer officers and vice presidents of customer support should expect to augment customer engagement center software suite offerings in areas such as self-service, and analytics, because there won’t be a single vendor to provide all their needs until 2016.
The good news is that there are significant improvement solutions, which can provide positive and consistent experiences for your business. When engaging with technology to help you improve your CX, remember your own best experiences.
Gartner reports that, “The current generation of customer service and support software for the contact center — that is, where contact with a human is required — is inadequate to support customers on social media.”
Software has responded well to new trends, and has been able to capture customer profiles that were otherwise unavailable before their development. Software can help you deliver customer intelligent content at every place in the sales cycle. Remember, you don’t need to do it all alone and you may just need the assistance that a strong CX platorm can provide.
3. Finally, Create a Customer-Focused Vision.
The final step to making a better customer service experience means that you’re designing your very vision around a strong customer focus. You may even want to get the support of some critical customers while crafting that vision.
A vision for your organization means that everyone, no matter their position, is striving to be more and more focused on the customer. Remember, you need your customers more than they need you. So treat every interaction as an opportunity to improve. Focus on serving their best interests and treat their experience as critical not just to the development of a strong customer service but for the entire online experience and through every step of the sales process.
In order to create the best customer experience possible, remember to always check-in with your customers.
Create customer advisory groups and focus groups to continue to keep ahead of the curve. Use technology, alongside the right staff, and align everyone to your vision of a strong CX and you’ll be well on your way.
