According to Forrester, customer experience is ‘the sum of all of the experiences that a customer has with a company over the duration of the relationship’, including discovery, purchase and advocacy.
Customers are the life force behind every company. Their happiness is vital to the success of any business in any industry. Achieving customer satisfaction takes much more than a single positive interaction, though – today’s businesses must elevate the customer’s entire experience.
According to Forrester,
customer experience is ‘the sum of all of the experiences that a customer has with a company over the duration of the relationship’, including discovery, purchase and advocacy.
Outstanding customer service is fundamental, but today’s rapid rate of innovation, digital transformation and changing customer expectations is increasingly difficult to keep up with. As a result, satisfaction with customer service has plummeted to a historic low. Staying ahead of the game requires continuous evaluation and improvement with a focus on creating value-added relationships with customers. This is crucial for both improving customer retention and increasing top-line revenue.
HARNESS THE POWER OF TECHNOLOGY
Today’s customers are tech-centric. They expect instant results and responses. For this reason, keeping pace with advancements in technology is essential for businesses who want to stay top of mind. In order to keep customers happy, modern-day contact centres must transform their operations to work side by side with artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Outdated technology not only decreases a business’s efficiency and therefore its profits, but it also indicates that customers aren’t a priority.
There’s no lack of options when it comes to customer service-related software and solutions. In fact, it’s not uncommon for customer service agents to use multiple applications and resources to solve a customer’s problem, switching from one programme to another during a single interaction. While each programme may accurately serve its individual purpose, failure to unify and automate these processes creates inefficiencies such as increased agent training and issue resolution times, as well as decreased agent consistency and productivity.
A more efficient business demands a more modern and efficient infrastructure. The 21st-century solution to this is becoming clear with the rise of cloud-based tech. According to Frost & Sullivan, a business consulting firm, over 80% of businesses currently use or are planning to use cloud telephony solutions to resolve their customers’ issues.
Cloud-based solutions allow contact centre agents to access all the information they need in one place, and even ensure that it’s all protected and available during unexpected disruptions. After all, if customers aren’t happy with one company’s slow and stuffy service, there are plenty of other options they can turn to.
STREAMLINED OMNICHANNEL APPROACH
We live in a dynamic world where customers are anything but static, and thanks to technology, they’re more accessible than ever before. Consumers expect and demand seamless interactions with companies, using their preferred method of communication whenever and wherever they happen to be, regardless of the platform.
According to a survey conducted by Aspect Software, businesses with omnichannel services achieve 91% greater customer retention rates compared to businesses that still operate across multiple platforms. Yet, all too often, transactional data and customer histories are not available nor consistent across communication channels. As a recent Forrester report outlines, this lack of integration leads to increased costs and results in slow and inefficient customer interactions, thereby reducing customer satisfaction.
Implementing omnichannel customer service will solve these problems while also enabling your company to reach a wider customer base by allowing consumers to interact with your business at their own convenience. Therefore,
a streamlined omnichannel approach to customer service is not only necessary to guarantee a consistent and tailored customer experience, but it’s also key for expanding business reach and helping to convert and retain leads.
In order for contact centres to serve their customers and businesses as efficiently and effectively as possible, they must become more adaptive to technology and increasing customer demands. Efficient, future-forward processes and solutions are the gold standard of today’s contact centres, and businesses risk falling behind if they don’t keep up to date with the digital disruption taking the industry by storm.
Using its 15 years of experience as technical consultants and CRM experts, redk supports companies looking to enhance efficiency and profitability through world-class tools that optimise performance across organisations. Get in touch to make sure you’re delivering the best customer service possible.
