The evolution of the ability that consumers now have to search, browse, purchase, review and connect at the touch of a button has created a revolving challenge whereby the customer experience needs to be continuously improved.
Expectations that have been set from online retail, banking and social media have meant more traditional organisations are always playing catch up.
The BTN was delighted to partner with Talkdesk, a global customer experience leader, for a virtual roundtable with executive leaders who have a vested interest in the entire customer experience journey.
The session was hosted by the excellent Tobias Braun (Strategic Solution Engineer at Talkdesk) who brought to life some of the customer expectations today being more digital, more personal, transparent, end-to-end and so much more.
The conversation was open, interactive and brought about the following points:
You don’t just fix customer experience, you need to create it as well
Customer experience doesn’t just occur as a result of having your customers using your product, customer experience occurs by dedicated time to each individual step of the process and focusing on how we can enhance the experience of the customer in a positive way.
To create a customer experience that is positive, we must first actually understand what our customer’s expectations are.
There was a variety of industries being represented around the table with the role of the customer experience aligning with the digitalisation of banking being one of discussion. The transition of the customer experience being from a traditional in-building experience to a primarily digital service has revolutionised the end-user experience. However, do we really know if the customers are happy? We can no longer rely on our staff in a bank to analyse whether a customer is happy or not.
Where do you want to excel as a business? Where do you want to differentiate? What is your North Star? The relationship between the way a business is run and the customer experience that we deliver are so closely correlated that we must be fully aware that we can have an impact on the top line by creating a customer experience that has a great reputation across the industry. The visibility of reviews sites has now meant that the individual customer experience we provide is no longer in the eyes of just the individual but in the eyes of everyone.
It’s not easy to see if customers are happy.
There are so many different ways of measuring whether our customers are happy but sometimes the difficulty is simply getting the responses. Whether you are using NPS, CSAT or open questions, we want our customers to want to give us feedback.
Tobias asked the group what were some of the ways that they tracked success within their customer service journey with a variety of answers being around call responses, the number of new customers, first contact resolution (FCR), repurchase rate and customer lifetime value, amongst many others. There was also an open discussion about the utilisation of sentiment analysis to discover how customers feel about your product, brand or service through the use of analysing emotive writing. This led to the openness around measurement and the use of data from that gathered from customers. The focus of the conversation was that the biggest science is the tracking of the numbers but we must ensure we are turning the data into insights that you can then act upon. Surveys have come a long way and data analytics have come a long way but if we are not then building upon this to create meaningful journeys for our customers, the data is irrelevant. What should we be asking our customers to get a better insight on? Can we compare our NPS against competitors so that we see how our market experience is?
End to end digitalisation has been with us for some time in many industries, whereby customers have more anxiety and a need for reassurance. Clear and transparent communications are more and more important as we build relationships based on trust.
We must find the right balance between the human touch and a tech assisted journey
How do we make sense of what can be made possible with technology? Our focus should be on the end to end journey and looking at how we can use segmentation to see how technology can impact each individual element. We need to make everything easily available at the door or at the touch of a button and our entire infrastructure needs to be reliable from business to logistics. Reliability can be achieved and maximised by utilising AI but we must try to comprehend when and where the human touch is needed versus the use of technology.
Customers are now living in the ’Netflix world’ whereby they have expectations from organisations that they should know about their preferences and predict their future steps. Organisations need to have the ability to create personas and build relevant messaging & offers for individuals.
We should be reviewing very targeted things such as a particular target market and particular customer journeys. With this data, we can start to understand where a customer feels less engaged in a journey and focus on that. This focus will also allow us to work backwards and look at the data that is worth storing and using through defining it at the start of our journey.
There are many moments in the customer journey that technology can be a facilitator for improvement but we must start to understand where our customers want true human involvement versus an augmented or virtual approach which is brought to the experience through the use of technology.
Self-service portals that empower customers can be a perfect way to give access to information such as invoices, delivery updates, confirmations, FAQs etc but these basic elements of the customer journey must be done right, otherwise, dissonance can be created throughout the customer lifecycle. Simple questions should be accessible for customers 24/7 but there will near enough always be a place for human involvement to be added in if complications occur, it is up to our customer experience team to understand this exact point.
In a world where ‘data is the new oil’, the oil is irrelevant if you have an electric car, for example. The data can be the best thing for your business if used effectively but there’s no point gathering it if you’re not going to use it to make strategic improvements. No organisation is bold enough to say ‘we are there’ when it comes to creating a perfect customer experience and that is because many organisations are far away from reaching what our customers are expecting due to continuously evolving and changing desires.
We must ensure we get the basics right when it comes to our customer journey and try to gather data around the moments that matter to enhance and improve. The link between a positive customer experience and a retained customer is full of correlation and we must ensure we are finding out where we can enhance the journey at any given opportunity through the facilitation of technology…and in some cases, a human.
To find out more about how you can improve your customer loyalty and create engaging customer experience journeys, Talkdesk has put together a sensational report all around the future of AI in the contact centre, which is downloadable for free here (and available in German here)
About Talkdesk
Talkdesk is a global customer experience leader for customer-obsessed companies. Our contact centre solution provides a better way for businesses and customers to engage with one another. Our speed of innovation and global footprint reflects our commitment to ensure businesses everywhere can deliver better customer experiences through any channel, resulting in higher customer satisfaction, cost savings and profitability. Talkdesk CX Cloud is an end-to-end customer experience solution that combines enterprise scale with consumer simplicity. Over 1,800 innovative companies around the world, including IBM, Acxiom, Trivago, and Fujitsu partner with Talkdesk to deliver a better way to great customer experience.
