Once considered a supporting aspect of the
consumer transaction, behind ‘product’ and ‘price’, the customer experience
is now a main-stage attraction when it comes to solidifying the relationship
with customers. Increasingly, stats like this one from Bain and Company
illustrate the impact that poor customer service can have on future revenues.
A customer is 4 times
more likely to buy from a competitor if the problem is service related vs.
price or product related.
Today,
the customer experience is a key strategic differentiator at many
organizations. Consumers
2020 Report, customer
experience is expected to become the number one key brand differentiator,
overtaking both price and product by the year 2020. In today’s digital world,
‘rock star’ service means making answers and information available at your
customers fingertips 24x7, every time they enter your digital channels. This
report shows you how, with seven things you can do to make your digital
self-service experience is more like the stairway to heaven and less like the
highway to hell.
KEY 1: HELP
CUSTOMERS BY LEAVING THEM ALONE (HINT: GET DIGITAL)
Just as the world
of music has gone digital, so has the everyday life of your customers. We start the list with perhaps the most
surprising piece of advice—that the secret to delivering exceptional customer
service is to actually not get involved with customer requests. At least, not
in person. Research into the preferences of consumers
today indicates that when customers are looking for information or answers,
they tend not to want to talk to people. As the results show, the customer
experience of today is increasingly a digital one.
KEY 2: RESOLVE CUSTOMER QUESTIONS IN ONE ATTEMPT
With customers increasingly choosing to self-serve, it means
your organization needs to deliver a satisfying self-service experience in your
digital channels. This means bringing low-complexity issues to completion
swiftly. Standard FAQ pages and site search won’t cut it today, because these
solutions require cumbersome navigation and searching through multiple answers.
For today’s customer who expects one single answer, your self-service has to
deliver one right answer on the first attempt.
KEY 3: SERVE UP THE NEXT ANSWER BEFORE THEY EVEN HAVE TO
ASK.
Intelligently serving customers means
giving them the right answer when they ask a question and, knowing what
questions they are likely to have next. When your digital self-service
technology can provide the one right answer and intelligently anticipate the
next question on the customer’s mind, you take the digital self-service experience
to a whole new level.
KEY 4: MAKE ESCALATION OPTIONS EASY TO FIND
Knowing that there will be instances when your customers
are wanting live support, it’s wise to make this live support easy to access.
This means making escalation options easy to find, as part of your digital
self-service experience. Doing so does a lot to inspire customer confidence in
your organization because it shows that you place a high value on customer
service—an increasingly important differentiating factor today.
KEY 5: TRANSFORM YOUR LIVE AGENTS
INTO THE ULTIMATE ‘ROCK STAR’ SERVICE PROVIDERS
When customers are allowed to self-serve for answers to
low complexity questions without having to contact live support, significantly
fewer calls will enter your live channel. However, there are instances where
customers have a more complex request that legitimately requires more personal,
live support.
This is the best use of your live support channel – to
provide that higher level of service when it’s really needed. When your live
agents are no longer required to handle mass volumes of low complexity calls,
they’re free to focus on delivering true ‘rock star’ service. This elevates the
value of your contact center because your agents can use a higher level of
skill to impress customers and solve true problems.
KEY 6: ENSURE THE MOBILE EXPERIENCE MATCHES THE WEB
EXPERIENCE
The good news for organizations is that customers are very
clear in their expectations of mobile customer service experience. Quite
simply, they want exactly the same instant access to accurate answers when
interacting with your company from a mobile device. Digital self-service is
just as important in the mobile channel as anywhere else.
KEY 7: NEVER UNDERESTIMATE
THE CONSEQUENCES OF A BAD CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE.
Organizations that
will survive in the digital economy are ones that accept the fact that
customers today wield tremendous power: they have high service expectations, a
wide range of choice on where and how to spend their money, and they can be
fickle about staying loyal to one brand.
Often, this means
an organization only gets one chance to make an impression. One study found
that a staggering 91% of unhappy customers will not willingly do business with
the same company again. (Source: Lee Resources)
Delivering rock
star customer experience means truly embracing your customer’s ‘rock diva’
personality, and investing in technologies that do a great job of catering to
their service needs in the digital channels.
