What do your customers (who are used to dealing with Uber, Amazon, and Apple) expect from their interactions with your organization? They want to have a great experience. As a result, traditional organizations have no choice but to step up their game to stay relevant.
Masha Sand, a Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant whose expertise is in digital strategy, product management, operations leadership, and business analytics, recommends three questions organizations should consider when upgrading or revamping their customer service approaches:
- What value does a customer get from each interaction?
- How can customer experience be enhanced in every interaction?
- What do customer interactions mean for a long-term relationship?
What value does a customer get from each interaction?
Advises Sand, in the recent Cutter Consortium Business Technology & Digital Transformation Strategies Advisor, “Customer Interactions in the Times of Digital Transformation:”
The value that your customers get from an interaction seems like an obvious concept; their questions are answered, documents requested and delivered, transactions processed, account data updated, and other types of tangible value are delivered. However, there is intangible value that customers are looking for as well: ease, quality, and assurance. More often than not, a customer is not able to get the value that she or he is looking for (either tangible or intangible) and has to resort to multiple callbacks/comebacks.”
What you should do
Sand recommends that organizations focus on “moments that matter” — the critical interactions that make or break the entire relationship and establish robust cross-channel metrics that make it possible to track your customer’s true journey through your service channel.
How can customer experience be enhanced in every interaction?
Do you know your customers’ preferences? Can you anticipate their needs? Can you meet them where they are? Today’s best customer service models rely on the information known about the customer to deliver a personalized experience.
What you should do
Writes Sand:
Meeting a customer where they are requires companies to think omni-channel. Customers move fluidly between channels, and digitization creates an expectation of parity between channels. While there are always some more complex or sensitive transactions that would require a conversation with an agent, providing a robust Web and mobile experience is table stakes today.”
According to Sand, with an omni-channel capability in place, the best customer service organizations continuously engage customers in the conversation about their needs and supplement that with the robust analytics that enable them to personalize customer experience and tailor each interaction to an individual customer.
What do customer interactions mean for a long-term relationship?
Every customer touchpoint should help your organization improve customer satisfaction, building up to long-term loyalty and even word-of-mouth promotion. The path to this state isn’t always simple or clear. Optimizing each interaction is important, but don’t forget to look at the entirety of the customer journey.
What you should do
The most advanced customer-centric organizations are starting to lay out customer journeys by engaging and collaborating with their customers in focus groups, using observations, and performing interviews. They then build an understanding of a customer’s needs, expectations, and emotional state at every step of the journey and tailor interactions to a set of needs. For example, a customer onboarding with an insurance company is happy to go through a self-service process or talk with a rep from a call center. In contrast, claimants who lost their house need reassuring phone calls with a claims specialist with whom they have a relationship. Using a call center approach in the latter case will not satisfy a customer’s emotional needs, even though they might get all the right information from a call center rep.
Building customer experience around customer journeys allows organizations to differentiate themselves and create long-lasting relationships that lead to loyalty and the coveted word-of-mouth promotion.”
For more on Customer Experience
Cutter Research: Cutter clients can read:
- The Whole Customer Experience: Competing Beyond Products and Services
- Frictionless Commerce
- The Wallet Allocation Rule: CX as Value-Creation Strategy
- The Digital Enterprise: Business Ecosystems for Great CX
- Cool Retail and Service Mobile Apps: Enhancing the Customer Experience
Not a client? Check out:
Workshop: The last several years have been a time of intense innovation around customer insights. Agilists have combined techniques from several disciplines, such as user experience (UX) design, software analytics, serious games, and even research techniques borrowed from anthropology and psychology. They have also expanded and honed elements of the Agile toolkit, such as using user story mapping to generate an initial backlog of user stories. Getting Better Customer Insights Faster provides an introduction to all of these techniques. You’ll learn how to build a strategy around these techniques, increasing the speed of collecting these insights, improving their reliability, and lowering the cost of acquiring them.
from The Cutter Blog | Debate Online https://ift.tt/2wvu10T
via https://ifttt.com/ IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment