The customer is king – a lot of businessmen have heard this phrase before but not many of them take it seriously, which is quite unfortunate because end to end customer experience should definitely be an important focus in every business and it should be taken seriously.
When you take care of your company’s customer experience management properly, you will be able to experience a ton of benefits for your business. Some of these benefits are: increased customer loyalty, increase customer retention, stronger competitive differentiation, better acquisition of profitable customers, improved industry leadership position, increased market share and of course increased profit and revenue.
It is a common misconception that effective customer service is only about managing phone calls to customer care hotline; the truth is that it is also about managing the processes involved in customer experience management. In order to achieve better customer experience management, it is important for the staff members of a company to have a clearer visibility and understanding of the processes involved while being able to rapidly adapt to them so as to keep up with the changing needs of the customers and the demands of the business.
Best Practices for End to End Customer Experience Management
One of the top blunders committed by business people is that they often skip out on process orientation when it comes to customer service. Now, the process orientation step is extremely important because it serves as a pH test to see whether your company’s customer experience management process is aligned properly with the business strategies and goals or not. It also checks whether the processes involved in this case are being carried out efficiently or not. When you adopt the best practices for end to end customer experience management, you will be able to maintain customer satisfaction while ensuring that the business goals are achieved side by side too.
Embedding the Voice of Your Customers Into the Fiber of Your Business
This is one of the best practices when it comes to customer experience management because it is noted that companies who takes their customers’ opinions seriously are the ones that rule the market. Thus, it is important to gather feedback from all customers and taking actions based on the feedbacks received by delivering it to employees so as to close the loop. For driving significant improvement in the business in this regard, one should have the right systems in place for capturing feedbacks from customers, analyzing them and prioritizing them. This is a very powerful too which has a huge impact on the business when used correctly.
Designing Optimized Surveys
If the surveys to be distributed amongst the customers are not compatible with the media through which they are distributed then it is a lost cause. The importance of having feedback mechanisms which are specifically optimized for email, online, social, mobile and receipt cannot be stressed enough. For instance, in case of a mobile feedback system, one should keep a very long survey, it should be short and precise. Thus, optimized surveys are the way to go in today’s era. For instance, in case of a mobile feedback system, one should keep a very long survey, it should be short and precise. Thus, optimized surveys are the way to go in today’s era!
Making Use of Social Media
Considering the fact that we live in the era of social networking, it would be pure foolishness to not make use of social media for improving customer experience! Since a majority of the customers frequent social networking sites therefore it is ‘mandatory’ for your company to have accounts on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can reach out to the customers directly via this free way of promoting your business and proactively manage your brand reputation through these social platforms. Also, you should strive towards getting as many customers to ‘like’ your company’s business page on Facebook as possible so that you will have a wider audience.
Empowering Customer Service Agents
It is impossible to touch upon the topic of customer experience management without mentioning about customer service agents because these are the people that directly interact with the customers. Thus, it is quite apparent that customer service agents play a vital role in the quality of the customer experience. Customer service roles are very demanding jobs, therefore it is crucial that your company hires the right individuals for the right jobs and also empower them well by proving them with top quality training. This way, they can be much more than just a self-help provider to the customers.
Acquainting Yourself With the Metrics
Keeping customer care service cost-efficient and maintaining happy customers is a difficult balancing act for companies. In order to achieve equilibrium it is important to acquaint yourself with the metrics well and then you should choose the customer service metrics that are significant for your business. Some of the metrics that are taken into consideration here are cost, revenue, FCR, NPS, customer satisfaction and so on.
Opting for Agile Technology
Having sluggish technology in today’s times will get your business nowhere because it wouldn’t even appeal to the employees, let alone the customers! Therefore you should opt for technology that supports agility so that things can be taken care of in a much faster manner. When you have agility in your business, you will be able to take your company to the next level and also exploit opportunities before the competitors even get to them! And when your business is benefitted from ‘agile’ technology, the benefits would be passed on to the customers too, thus making them happy customers!
Conclusion
Customer experience management is a full-time job because it requires full dedication and attention. In an industry where there is cut-throat competition, one cannot afford to take a backseat when it comes to customer experience management because this would enable the competitors to get ahead and snatch your customers! Keeping your customers happy is essential for your business because without customers your business would cease to exist. In other words, customers are like the ‘life force’ of the business! Therefore, it is important to follow the best practices for end to end customer experience management for optimum results.
