Six Tips for Enhancing the Customer Experience
Customers are the life-blood of any enterprise, and keeping them happy and loyal is a major focus for any organization. The only way to cement success is to ensure that every interaction is an outstanding customer experience. Companies that deliver extraordinary customer experiences demonstrate six common elements that—when applied together as a cohesive solution—enable organizations to unlock the lifetime value of their customers and build an outstanding referral platform for future growth.
1. Customer culture is crucial.
When creating an outstanding customer experience, technology can go a long way toward maximizing productivity, increasing sales and enhancing customer satisfaction. However, if your organization doesn’t have a culture that places the customer first, the value derived from your technology investment will be limited.One of the financial sector’s most successful institutions, ASB Bank, has set itself apart by focusing almost exclusively on creating an outstanding customer experience at every level of the organization. ASB has found that an uncompromising commitment to customer satisfaction, backed by an integrated customer management solution, has delivered huge growth in revenue and profitability as customers respond by voting with their wallets.
2. Empower and support contact center agents.
Customers state clearly that they continue to value human contact, so enterprises must ensure they can attract and retain quality customer service staff. This remains a huge challenge for contact center managers, with average turnover rates of 17% each year, keeping recruitment and training costs high.An integrated contact center solution addresses the cost of training by simplifying and automating transactions. By using technology to drive productivity and automate processes and transactions that don’t require human intervention, contact center agents are freed up to do what they do best—create a unique and enjoyable customer experience.
3. Create a single view of the customer.
Every contact a customer has with your company—whether it is over the phone, on the Internet, by email or on paper—must be captured. The more you know about your customers, the more opportunities you will have to serve them and identify value-added opportunities.By aggregating the details of every customer interaction across every touch point in the company, a CRM system ensures that agents have access to a complete history for each customer.
4. Customer process management drives efficiency.
Customer process management (CPM) in the contact center is delivering unprecedented efficiency gains by streamlining and tracking processes from initiation to fulfillment, enhancing first-call resolution rates and simplifying complex processes.By combining process integration, workflow and business rules, CPM systems significantly reduce the time and number of steps involved in performing all customer-related transactions, as well as the training required to make contact center agents productive.
5. Leverage the Internet with care.
In a bid to improve productivity and cut costs, many companies have sought to reduce contact center traffic by pushing customers out to the Web. This approach can backfire if not implemented as part of a considered strategy.While some transactions, such as a quick information request, might require no input from a contact center agent, others provide valuable opportunities to cross-sell, enhance the customer relationship or to ask more in-depth questions. It is crucial companies leverage technology to prompt contact center agents when these opportunities arise.
6. Apply meaningful metrics.
Too often companies focus their metrics on operational issues such as wait times, call abandonment rates and handling times. While important, these metrics fail to reflect the strategic value of the contact center. Metrics should also include things like share of wallet, customer loyalty and lifetime value.It is also important to review contact center metrics and objectives regularly to ensure that they are not diametrically opposed. For example, pressure to increase call volumes can adversely affect how much agents can achieve when speaking with customers.
Outstanding Customer Experience Guaranteed
In an age of globalization and commoditization, the quality of the customer experience has become the most important factor in a purchasing decision. The six key elements outlined in this article offer a powerful way to clearly differentiate your product or service from your competitors and provide that elusive consistent outstanding customer experience.
Software, a Consona CRM solution, provides adaptable and flexible CRM solutions for the enterprise. Onyx helps marketing, service and support organizations capture, share and automate customer data and processes across the enterprise, quickly and cost-effectively. With its integrated suite of customer data management, process management and business intelligence products, Onyx enables businesses to reduce costs, increase productivity, grow revenue and ensure compliance, while providing them with a competitive advantage. Onyx solutions are utilized by organizations worldwide, including recognized industry leaders Wells Fargo, Amway, AIG, the Seattle Mariners and Konica Minolta.For more information visit
www.onyx.com.