DELIVERING A ROCK STAR CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERIENCE

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.

For more details visit us @www.urssystems.com

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CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE TO DRIVE IMPROVEMENT AND GROWTH

It is well documented that optimizing customer loyalty has a direct and positive impact on a company’s financial performance and strategy. Increasing customer loyalty through improved customer experiences can be driven by the insight gained from a comprehensive customer feedback program. As companies have better visibility into the attitudes, expectations and preferences of their customers, they can cost-effectively tailor their sales, marketing and services programs to better align solutions with the business objectives of their customers. Yet many companies continue to struggle with strategy, namely how to translate customer feedback into action and improve the bottom line.

Using customer feedback to drive product strategy and direction and has been incorporating customer feedback mechanisms into its day-to-day activities over the past decade. The company strategy should be focused on giving its customers what they are asking for—and on winning their loyalty in return. Through collaboration with customer care and services teams across all lines of businesses, an organization can identify customer needs and uncovers the root causes of customer issues across geographies and industries. A coordinated set of customer-centric programs are then designed to address opportunities in a consistent manner throughout the company. This helps to align business operations and executive priorities with those of our customers.

Closed-Loop Feedback Process

In its simplest form, a closed-loop process helps  to collect and respond to customer feedback across customer segments, which follows three primary steps:

• Gathering, analyzing and reporting customer feedback
• Defining, actioning and communicating critical themes and initiatives
• Tracking, monitoring and trending results to quantify the effects of improvement programs

Listening and responding to customers promotes customer loyalty and forms the foundation for a solid reference program and retention strategy. Identifying issues at a macro level facilitates the prioritization of organization-wide business improvements, resource allocation and the refinement of strategic action plans to ensure our customers’ success. Similarly, at a micro level, strategy encourages employees to take immediate action to address individual customer concerns. Ideally, addressing customer concerns at the time of feedback ensures these at-risk customers do not defect. This sense of urgency toward unhappy customers creates a level of trust and transparency, which sustains customer satisfaction and drives profitability.

Gathering, Analyzing and Reporting Customer Feedback As Part Of Your Customer Strategy

Customer feedback is collected across a variety of channels with the objective of providing customers with a voice into how an organization delivers its products and services:

• Executive sponsorship programs, CIO advisory board and strategy councils
• Customer advisory boards, focus groups, users groups and special interest groups
• Proactive outreach programs and facilitation of feedback from one-to-one engagements
• Customer surveys, social media outlets and other online communities

This multi-channel approach provides customers with multiple avenues to voice ideas, highlight successes and engage with other customers sharing common challenges and opportunities.

Tracking, Monitoring and Trending Results

Upon identifying key themes and communicating the response, repeats the collection of feedback. This recurring process in our strategy allows to verify the effectiveness of the improvement programs, as well as identify future opportunities for enhancement, from those customers directly impacted.

Obtaining Insight Through Surveys

To ensure that you captures the right type of feedback from the right contacts at the right time without over-surveying, a structured survey program featuring a portfolio of relationship, transactional and targeted surveys is used:

• Relationship Surveys: Highlights overall customer experience and loyalty drivers across cumulative contact experiences
• Transactional Surveys: Measures service quality of each organizational unit and trigger improvements to enhance operational effectiveness
• Targeted Surveys: Facilitates qualitative research, enable deep-dives and compliment the relationship and transactional surveys

Building Strategic Customer Relationships As Part of a Holistic Strategy

Understanding customer needs and tailoring programs throughout the customer lifecycle fosters strategic relationships. Similarly, predicting and preventing customer attrition by interpreting and acting on the voice of the customer reduces market share erosion while yielding new opportunities to deepen existing relationships—and better positions the company for accelerated growth during improved economic times.

For more details visit us @http://www.urssystems.com

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