In its simplest definition, customer experience is the sum of all the interactions that a customer has with a company over the course of the relationship and includes the customer’s feelings, emotions, and perceptions of the brand during the course of those interactions. Some people question whether product and price are part of customer experience.
Journey maps are a way to walk in – and to capture – your customer’s steps and chart her course as she interacts with your organization while trying to fulfill some need or complete some task, e.g., call support, purchase a product, etc. The map (created with customers, from their viewpoint) describes what customers are doing, thinking, and feeling at each step in the journey. With the right data integrated into the map, you can identify key moments of truth, i.e., make-or-break moments or moments during which the customer decides if she will continue to do business with you or not, and ensure that those moments are executed flawlessly going forward.
Important to the journey mapping process is to have the right customers and the right stakeholders in the room to create the maps. The right customers are those for whom you’re mapping, obviously. We typically identify the personas for which we’ll map before beginning any mapping workshop; the right customers will represent those personas. The right stakeholders include individuals from the cross-functional departments that are either directly or indirectly involved in the journey that you’re mapping.
The customer service experience is one of my favorite journeys to map because it is such a rich experience; it affords such huge teaching and learning opportunity.
People contact customer service when the product isn’t working right; the documentation isn’t clear; marketing set expectations that the product didn’t deliver; sales sold the dream and not what the product actually does; the invoice is not accurate or hard to decipher; or for a variety of other reasons. Something (i.e., the experience) broke down somewhere upstream, long before the customer even thought about calling – or even wanted to call – customer service.
In other words, when messages are misleading or confusing, when the customer has a complaint about an interaction or a transaction, or when something doesn’t work the way the customer expects, the experience is broken. The resultant action: the customer calls customer service to get help or to get answers.
This call isn’t customer service’s fault. This isn’t a breakdown in service; this is a breakdown in the experience. And so, customer service takes the beating and the anguish from the customer for something that could’ve been designed better upstream. Had that proper design occurred, the number of frustrated customers calling the call center would have been drastically reduced!!
Have you ensured Positive CX at all touchpoints – Get your checklist
Providing a stellar customer experience has been a cornerstone of business practically since spending and consumption have existed. However, now that the business landscape is growing increasingly competitive and companies are competing for customers’ attention more than ever before, delivering a great customer experience is even more important to increase conversions.
Here are some ways you can boost your conversions by keeping customers satisfied:
A significant part of increasing conversions is promoting customer loyalty — and, concurrently, customer lifetime value. Customer experience is closely linked with this, as 64% of companies rate customer experience as the best tactic for improving customer lifetime value.
By shifting your focus on how to boost customer lifetime value, you’ll establish the right mindset to make customer experience work to increase conversions. Gear your strategies towards boosting the value of your customers, and the customer experience part will fall into place more naturally.
This goes further than just greeting customers with a smile; customer service includes every interaction before, during, and after a purchase. You need to be thorough to turn your one-time buyers into repeat customers, as 47% of customers would take their business to a competitor within a day of experiencing poor customer service.
On average, companies make more money by retaining customers than by acquiring new ones. By getting to know your customers through social media, phone calls, and email, you can identify your most valuable customers and pay special attention to them to build the relationship — and generate more conversions.
Personalizing your interactions – in person or online – with your customers can do wonders for your conversions, as customized experiences can increase sales up to 20%. Customers want to feel special, so provide them with personalized content to show them you care.
To build up loyalty among your customers, it’s important to reward them for buying from your business. Seventy three percent of loyalty program members recommend the brand to others – meaning that treating your customers well through rewards like discounts, gifts, and more can quickly translate into revenues.
Customer service reports not only provides you an overview of all customer service requests received from your customers but also allows you to identify the key areas for improvement, plan your workload and schedules of your customer support team. You can keep track of your CX trends, and most importantly, you get to know whether your customers’ expectations are met or not.
Lets have a look at the reports:
The “number of requests received” report shows you how many customer requests you have received within the last day(s). Knowing the number of requests you receive helps you identify customer service trends and gives you insight for how you can plan and schedule your support team.
For example, if you start to notice an increase in requests on Saturdays and Sundays, it might mean that you need to schedule your team to work on the weekend.
The “number of requests closed per user” report provides an overview of how many requests each support agent is closing. With this report, you can measure the performance of individual customer service agents, allowing you to identify how productive each agent is and how many requests they are able to handle.
If you find that an agent is answering twice as many requests as the rest of your team, it might mean that the agent is “cherry picking” the easy requests over the more difficult ones. One way to solve this is to automatically assign requests to the next available agent so that all requests are distributed equally.
Another example might be that one agent is answering too few requests compared to the rest of the team. If an agent is struggling, then you should consider conducting a training session. Find out what’s slowing them down and suggest ways they can improve their workflow.
According to a study, 82% of customers say the number one factor to great customer service is having their issues resolved quickly. This is why it’s important to measure how long it takes you to respond to a customer!
Average response time is calculated from the time a request has been sent by a customer, to the time an agent has responded. For example, if a customer sends a request at 3pm and a customer service agent responds by 4pm, then the response time is one hour.
The faster you can respond to a customer, the better service you deliver.
If you find it is taking too long to respond to customer service requests, if could be due to the fact that the right department or agent isn’t receiving the request and that the delay occurs when trying to find the right contact person.
Another reason for taking too long to respond might be due to the responses themselves. Are your agents creating each response from scratch? Are lengthy emails slowing down your response time?
Customers don’t enjoy endless back and forth messages with customer service departments and prefer to have their issues handled by an agent who has all the right information, asks all the right questions and gives accurate answers, within the first reply.
What is first contact resolution?
It’s when you can resolve a customer issue in your first response.
Only 11% of companies are able to manage customer requests in the first reply.
This report tells you how much effort your customers have to put in to get their issues solved.
A high number of messages could indicate that the request responses from your team are not detailed enough.
However, an agent could easily include all of these details within the first response, which would lead to a high first contact resolution rate.
The “number of requests created per month” report is an important report for identifying customer request trends.
Like any business, you will have your high season and your low season. If you sell your product or service to businesses, you can expect a high volume of requests during the work week and you can expect the number of requests to drop during the weekends.
When there’s so much data available, it’s easy to spend time reading the wrong reports.And there’s no use in getting bogged down in data without knowing what to actually do with it. The reason you are reviewing this data is so you can make better decisions, improve your processes and understand how your team is performing.By using these customer service reports, you can keep track of trends, employee productivity and customer satisfaction, all of which have a significant impact on your bottom line.
Put yourself in the customers’ shoes. How do you gauge the quality of service a company gives? What makes a customer experience an excellent one? Would you consider a normal, vanilla transaction a high-quality service?
In whatever facet of customer service, it’s often advised for businesses to underpromise and overdeliver. Underpromising sets the bar of expectations low for customers; overdeliver, means going beyond what is asked. When applied, simple requests become memorable moments; customers become more satisfied because of the positive customer experience. But is this practice worth the effort for your call center?
There are those who believe that going the extra mile merits better value, creating a positive reputation for your brand. Not only did your customer service team help your consumers, you went beyond what is expected of you to satisfy their needs. And this can influence them to be loyal to your brand.
There’s also the fact that it sets the customers’ expectations much higher. Take a look at online sales giant Amazon. Their delivery times seem to get shorter over time, to the point of considering the use of drones to circumvent traffic or getting your product delivered before you even ordering them. They continually top the promises they make and still make sure everyone receives excellent customer experiences. However, not everybody can pull this off.
In contrast, this maxim has an ironic nature. Some people view underpromising and overdelivering as withholding the best you can offer to customers. It’s like you’re being strategically deceitful by not being upfront about what you can bring to the table. It’s like you’re hiding what could get the job done immediately.
Others think the above and beyond approach is just wasted effort. According to a study, you could just always deliver (not over or under) and still gain the customers’ approval virtually the same rate as going above and beyond.
So, what does all these mean? Go above and beyond when you can and when you should. Understand that every customer is different. Some may want to feel that your call center agents are making an effort for them. Others just want things to go their way regardless of how services are delivered. What’s important are the promises you make—keep them, don’t break them.
