In a constantly connected and mobile society, providing an omnichannel customer service has become indispensable for brands looking to connect with busy customers
A phone conversation is no longer the only means for customer interaction; customers today communicate via SMS, email, social media platforms, live chat and more. Nearly 50% of customers find themselves crossing back and forth between digital and physical interactions, even in a single conversation. The omnichannel trend reflects consumers’ desire for greater choice and personalisation: they can select the mode of communication which best suits them, use their own devices and access information at any time of day.
https://www.technative.io/delivering-a-superior-omnichannel-experience-for-your-customers/
One of the biggest challenge businesses face in providing better customer service is truly understanding their customers. Figuring out why customers are reaching out and what drives their decisions, behavior, and opinions of your brand are crucial to long-term success. To create a positive customer experience, not just before and during the sale, but after the sale as well, you need to listen to your customer during every conversation.
Speech Analytics lets you harness the power of voice of the customer insights by enabling you to automate the monitoring, categorization, tagging and scoring of all interactions with customers – whether they happen on the phone, email, chat or social. Doing so can give you a deeper understanding of why customers reach out, what frustrations they are experiencing and what they need from you.
These articles outlines how speech analytics provides voice of the customer insights to improve customer service.
https://callminer.com/blog/voice-of-the-customer-analytics-the-power-of-voc-insights-in-improving-service/
Is customer service part of the customer experience? Or is customer experience what happens when someone receives customer service? Are they the same thing?
The terms “customer service” and “customer experience” are often confused or used interchangeably. They’re not the same thing, but they are related.
The difference between customer service and customer experience is that while customer service is one piece of the puzzle — focused on human interaction and directly supporting customers — customer experience is the sum of the entire customer journey with your business.
Let’s take a look at customer service vs. customer experience in more detail.
https://www.helpscout.net/blog/customer-service-vs-customer-experience/
Whether new to CX or looking to expand your current knowledge, it is important to learn about what, when, and how to develop personas so that you can serve your customers better. Knowing what personas are NOT is equally important to create desired outcomes versus hinder them.
http://customerthink.com/customer-personaswhats-all-the-hype/
Are your customers successful and happy with your products and services? Are they telling their friends and business partners to buy from you? If they have a concern, are you making meaningful change to address it? These are questions that all businesses need to ask themselves to ensure everything is being done to create customer delight. Happy customers are not only retained but they also help create more happy customers. Having solid answers to these questions helps drive a smooth customer experience throughout your sales cycle, the delivery, use or implementation of your product, and through any ongoing post-sale interactions.
To realize these goals a company needs to ensure their practices delight customers at every stage. And as the saying goes: “You cannot change what you cannot measure”.
https://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/the-value-of-measuring-customer-delight-02096194/
According to Forbes magazine, globally it is reported that companies across different sectors lose around 62 Billion due to poor customer experience. With a statistic like this, one might think that customer service is getting worse, when in fact it is getting better. The reason behind this is that the best companies are setting the bar higher.
Research done globally by Ipsos has shown that expectations have become more liquid, meaning that they are increasingly influenced by a much wider body of experiences across a variety of sectors. Here it could be argued that the increasing digitization makes it easier for a customer to compare, thus it’s possible that the service provided by Amazon’s One click ordering affects the way consumers expect to deal with their bank, utility provider or local restaurant.
http://www.venturemagazine.me/2018/07/customer-experience-excellence-ipsos/
Customer journey mapping is a popular tool for visualizing a customer’s experience. These maps provide a visual outline of various interactions that the purchaser has with a brand. It’s become a must for businesses as it allows managers to spot potential problems, going a long way in ensuring that the customer experience is satisfactory and hassle-free. When the customers’ road to conversion is straightforward, they’re more likely to stick with that brand.
In fact, taking advantage of the benefits of journey mapping, according to research published by Aberdeen Group, “Customer Journey Mapping: Lead The Way To Advocacy” the ROI for doing so is 200% greater employee engagement and 350% more revenue from customer referrals. Just imagine the profits and the ability to relocate toward bigger tech cities, such as Austin or San Francisco.
But, for successful customer journey mapping, it must be a collaborative process, with brand managers, markets and customers are included, allowing a manager or owner to form a complete perspective of what’s going on, from the moment the customer first discovers the brand through the buying stage.
In order to get a clear picture of this journey, there are four essential components of journey mapping.
http://customerthink.com/four-essential-components-of-customer-journey-mapping/
Your service desk customers typically have the last word about the services you provide, like it or not. There’s a bit of the old adage here – “the customer is always right.” While that thinking has a long legacy in the business world, there is a bit of movement to such philosophies like “the employee is always right” that reflects the sentiment that without properly empowered employees customers can’t be properly serves. Nevertheless, in the organisations where service desk customers typically have the last word, it is increasingly important that you track how they feel about their interactions with you. But how do you actually measure how well your service department resonates with the user base?
This is no easy task, though. Quality customer experience is as important as it is difficult. Satisfaction among your customers depends on how you’ve helped to solve their issues rather than what you did to solve it. In other words, your customers don’t want to know what it’s the sausage, they just want the sausage.
Quantitatively measuring that may otherwise be defined as qualitative can be a bit tricky, but there’s no reason to panic. There are ways forward.
https://www.itproportal.com/features/tracking-customer-experience-with-key-performance-indicators/
We have the technology to listen to customers, but we're still not getting customer experience right. According to the State of Customer Experience 2017 report from business process services company Conduent, brands fail to provide 80 percent of customers with first-step resolutions. Further, 75 percent don’t provide enough support to encourage successful self-help.
https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/10-common-voice-of-the-customer-mistakes/
Every organization has a unique way of interacting with customers based on its organizational culture, a system of shared assumptions, values, beliefs, and behaviors that govern people’s behavior within the organization. The way employees of an organization interact with customers creates the image or perception of the company to its customers. Even more, every customer’s perception is unique as it is not merely about the way the organization interacts with the customers, but also includes the way the customers perceive it.
Customer experience is the cumulative effect of customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by each interaction with an organization’s employees, systems, channels or products. Therefore, it is not enough to merely group the customer perceptions into a set of bands by asking a series of rating questions (typically on a scale of 0 to 10). These questions barely break through the surface of customer’s feelings and do not come near understanding the true voice of the customer.
https://www.techsophy.com/blog-customer-feedback/
