Amazing Customer Experience

In every management discourse “amazing customer experience” spins off more questions on the customer engagement program. Earlier companies hardly care about what customers think about their products or services because the marketing function was busy transforming the negative experiences of customer through various marketing gimmicks and tactics. But today the emergence of social media has altered the game. The customers are more empowered to express freely their honest opinions and views about a product or service offered by a company on any social media platform. If any customer’s negative opinion is supported by similar views of other customers, this becomes a major concern for the company. Once the discussion transforms into a more participatory forum, it not only impacts the future business of the organization, but also it destroys the brand.

The role of social media has been predominant in empowering both businesses and customers. The marketing team can explore new avenues in the digital ecosystem to boost their marketing strategy. While earlier customers had little choice for selecting a channel to interact with a company, today the upsurge social media has brought in a plethora of options to reach out to the company representative. It’s not only a unidirectional communication that hides behind the carpet; rather a more participatory discussion that attracts many stakeholders to engage with customers.

An amazing customer experience doesn’t come out of blue. The company needs to understand the customers’ needs, engage with them, and deliver exceptional value in whatever form of offering. But the primary task is how to understand their actual needs. According to a survey conducted by IBM, just 35% CXOs really understand their customers well. This indicates that maximum CXOs don’t understand the customer needs.

In a customer-centric business environment, companies need to engage with customers through various communication channels and must endeavor to deliver value in concrete terms. Today, a number of companies send a survey form to customers and expect them to provide exciting feedback. That’s the inherent problem in customer engagement. You can’t dictate customers to be servile and expect good reciprocation. There are many players in the market and it won’t be too harsh to say that customer has always a choice.

The tricky part of customer engagement is how effectively companies can drive the customers to act as per their strategy. It’s not a marketing gimmick at all; rather it’s a cohesive customer engagement program. For example, a company’s sales representative can even gather precious information in an informal way while attending to a customer. It’s not a one-off incident. Companies should build up an engagement strategy in an implicit manner. A better way of doing this would be building the trust among customers and employees. Human relations can deliver amazing business value.

If you want your customers should respond to certain questions, then don’t send a formal survey link or questionnaire to millions of customers. In fact, train your employees to build an environment in which customers could be tempted to respond to many open-ended discussions. During those discussions employees can keep exploring the opportunities or help driving the customers to a point where the discussion points can provide huge insights.

The best customer engagement policy should hinge on the fact that a good listener is the most successful achiever. Try not to intimidate the customer by repeatedly intervening in the discussion. Give the customer free hand to open up and come out with as many points, which in turn will provide a gigantic customer datasets to explore the treasure. But the company representative shouldn’t forget the role of moderator; else the customer will drive his or her own agenda and the information collected will have no use.

Let’s consider the efficacies of social media engagement. Today, all young customers have a social media account and they are quite active in social media discussions. Anything and everything is discussed threadbare on social media. But the crux of the problem is that companies are not equipped with the right technology solution to decipher the discussion points. With millions of customers posting their views on a specific issue, it’s a gigantic task for the company to get the desired insights.

What’s required to analyze these engaging discussions is a technology solution, which would enable companies to derive powerful insights. However, to achieve the optimal outcome the companies should integrate all customer-facing applications – be it customer portal, corporate website, social media sites, CRM, or business analytics tool. The synergy among the tools will manifold the power of analytics.

As mobility is taking the lead in disruptive technologies, the companies can leverage its capability to boost the customer engagement program. With millions of smart apps readily available, companies can move their CRM and other customer applications into cloud and build a mobile strategy for business workflows. This will improve the quality of 24x7 operations. As customers will be exposed to a response mechanism round the clock, it will drive more customer engagement. But here is a caveat! The employees responsible for customer engagement should be distributed across various time zones and they must internalize the local culture to be more customer-friendly.

Remember, cohesive communication can only resolve 40% of the problem, but it requires the support team to accomplish the rest 60% task in a responsive manner. Although the companies have a mandate like SLA to take care of issue resolution process, there is no harm in building a smart system wherein support staff can reduce the resolution turnaround time in a proactive manner. When a customer issue is resolved with due diligence within the SLA, there is no substitute to the customer satisfaction level achieved in that process. A satisfied customer can be a reference point for many customers down the line.

Moreover, a satisfied customer can be open to share his or her views without a second thought. So, it’s a tactic for customer support representatives to collect the feedback of customers when they are really satisfied with the service of company. A unified system can enable the company to collate customer data from various geographies and eventually help derive generate meaningful customer insights. A data-driven company can bring in customer service excellence and deliver amazing customer experience in every customer engagement.