Customer experience in the digital age. What do customers expect?

Guest post by Sam Widdowson

It’s no revelation that more and more customers are choosing to shop online. Computers, tablets, and smart-phones have empowered the customer, giving them the flexibility to shop anywhere, any time.

Though the channels they’re using to shop with are changing, their expectations are not. Customers want an efficient, consistent, and enjoyable customer service experience every time they need it. Whether they choose to self-serve with an Intelligent Self-Service tool or a Virtual Agent , or speak to an agent over a Live Chat system, providing them with up-to-date, accurate, consistent information across all channels is now more important than ever as *92% of consumers say they would stop purchasing from a company after three or fewer poor customer service experiences.

Just because customers are now interacting with your brand from behind a screen, the same basic principles still apply as if they were wandering through a shop – if they need an answer to a basic question on a product or service, they don’t want to be waiting around for the next available ‘specialist’, even though that may be what they have to do as there are only finite resources on a shop floor. The Digital Age changes that. Harness the knowledge that flows through your company at the core, and allow your customers to absorb it through the channel of their choosing. Customers expect to be able to self-service  70%+ of their needs through customer portals or mobile applications. Not only does this make your customers happier by giving them the opportunity to get the information they were after efficiently, it will also influence your Customer Service department as the enquiries coming in will be more complex, and agents will be able to allocate the time necessary to give that customer the attention they deserve, keeping those CSAT scores sky-high.

But be careful not to lose that human touch… There’s nothing more frustrating than getting stuck in a loop with a poorly designed ‘chatbot’ that fails to answer even the simplest of questions. Make sure that whoever has commissioned your self-service solution, whether that is an Intelligent Self-Service tool, or a Virtual Agent, factored in escalation routes to speak to a real human, at identified frustration points, through an efficient, convenient channel such as Live Chat or Callback, otherwise those routine enquiries you seem to be deflecting will end up being the customers themselves.

Lastly, personalisation can help deliver exceptional customer experience. Knowledge of the product, company, latest offers, etc, is great for your employees to have; however, if they’ve got no knowledge of the customer’s previous interactions, or frustrations, that have led to that contact, it’s going to be an uphill battle from the outset. Making every interaction personal is what customers want and expect in today’s ultra-competitive market.

Forbes

The ultimate tech stack to improve CSAT and agent efficiency

Guest post by James Robinson

Improvement of CSAT… the holy grail of all CX directors, contact centre managers and CEOs alike. We know that improving the way we deal with customers is key to increasing CSAT (and subsequent profitability), but what types of technology have been proven to deliver these all-important results?

Web Self-Service

First and foremost, make sure you are offering the channels as your customers want. With 50% of customers thinking it’s important to solve product or service issues themselves and 70% expecting a company’s website to include a self-service application , self-service is no longer a ‘nice to have’. A query resolved by the customer themselves, using an intelligent web self-service tool is a query your contact centre agents didn’t have to deal with, significantly increasing their efficiency levels and, by proxy, customer satisfaction.

Conversational AI

Virtual Agents are more than just a flashy UI delivering the same answers as a web self-service tool; they are tools that humanise AI. An intelligently implemented virtual assistant that utilises advanced AI to ‘converse’ with your customers can build trust, something that is vital to attain. Once that trust has been established it is clear that not only will your customer return to that very cost effective channel to communicate with you in the future, but will most likely become a promoter of your company.

Live Chat

The ultimate catchall. As well as the ‘go to’ channel for many customers, an intelligent live-chat solution can be offered to customers who didn’t find what they were looking for first time around, streamlining their journey and improving the chance of achieving one of the most efficiency-driving KPIs around: first contact resolution.

Contact Centre Agent Support

Your contact centre agents are the first (and often, only) interaction with a human that your customers experience so it is vital they have all the information and support they need in order to serve that customer quickly and, more importantly, first time. An AI driven knowledgebase with process simplifying decision trees should do the trick. Encouraging your agents to create content and leave a legacy improves employee engagement and has a positive knock-on effect on CSAT.

Cohesion

OK, not a piece of tech per se but definitely an element of functionality worth mentioning, one that can make the difference between good and stellar results from these technologies. When AI is applied to the journey of a customer in a cohesive way, the experience of that customer improves exponentially. When a solution knows how a customer has interacted with a knowledge resource across all channels, it can react and deliver in a more accurate, human way.

The thought of the cost of implementing all these technologies can be daunting, however, before I finish, I would like to leave with some good news! There is something innate that is already streaming throughout your enterprise, something that is self-generating and infinite, something that is at the very core of all the solutions mentioned in this post. That something is: KNOWLEDGE. Once an enterprise harnesses that innate power it really does transcend the tech to deliver the most significant efficiencies and make a serious impact to a brand’s CSAT.

Cut routine enquiries by up to 50% – Spring clean your CX strategy

The days are finally getting longer, and the anticipation of spring is in the air. It’s that time of the year which has us dusting off the winter blues, and for many businesses, the time to clean up their customer contact strategy to deliver the best customer experience ever.

According to Capgemini, 81% of consumers prefer to pay more for better customer experience.

Now doesn’t that make you want to make you want to polish your customer engagement offering? Businesses that strategically allocate resources to strengthen their customer experience focus, stand to gain an edge over the competition, boosting profitability and brand reputation.

Your contact centre is the central point of customer contact through channels of their choice. Contact centres, like the seasons, need to continually change and evolve to deliver on customer expectations, because customer expectations have changed. The once placid customer is now active in driving changes in customer service, and the contact centre.

About 10 years ago, if a customer had experienced unsatisfactory service, on an average, they would tell about 7 people about it. Today that number has now grown to 100s, thanks to social media.

The challenge is clear. Customers want seamless experiences from one channel to another – whether over live chat,  email, self-service or a phone call, and in-channel query resolution is more important than ever. They want to contact you through channels of their choice and expect you to respond as promptly during busy periods as quieter ones.

Omni-channel, the bud that could blossom customer experience into fruitful pickings. However, with customers demanding more channels, more complexity is added in creating channel-routing intelligence.
Recent research by ICIMI suggests that no single KPI has a bigger impact on customer satisfaction than first-call resolution (FCR). And the Service Quality Measurement (SQM) Group found that for every 1% improvement in FCR, you get a 1% improvement in customer satisfaction.

Unfortunately, many contact centre agents still aren’t equipped with the right tools to help them achieve challenges set to them.

Reports from Dimension Data reveal that around 40% of contact centres don’t have data analysis tools, despite analytics being voted the top factor to change the shape of the industry in the next five years. And that more than half (57.2%) of contact centres managing email to not have technology solutions in place to maximise efficiency levels. Despite omni-channel being a hot topic for years, only 8.4% of businesses have all contact channels connected.

So why are contact centres not sweeping new strategies into action? Why do they find it difficult to introduce new technology, technologies that integrate with multiple systems that could offer a single view from customers?

Legacy systems and integration issues remain the top challenge affecting CX technology. Another challenge here is being able to secure budget for technology systems. Executives are quick to see the end-game benefits of a customer-centric strategy: more satisfied customers, increased loyalty, a lower cost to serve, and more engaged employees. But they often fail to understand clearly what a superior customer experience is worth and exactly how it will generate value.

Patiently building a business case that shows how technology solutions will meet user needs, and therefore encourage the uptake of digital channels, will help to allay fears of making poor decisions or going down the wrong path.

Visit the resource section of our site for more information, and access to pragmatic calculators to assist in quantifying the economic outcomes of differences in customer experiences.

How will Brexit shape the Customer Experience Economy?

Much like the year of international alarm, feverish preparation, and programming corrections for the Year 2000 (Y2K) bug, 29 March 2019, has many of us questioning what the future might hold.

Reports of relief filled the news media on the dawn on January 2000, when it became apparent that the world’s computer systems didn’t’ send us back to the dark ages. But unlike the variety of different approaches available to solve the Year 2000 problem in legacy systems, the uncertainty of where we’ll be with Brexit next week or next month, has many of us worried. However, one thing is sure; Brexit is creating a tough environment for businesses which thrive on steady commercial conditions and certainty.

As painful or wonderful the Brexit aftermath might turn out to be, there are many lessons to be learned from this historical event. Like customer expectations adopting to advances in technology, Brexit is a powerful reminder that people/customers can and make choices that might surprise you and sometimes themselves; or wishing they had made different decisions.

While times of high-market instability can cause businesses to panic and cut spending on customer engagement initiatives, its time to drive innovation to win, assist and retain customers.

‘Taking back control’

Customer Experience is not a fad, it is expanding in complexity at a rapid pace, and Brexit won’t change that. Pragmatic businesses understand that consistently satisfying customer service is becoming increasingly important as customer expectations are adapting and growing just as rapidly as the channels and technology consumers are now empowered to engage with.

Customers and prospects want businesses to demonstrate that they value and understand them.Executives are quick to see the end-game benefit of a customer-centric strategy: more satisfied customers, increased loyalty, a lower cost to serve, and more engaged employees. But they often fail to understand clearly what a superior customer experience is worth and exactly how it will generate value.

Welcome to the revolution

Unlike the current political chaos, there are smart tools and calculators to assist those of us tasked with measuring and linking digital customer engagement to business growth. Using these tools will assist in building a business case to fund digital customer engagement, secure buy-in, and build momentum.
Access the purpose-built calculators that prove the direct impact on customer expectations, which go far beyond the traditional ROI. Tap into new opportunities and make sensible savings, investing in technology to drive more sales, promote Customer Experience and build strong foundations for the future.

Enchanting customers to fall for your business

Don’t go breaking their hearts

And just like that, the first month in 2019 is over. January sales are being replaced with cupid arrows, hearts, and messages of love. Whether you love Valentine’s Day or think the hype doesn’t justify the occasion, your customer experience strategy should swoop in and enchant customers to fall for your business every time they interact with you, regardless of channel.

Continuously nurturing relationships with your customers is crucial to growing your business.

Love-hate relationships

Unlike our mixed feelings towards Valentine’s Day, most of us love the convenience of our connected world. However, we appear to have a love-hate relationship when it comes to online service.

According to Baymard, nearly 70% of shoppers will abandon their online shopping carts. Shocking until you realise that many users are window shopping, comparing prices, saving items for later or exploring gift options.

However, Forrester reports that more than 50% of customers will abandon their online shopping cart if they can’t find answers to simple queries and switch to a competitor’s website. Customers become so accustomed to doing most things online, it’s no surprise that Coleman Parkes reports that 75% of us prefer online support above any other channel. However, customers hate struggling to find accurate and consistent answers to their questions.

The silent treatment

Efforts to prevent potential customers from abandoning their e-commerce carts, have had many businesses implement live chat support. A study by Forrester Research found, “Many online consumers want help from a live person while they are shopping online; in fact, 44% of online consumers say that having questions answered by a live person while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a website can offer.”

An emarketer.com survey found that 63% were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat. The report goes on to say: “62% reported being more likely to purchase from the site again. A further 38% of respondents said they had made their purchase due to the chat session itself. All these attitudes were even more prevalent among respondents who bought online at least weekly.”

As it turns out, live chat can offer real-time support, while also adding significant benefits to the staff and bottom line of companies. It is however important to consider that live chat poses some challenges. Customers are not bound by normal working hours when looking to make an online purchase or find support. Having live chat available with no-one to answer, might do more harm than good, frustrating customers with time-wasting silence.

Great CX

Multi-channel technology can assist in creating omni-channel customer experiences.

Here are some of the key trends for 2019 that predicts love from customers:

• Consistency across channels is key to a great overall experience. Trust is created when front-line staff, support staff and online channels all over the same consistent answers. Having an integrated knowledge-base across your website, contact centre and social channels is key.
• Ease: If it’s easy to find answers, purchase, get support, customers will return.
• Mobile: We take our smartphones everywhere with us. In a study by Search Engine Watch, 67% of participants said they were more likely to make a purchase when visiting a business’s mobile-friendly site, versus 61% who said they’d most likely leave a site that wasn’t optimised for mobile.
• Personalisation: Make identity an enterprise asset. Identifying customers at every touchpoint will result in a long-term relationship.
• Virtual Agents: 24/7 customer service with a smile. A semblance of personal service, NLP artificial intelligence combined with a graphical representation, can be a powerful additional contact channel (not a replacement for human interaction). Virtual Agents can raise the online customer service effort bar. Always on, ready to offer customers who wish to self-serve answers, an engaging, appropriate, and conversational automated interaction.

Conclusion

In our own lives, we appreciate that we cannot expect close relationships, family relations, or a marriage to survive and flourish if we don’t put time and effort into maintaining it. A business’s relationships with its customers is no different.

The Customer Experience ‘To Don’t’ List for 2019

Part three of ‘three little pigs’

January is finally over. What feels like the longest month of the year – not that it’s really been 2019 that long – has many of us glad that the party season and New Year’s resolution making and breaking over and done with for many months, 5 February, marks another festive celebration. Little pig, little pig let me in … Happy Chinese New Year, the Lunar Year of the Pig! As the last blog in our series about the Customer Experience ‘To Don’t’ list, we hope to shed light on the heart of customer support, the contact centre.

Contact centres are the backbone to happy and satisfied customers. However, today’s contact centre is a complex environment that can lead to excessive agent training needs, increased levels of agent frustration and thus attrition, increased average call handling times and, worst of all, customer frustration, waiting for agents to resolve their issue.

Like bacon and eggs

If contact centre agents aren’t equipped with the right tools to help them achieve these challenges set to them, they will become frustrated and less engaged – a growing concern for organisations as it affects both brand perception and revenue.

For sales and support channels to work synergistically – to seamlessly deliver a on a brand’s promise to each customer segment – the contact centre customer service platform in turn, needs to deliver on a consistent experience at every customer interaction.

Feast your eyes on how digital service channels can assist contact centres to address these four challenging customer service expectations.

1. Credibility

A centralised and shared knowledge management solution will ensure that the same information is given to customers across all contact channels, helping to improve satisfaction rates. Clearly sign-posted on a home and contact page, this will enable customers to find answers to their own questions. An extended knowledge-base into a brand’s contact centre will ensure that agents give customers consistent, accurate and timely answers to their questions. This will help to reduce agent-training times and increase conversions, whilst improving the overall customer experience.

2. Reliability

Providing an opportunity for those customers with more complex enquiries to be seamlessly escalated to one-on-one dialogue with a contact centre agent, saves them the frustrating experience of having to call the contact centre and wait on hold for minutes at a time. These live chat sessions can be automatically triggered to help reduce abandonment rates.

3. Intimacy

Offering the same level of customer service and extending the FAQ knowledge-base onto mobile or social media sites, can help to meet customer’s expectations for instant, 24/7 customer service. Investment in the right online customer service technology can provide a cost-effective service across whichever channels customers choose to contact a company.

4. Focus

Customer complaints and feedback provide vital insight into areas for improvement. Offering customers and staff on the frontline dealing with customer complaints a mechanism to suggest improvement, and regularly analysing this information, enables organisations to optimise their service offering, helping towards meeting regulatory guidelines. Responding and acting on feedback lets customers and team members know that their opinions are valued.

Delivering exceptional customer experience in the contact centre is vital to retain customers, reduce costs and increase sales to live happily ever after. For more thought leadership, insights and proven business cases (to far exceed surviving just by the hair on one’s chinny chin chin) visit the resource page on our website or request a demo of our award-winning customer support software.

The Contact Centre ‘To Don’t’ List for 2019

Part two of ‘three little pigs’

How are you doing in the 2019 New Year’s resolution department? A study by Strava, that analysed more than 31.5 million online global activities in January 2018, revealed 12 January to be the date when most of us will have given up on our annual New Year’s resolutions. Although the Chinese zodiac states that people born in ‘The year of the pig’ have great concentration: once they set a goal, they will devote all their energy to achieving it. This sounds a little huff and puff as a mere 8 percent of us achieve our New Year’s goals.

And the same can be said about businesses in the process of planning their customer experience strategy. Excited about the outcome that an enhanced CX will have on their organisation’s bottom line, businesses invest in siloed ‘straw stalks’ of technologies/channels because a house, regardless of its construction material, built quickly and cheaply fulfils the same purpose? Do they know what happened to the first little piggy?

The big bad wolves that devour CX engagement

Often teams within organisations are so busy, that they just want to fill the gaps, convinced that they hear their customers and understand what they need. When businesses invest in new technology or channels without having a clear strategy of what each digital enhancement can or can’t deliver, they have about the same chance of delivering exceptional customer experience as a straw-house against a hurricane.

In 2019, the customer matters more than ever before. The world has changed, and so customers have the power, not the sellers. Customer perception is fragile and able to change with each interaction. Constantly maintaining a strong customer experience in our digitally connected world is a challenge, however this Customer Experience ‘To Don’t’ list aims to reveal a bit more ‘third pig’ CX strategy.

Don’t choose a number:

When choosing a metric to score your customer experience and establish a target for it, the metric must be meaningful to the specific customer touchpoint you’re wanting to analyse. The metric needs to be relevant for your particular industry.

Don’t stop measuring:

Whichever customer metric you choose – the all ubiquitous Net Promoter Score (NPS), the traditional customer satisfaction CSAT, or a more recent invention Customer Effort Score (CES) – it’s worth nothing without analysing the customer feedback you’re collecting. Analysed across multiple touchpoints across the customer journey will show where improvements should be made, which channels perform well and also help identify the rate and reasons for customer churn.

Don’t invest in technology just for the sake of adding another channel:

Many industry buzzwords like AI, bots, physital and omni-channel set to create more headlines in 2019, are causing uncertainty about job losses and the impact it will have on customer experience.

Multiple contact channels that don’t feed into the same knowledge-base can derail CX. Consistency and continuity across engagement channels should support customer service delivery. Having a well implemented customer service strategy with a centralised knowledge-base at its core, is key to meeting the following challenges facing companies wanting to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

When choosing a technology vendor, consider these important questions:
Does the vendor have an integrated platform, or a loose collection of components? Does the vendor own all the products or are they a patchwork of unrelated pieces? Can you choose what you need from the product portfolio? Can you add other components later? How well do they integrate with your CRM and can they scale up? What kind of experience does the vendor have?

Don’t give up:

Just like January 1st is just a day in the calendar, the CX strategy can be reset for a fresh start. Go back to the beginning and revisit the rewards of making changes to it.

Ask questions such as; Why the business needs to make a change? Is the goal concrete and measurable? What is the plan? What support system is in place while working towards a change? How will victories be incentivised?

Bringing home the bacon in 2019

To improve the customer engagement/experience and keep consumers loyal, businesses must place more importance on understanding the relationship between support interactions, channels, and the changing tides of consumer behaviour. This will be key in choosing the right technology to support their strategy.
In the last of our blog series we will disclose specific actions for customer support, as the role of customer service and the contact centre is all too often still largely underestimated in the bottom-line of businesses and the overall customer experience journey.