Four Crucial Elements for a Great Customer Experience

Today's customers expect a hassle-free experience personalized to their needs. Because so many customers interact with organizations through digital channels, it is imperative that these organizations have technology solutions and features in place that make a seamless customer experience possible.  

To achieve maximum competitive advantage, a digital customer experience strategy must be built on four key elements: Personalized experiences, Quick response times, Relevant information, Proactive experiences. Here's a quick explanation of why these elements are so important:

1. Personalized Experiences

Potential customer inquiries can come from anywhere. Being truly digital means enabling customers to connect the way they want, when they want, and from where they want. Existing customers must be identified and any new customers must be profiled. And, all customer data across all media channels should be retained for the entire duration of the customer relationship. 

2. Quick Response Times

Many providers today offer multi-channel capabilities such as voice, chat, email and conferencing already built The digital customer experience has no room for delay. Speed, accuracy, and timeliness of the initial interaction are paramount and all media must offer appropriate self-service capabilities. Bottlenecks should be eliminated. And, forecasting tools should be used to help managers optimize the workforce with the most productive and efficient agent staffing levels.

Important customer information should be captured during all stages of an interaction and carried throughout the entire life cycle of the interaction and customer history. By constantly building and maintaining a relevant picture of the customer and all the data that surrounds him or her, employees can provide a more personal, engaging, and timely service that reduces customer churn and inspires loyalty. Integrating an organization’s customer relationship management (CRM) system with its communications platform helps share customer data across business departments. This data is extremely important for spotting untapped opportunities to increase revenue per customer and to feed into macro-level data analysis that informs wider strategic business decisions, from marketing strategy to service design.

4. Proactive Experiences

The customer experience can be improved dramatically by using customer information to anticipate events, act upon scheduled events, and plan resources more effectively. With the right information, a business can use mass messaging or individual, personalized messages over voice, email, or SMS channels to provoke a response from the customer (e.g., reaching usage limits, appointment/late fee reminders, etc.). This is preferable to reacting to unplanned customer enquiries. It lowers the potential for problems that could reduce customer loyalty. And, it improves agent morale by enabling repetitive enquiries to be satisfied proactively through self-service options.