If your organisation is providing customer service in the same way that you did a few years ago, you’re on the road to losing customers, staff and market share.
Successful businesses ensure that their customer engagement and employee satisfaction strategies evolve and adapt to meet today’s needs. When this happens, you increase customer and staff loyalty, and open more opportunities for business growth.
The importance of experience for your business
Take this common scenario:
A customer has a couple of questions about a product they’ve purchased from you, and starts off by checking out your website to try and find the answer. He sees the webchat and enters his question, but the chatbot can’t answer his questions effectively. So he goes to your Facebook page and leaves a message in Messenger, which is auto answered by a chatbot – who advised him to call Customer Service. After some time on hold, a friendly customer service agent takes the call, but isn’t able to give all the answers, due to their permission levels. So he is transferred to another department. More hold time follows and his frustration starts to mount. He has to start his story all over again with the new department and finally he gets the answers he’s seeking – after 38 minutes.
In this all too common situation, the customer can feel they are going round in circles trying to get a quick answer to their questions, and to speak to the right person. Even if they love your products or services, having an experience like this clouds their perception of your company as a whole.
The goal of offering multiple touchpoints is to cater for customer preferences and make it easier for them to do business with you, and of course to provide a great customer experience. But, often the opposite happens because the different touchpoints operate as silos.
And it’s not just the customer who’s frustrated – team members will be too. No-one wants to spend all day at work grappling with technology and providing inefficient service to disgruntled customers.
How have customer and employee needs changed?
Most customers want easy-to-navigate digital interactions which help them get answers or help quickly and efficiently. No-one has the time or patience for convoluted systems and service delivery.
Customer Experience (CX) focuses on shaping the customer journey with a personalised experience which solves problems quickly. Customer feedback is used to gauge touchpoint interactions and satisfaction, and to learn where improvements need to be made.
Employees want fast and straightforward interaction with the systems and colleagues they depend on for doing their roles efficiently, and providing great service to customers.
Employee Experience (EX) refers to what it’s really like for your team members who are trying to deliver consistently good CX. A successful EX strategy and environment produces a less stressed and more driven workforce that works in a more efficient and productive way. Taking care of EX encourages commitment to the company’s vision and ethos, and improves job satisfaction and retention.
So what then is Total Experience?
Total Experience is the next step – where an organisation proactively implements strategies and systems that allow customers and employees to engage with the brand and company in a more holistic way.
Total Experience – TX – brings together all the X elements.
- UX – which relates to the user experience on your digital assets – particularly your website or app
- CX – the overall experience the customer has when trying to get customer service
- EX – how easy it is for your employees to operate your systems and deliver on your promises
Creating systems that collaborate for frictionless CX, UX and EX is at the heart of Total Experience.
Gartner’s report, Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022 predicts that TX-focused organisations will outperform others in CX and EX by 25%.
How to begin to incorporate TX?
Here’s a few ideas you can use to get started with building a wonderful TX for everyone who has anything to do with your business or organisation.
Take time to develop a multi-level plan
- Gather a complete and honest picture of your business by investigating and documenting the current experiences at all levels.
- Form a multidisciplinary team whose role is to create a strategy focussing on goal setting and collaboration opportunities.
Invest in the right technology
- IT is a driving force of TX, but investing in the right technology is vital. Identify platforms that amalgamate the digital experience for customers and employees. Look for those that improve collaboration, visibility and recording systems to boost customer service.
- Focus on platforms that can manage changing customer expectations by offering omnichannel communications and omni departmental connections. Move away from a purely transactional approach and towards a holistic CX. This will allow you to create a consistent and engaging customer journey that reflects your brand and company values.
Make good use of data to support strategies and decisions
- Use business insight information to identify channel trends and changes in key metrics.
- Run customer surveys to find out what they love and what they find frustrating about doing business with you.
- Hold employee discussions to identify technology issues and pinpoint silos that need to be connected to remove frustrations and provide empowerment.
Stay up to date with technologies and trends
Delivering better TX than anyone in your sector will give you the edge over your competitors and see you reap the highly prized rewards of increased customer loyalty and staff retention.
To do this, you need to be constantly aware and ready to act.
- Keep yourself informed of new trends and technologies that drive TX.
- Maintain flexibility and plan to adapt to the changing needs of customers and employees.
Embrace the future with TX and Premier Contact Point
Gartner’s report predicts that by 2026, 60% of large organisations will use Total Experience to improve CX and EX.
As technology continues to morph at the speed of light and using it continues to permeate every aspect of our daily lives, customer and employee expectations will also continue to grow and change.
TX is the building block for adapting to the changes and for providing the best personalised and collaborative company experience into the future.
Premier Contact Point’s technology is helping many businesses and organisations to implement TX and enjoy the rewards it brings.
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