Is the idea of customer experience an art or a science? There is much talk today about the meaning of customer experience and more importantly how to leverage it. However, organizations are still coming to terms with how to build a CX strategy and implement that strategy. Below are five examples of guiding principles to consider when it comes to enhancing the customer service experience within your organization.
1. Personalize the Experience
It’s known across industries that creating a personalized experience yields a much higher ROI. Personalized experience is something every customer seeks when interacting with your brand whether they realize it or not. The ability to track and analyze customer data in real-time as well as past customer experiences are ways you can use contextual information to make future recommendations about other services and products, or creating targeted campaigns to build loyalty and trust.
2. Optimize Customer Experience
Optimizing the customer experience is not only delivering a more personalized experience. It is also about unifying the customer experience across every channel of engagement. Whether this involves your customers engaging with you via voice, web or social, it is important to deliver a comprehensive yet seamless experience in each channel to avoid customer service dead-ends or starting over.
3. Know Your Customer
Creating a single customer profile is an essential principle for enhancing CX within your organization. With a true CX solution in place, customer profiles, should be able to be created by any identifier. Customers will ultimately decide which channel they prefer to engage with you. Therefore, it is important to capture not only their preferred channel but their entire profile to better interact with them. With a clear outline of your customer base, you can provide a much more personalized experience while increasing retention and loyalty.
4. Shape the Customer Journey
Instead of reacting to a customer journey it’s now more important for organizations to shape the customer journey. Shaping the customer journey means taking specific customer actions and decisions and responding to each customer interaction in real-time. Navigating your customers through their journey allows your company to gain a clear picture of what your customer is trying to achieve. More importantly, capturing the contextual data behind your customers’ actions empowers your organization to identify gaps in the customer experience.
5. Invest in Innovative Technology
If you haven’t already, invest in the right technology to optimize customer experience. The idea of cost and simply not being ready for delivering CX are no longer applicable excuses. CX technology should complement your existing systems without ripping and replacing current technology. In addition, a hyper-focused CX solution should use a simple UI to ease the process of orchestrating the customer journey.
The idea of customer experience is slowly transforming from an art to a science. It is becoming more and more possible to track, analyze, and measure each customer action. Ensuring your organization is leveraging these five guiding principles to deliver an enhanced customer service experience from start to finish can improve ROI, retention, and loyalty, while solidifying your place as an industry leader.
