Содержание
- 7 ways to improve your customer experience strategy
- How to improve customer experience
- Формула эффективного клиентского сервиса
- Understanding customer experience
- What is Customer Experience Management?
- What is great customer experience?
- Составление карты пути клиента
- Customer experience management: value is in the eyes of the beholder
- What can you do with your NPS score?
- Customer experience management
- Books about customer experience: a reading list
- Value employee ideas
- Управление взаимоотношениями с клиентами
- Related stories
- Decide when to send it
7 ways to improve your customer experience strategy
As competition heats up and economic uncertainty is a given, one thing is for sure: a good customer experience can help drive the success of a business. But loyalty isn’t given—it’s earned. And without the right strategy, it’s easily lost.
The good news is that customer experience can be improved. And it starts by putting the customer at the center of your strategy. Here are 7 tips:
Customer feedback provides insight into customers’ expectations, and how they might change over time with changes in your industry. It can also tell you where customers are getting stuck and confirm what’s working well.
The key is to acknowledge the feedback and do your best to act on it. “It’s important to create a feedback loop with customers and act on what they tell you,” said Dyson. “This builds trust and ensures it’s not just lip service.”
Dyson also recommends creating an internal employee feedback loop. Agents can help aggregate customer feedback and provide insight into what’s making it challenging for them to deliver great service, such as policies or processes that don’t suit customer needs or friction between siloed teams that’s leading to slow resolution of customer issues.
Build an omnichannel experience
When you develop an omnichannel CX strategy, you aren’t just meeting customers where they are—that’s table stakes.Omnichannel means going a step further and providing a consistent communications journey for your customer, one where the conversation history and context travels with them from channel to channel.
Create a content management strategy
Customers would often rather solve issues on their own than reach out to a live agent. You can help them help themselves with data-driven content.
Usually, it’s in the form of help articles or chatbots that quickly point customers in the right direction. Ensuring that your content is accurate and up-to-date is crucial; an unhelpful article translates into a bad experience.
Deliver personalization
According to the 2020 Customer Experience Trends Report, 76 percent of customers expect personalization using data.
This might include engagement over their preferred contact method, account type or status, product recommendations based on purchase or search history, or some kind of personalized online experience.
Tailoring support efforts towards customer personas can go a long way, especially in the case of customer experience. Gathering context about who they are (they’re preferences, personalities, habits, etc.) can help agents better target their support that leads to faster resolutions. It may be helpful to conduct UX research on your business’s support initiatives to figure out ways to make interactions more personalized.
Empower customers through AI
Gartner estimates that by 2022, 72 percent of customer interactions will involve an emerging technology such as machine-learning applications, chatbots, or mobile messaging.
AI-powered chatbots and virtual customer assistants are handy for quick, repetitive tasks. But when they reach their limits on providing capable customer support, humans need to be there to help their customers.
Deliver proactive experiences
Simply reacting to customers’ needs is no longer enough to stand out. When businesses are proactive—anticipating customers’ needs and getting ahead of a problem before it escalates or even happens—they can create a unique experience that feels personal.
An e-commerce company might deploy a chatbot on its checkout page to answer customers’ questions before they abandon their cart. Or, an internet company might send a text to let customers know about an upcoming outage.
Use data and analytics
The stories found in the data about your customers and your support agents will clue you into many things: the efficiency of the support organization, general satisfaction with the interactions, behavioral trends amongst your customers, and lots more.
Refining processes with the customer experience in mind starts with understanding what the data is saying.
How to improve customer experience
1. Focus on delivering what your customers value most
It’s crucial to understand your customers’ view of your brand and the moments that matter most to them. A consistent, day-to-day delivery on your brand promise is crucial to retaining customers, cementing brand loyalty, and growing your base.
Understanding what elements are crucial to your customers helps you prioritize action and investment. In any list of experience elements, there will be ones that fall to the bottom. The key is to be sure that the lowest-performing elements are also the least important ones to your customers. That alignment – typically derived from key drivers – helps keep the business focused and KPIs relevant.
By identifying the loyalty behaviors you’re trying to improve, you can build models that will help you demonstrate to leadership how those behaviors drive changes in key CX metrics. This will help you secure buy-in for ongoing CX spend and ensure continued improvement.
2. Listen carefully to what your customers tell you – and then act on that feedback
One very productive approach is to use closed-loop processes to respond directly to customer concerns. In B2B CX, it’s even possible to follow up with customers who give low satisfaction scores or are NPS detractors. Given you’ll usually get fewer responses than in B2C, and have a closer relationship with each customer, this kind of approach can be highly productive.
In B2C, you’ll often have a much higher response rate to any surveys you send out. So while you should absolutely fix anything customers raise as an issue, following up with low-scoring individuals is often unproductive. Especially if your managers haven’t been trained and coached for those discussions.
Also listen to what your employees are saying. Often employees can identify problems and opportunities faster and with more depth than what you will uncover through your customer feedback programs. In fact, companies that have mastered the employee experience by listening and acting on the voice of employees have the best CX.
3. Show you’ve taken action
Customer experience programs are ongoing discussions between a brand and its customers. As such, it’s crucial to demonstrate you are taking action on the feedback, even for those respondents who have not specifically asked for contact. Including a simple message alongside customer-led initiatives – e.g., “You spoke. We listened.” – demonstrates that providing feedback is not just a tick-box exercise within the business. Customers are far more willing to provide experience feedback if they believe the business takes it seriously and acts on it.
4. Focus on improvements, not measurements
Customer experience isn’t a metric; it’s an ongoing program that delivers substantial business benefits. And that means you shouldn’t chase numbers. Use measurements to drive improvements in your CX program that will result in tangible outcomes. Whenever presenting or reviewing CX metrics, pair them with key learnings and resulting action items.
To gain momentum for your CX program, make and share quick wins.
5. Build upon your success
XM Institute offers research and tools to help you design, deliver, and mature your CX program. If you’re just getting started, the Fundamentals of Customer Experience Launchpad provides helpful tips and resources. For those who are further down the path of CX maturity, the XM Institute Blog offers insight into key trends and best practices on all four elements of XM – customer, employee, product, and brand.
Формула эффективного клиентского сервиса
Сервис (или клиентский опыт) можно представить простой формулой: С = О – В, где О – ожидания потребителя, а В – восприятие реального опыта.
Представьте: вы отправились в кафе или магазин, впервые, до этого увидев только рекламу или вывеску. Если ваши ожидания оказались выше реальности, вы получите ужасный сервис: липкий расшатанный стол, только наличный расчет или узкий ассортимент. Последствия очевидны: жалобы, разочарование, и вы повторно не посетите данное кафе. Если же реальность превзошла ожидания – это WOW-сервис (комплимент, дополнительные услуги и пр.). Такое обслуживание приносит рекомендации, повышение чека и лояльного клиента.
Не обязательно в сервисном случае ждать чуда. Даже знак «равно» между ожиданиями и реальностью – хороший знак для бизнеса. Чтобы каждый клиент был доволен, удовлетворите его базовые ожидания. Загвоздка только в том, что ожидания нужно знать.
Understanding customer experience
“Customer experience” gets thrown around a lot, but how’s it actually defined?
“Customer experience and service have converged,” said Peter Schwartz, Salesforce Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning. “It’s more than call centers and successful responses to problems; it is service opportunities in sales, support, and marketing. Delivering great customer experiences now means providing amazing almost magical service at every opportunity.”
For example, think back to the last time you called your cable company, filed an insurance claim, or booked a vacation. When you were done, how did it feel? Was the overall experience easy and enjoyable — or headache-inducing? What did you think of the company that provided the experience?
We’re not just talking about the customer service you received — the customer experience is broader and deeper than that. What’s important is the total perception of the company, interaction by interaction, from the first touchpoint to the last. This may include navigating the website, talking to sales reps over the phone, visiting a store, sampling a product or service, and experiencing an onboarding phase after a purchase.
The point is that at every one of these moments, customers form judgements about whether a company is living up to their expectations, and making it easy and enjoyable for them to do business with. In other words, customer experience is the sum of all these interactions.
What is Customer Experience Management?
Customer Experience Management (CEM or CXM) is the process by which an organization manages and organizes each and every customer interaction with a brand across the buyer’s journey. Gartner clearly defines customer experience management (CEM) as “the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and, thus, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.”
The objective of CEM is to optimize customer interactions to align with the customer’s ideal brand perception and exceed their expectations to nurture and strengthen long term customer relationships. Customer Experience management is emerging as the key strategy to gain a competitive advantage in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace. According to Gartner, more than 50% of organizations will redirect their investments towards customer experience innovations in the future. This also means, that your competitor is 50% or more likely to be focusing on customer experience in the future, thereby making it necessary to have a customer experience management software in place.
Three essential pillars of Customer Experience Management (CEM) are-
Know Your Customer
Brands that know their customers well are able to create awe-inspiring customer experiences. Organizations need to pay more attention to customer data to get insights about their needs and preferences for delivering personalized experiences.
Devise Optimal CX Strategy
Once the buyer persona is identified, it is crucial to define customer experience strategy mapping all the relevant touch points throughout the customer journey to better plan and organize how a brand will interact with the customers at each touchpoint.
Measure Customer Satisfaction
It is imperative to measure customer satisfaction in real time to estimate the success of CX strategy. Customer satisfaction index can be devised on the basis of regular customer feedback which will give a clear indication about customer perception of the brand.
What is great customer experience?
A good customer experience is one that makes it easy for a customer to do business with you, according to Dyson.
“A great customer experience makes it effortless for customers to accomplish their goals for what they want to use your product or service for,” he said. “Customer loyalty is less about big «wow» moments and more about being dependable and making things easy for customers.”
A positive customer experience might include:
- Marketing setting realistic expectations about the product or service
- Intuitive product design
- Easy-to-access self-help resources
- Proactive messaging around known issues
- Sales being transparent about pricing
- Always-available live customer support with short waits
What’s important is that all these teams are working together to create a seamless, consistent experience for the customer.
Since every customer interaction is usually handled by a separate department, it may seem like having satisfactory metrics within each department would be enough to create a great customer experience. However, the tricky part about customer experience is that the consumer does not experience their relationship with your company as a series of smaller interactions, but rather will remember it as one ongoing interaction.
This can create problems for organizations in which various departments are siloed and do not communicate in between each other. Silos can result in customers having to repeat information, fill out forms multiple times, or just a customer journey that drags on longer than needed.
Being aware of customer experience from an end-to-end viewpoint and making sure customers’ needs are at the center of attention every step of the way is key for creating a good customer experience.
Составление карты пути клиента
Подход к созданию карты пути клиента для проектирования услуг был впервые представлен OxfordSM (в то время называвшимся Oxford Corporate Consultants) в 1998 году для поддержки Eurostar в создании и реализации своей корпоративной миссии и предложения бренда. OxfordSM продолжила широко использовать этот подход, в том числе с правительством Великобритании, благодаря которому руководство по этой методике было публично опубликовано. Впоследствии он стал одним из наиболее широко используемых инструментов для проектирования услуг и использовался в качестве инструмента для визуализации нематериальных услуг. Карта пути клиента показывает историю опыта клиента. Он не только определяет ключевые взаимодействия, которые клиент имеет с организацией, но также знакомит с чувствами, мотивацией и вопросами пользователя для каждой из точек соприкосновения. Наконец, цель карты пути клиента — рассказать организациям больше о своих клиентах
Чтобы составить карту пути клиента, важно учитывать клиентов компании (личность покупателя), временные рамки цикла взаимодействия с клиентом, каналы (телефон, электронная почта, сообщения в приложении, социальные сети, форумы, рекомендации), первые действия (подтверждение проблемы) и последние. действия (рекомендации или продление подписки, fi)
Карты покупательского пути — это хороший инструмент для повествования историй: они сообщают бренду о путешествии, наряду с эмоциональным фактором, с которым покупатель сталкивается на каждом этапе покупательского пути.
Карты пути клиента учитывают ментальные модели людей (как вещи должны вести себя), поток взаимодействий и возможные точки соприкосновения. Они могут объединять профили пользователей, сценарии и потоки пользователей; и отражать образы мышления, процессы, соображения, пути и опыт, через которые люди проходят в своей повседневной жизни.
Преимущества
Составление карты пути к покупке помогает организациям понять, как потенциальные клиенты и клиенты используют различные каналы и точки соприкосновения , как воспринимается организация и как организация хотела бы видеть опыт своих клиентов и потенциальных клиентов. Понимая последнее, можно спроектировать оптимальный опыт, который соответствует ожиданиям основных групп клиентов, обеспечивает конкурентное преимущество и поддерживает достижение желаемых целей в отношении качества обслуживания клиентов.
Customer experience management: value is in the eyes of the beholder
So, the term “customer experience management” (CEM) –literally managing customer experiences – might seem somewhat of a weird term at first sight and maybe even out of touch with a changing reality.
Sure, you can manage many elements that create the conditions for fantastic customer experiences: the quality of your customer service, the response speed of your contact center representatives, the content you create, the quality of the various inbound and outbound interactions (not in a marketing context but a general context of inbound and outbound communications), the brand narrative, the touchpoints where different interactions occur, the overall “ambience” of physical experiences, deep insight into what customers want, the list goes on and will grow.
However, you cannot really “manage” the customer experience as such. And the reason is simply: customers shape their own experiences.
A matter of emotions and (inter)action: customer experience and customer engagement
Individual customers – and people – are individual. In other words: they are all different. As customer experience is really “owned” by the customer (as a highly emotional given), vendors of CEM solutions, marketers and many others have started talking about customer engagement whereby there is (inter)action instead of customer experience (both are not the same).
This complexity, along with the lack of understanding what customer-centricity really means and the fact that in reality it often remains a promise (let alone, siloed effort), has been creating the famous customer experience gap. Of course, customer experience management is about more than what we just mentioned here, we used the ‘management’ part of it to make a point – strictly speaking customer experience management is about “design” for the kind of experiences you (no, wrong: your customers) value and want, from the most obvious low hanging fruit to the more sophisticated parts of the puzzle and always emotional.
Even if customer experience is about emotions and individual parameters, there are many commonalities in the ways people experience things, fulfil a task and value experiences.
Customer experience management and the outside-in view
Tangible benefits of customer experience management – read more
Customer experience management or CEM is not about managing customer experiences as such but a practice that includes the design of customer interactions – and touchpoints – aiming to meet customer expectations and ideally exceed them (when it makes sense), whereby the end-to-end customer experience is taken into account and the mutual value of customer interactions is optimized in a continuous loop of interaction, reaction, pro-action and optimizing satisfaction to go beyond “good enough”. It has to be what it has to be.
Given the many dimensions and elements in the overall customer experience it does require management, transformation and process optimization, involving the customer on various levels, making intensive use of actionable data and information and removing obstacles and silo effects, taking into account – and involving – the customer and increasingly deploying connected technologies. Mind you: it’s not just about data and technology, most certainly not. It’s still about good old but hard to achieve “putting yourself in the shoes of”, “having an outside-in view” and getting out there as customers are more than data and digital feedback, they also walk around and can speak. And remember: emotions!
What can you do with your NPS score?
Remember, NPS is an indicator. It provides an overall metric to track and it allows you to monitor improvements in a product, service or organization. But there is so much that influences NPS. Take call center agents, for example, one agent may have an NPS score of 78 while a colleague has an NPS of 32. Considered just on their scores, it’s almost impossible to understand why. If you understand the context that each agent is working in it might start to make sense. Perhaps the agent with the lower score is working with customers who are trying to cancel service where the other is working with brand new clients. Naturally, these two agents will have different scores due to the customer’s experience before they contact the agent.
You might also be tracking things like Average Handling Time (AHT) or First Call Resolution (FCR) or even asking for feedback on particular traits like was the agent polite or helpful. These are all data points that can help you understand what’s driving your NPS score. So when you analyze the data, you can understand what’s influencing and changing your scores.
By running a key driver analysis, you might find that AHT is the biggest driver of your NPS score, allowing you to prioritize improvements in that area. You might find too that key drivers are different for different segments like age groups or genders, so you can adapt your approach to different audiences in order to offer the experience they expect.
The more data you can collect and analyze alongside your NPS score, the more you’ll be able to understand what’s driving your customer experience, allowing you to prioritize your improvements to have the biggest impact on your customers.
Using NPS survey responses as an input into a customer churn model
Layering together customer churn data with customer experience metrics, such as NPS, can help you predict when a customer is likely to cancel your service. This can help you closer link your experience data (X-data) to operation data (O-data) such as renewal rates, and It can help you win CX champions with senior leaders. In the past, creating a customer churn model was the work of advanced statisticians, but with Qualtrics Predict iQ, you can set up a model and start identifying customers who are likely to leave and have a customer care team to follow up with them.
Segmentation in your NPS survey responses
Segmenting your customer’s NPS scores is a powerful and great way to see if you notice patterns and find ways to improve certain touchpoints or experiences. Segmentation can be done by behavior, demographic, social class, or market. You can use NPS scores along the customer journey to ask for feedback through the customer’s preferred channel, at the right moment, and monitor metrics over time.
Customer experience management
Customer experience management is “the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed their expectations, leading to greater customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy,” according to Gartner.
Companies that are unable to successfully manage the customer experience are often taking a fragmented approach; that is, they’re looking at the different factors driving customer experience and figuring out how each one can be improved. While they’re doing so, they aren’t giving due consideration to how each factor influences the others.
That approach upholds the chaos that causes unsuccessful customer experience management.
By taking a more organizational and holistic approach to a customer experience strategy, it leads to more customer satisfaction and Here are some areas to keep in mind when building your customer experience management strategy:
- Marketing
Marketing’s role in the customer experience might be the most dynamic; it needs to be constantly adjusting to match the shifting needs of customers.
Marketers are often responsible for making the first impression on a prospect through ads, outbound campaigns, and word-of-mouth. Their influence continues through public communications, social media marketing, and creating a brand presence. The data gathered through all of these customer touchpoints can help you create more personalized customer experiences, which in turn creates more loyal customers.
Sales
Sales organizations are responsible for solidifying the expectations of becoming and being a customer. Outside of quick retail experiences, the sales process is often very attentive to the customer journey and meeting the needs of their prospects.
This provides valuable insights concerning what customers are looking for (be it specific features, follow-ups, support requirements, etc.) which in turn can influence the efforts in other parts of the business. When your customer experience is in-sync, sales can be more enabled to close repeat purchases and reduce customer churn rates.
Product
The goods and services provided by a company and the customer experience are closely linked; many customers will pay more for an experience than the product they’re receiving (think of the differences between high-class dining and fast-casual fare).
Beyond the immediate experience, there are details like reliability, affordability, user experience (UX), general ease of use, and a product’s life cycle that all tie into the customer experience. The experience provided by the product is the primary contributor to a business’s reputation, which in turn impacts every other part of the customer experience.
Customer service
After a sale, customer service is often the primary department that interacts with the customer.
Support agents are in a position to collect real-time feedback on the customer experience: they can see how customers interact with the product, how (and if) expectations are being met, and how the customer base is changing. Feedback is the most critical part of the customer experience; businesses can’t effectively evolve without it.
A CRM platform like Zendesk’s Sunshine can help connect customer data from all these teams and areas of the business together to streamline management.
Books about customer experience: a reading list
Take a look, it’s in a book! With the guidance of these experts, you can make your own master class in the customer experience. Here’s a brief reading rainbow
- The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty, by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick Delisi
- The Service Culture Handbook, by Jeff Toister
- Customer Understanding, by Annette Franz
- The Customer Experience Book, by Alan Pennington
- Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine, by Jeanne Bliss
- Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hsieh
Value employee ideas
Employees who are on the frontlines interacting with customers are in a unique position. They’re the rubber meets the road when it comes to delivering on your brand promises, and they’re equally pivotal when it comes to perceiving and communicating customer expectations, mood and perceptions.
So when that crucial connection suffers, so does your understanding of your customers, and their perception of you. Employees who feel valued are more engaged at work and more willing to help customers.
According to our latest employee engagement trends research survey, employees are two times as likely to be actively disengaged if they think their manager ignores them, so it’s important to let them know they’re valued by listening to their opinions and ideas.
Take action:
As well as running regular pulse surveys to collect employee experience data, consider setting up an employee suggestion box to create a channel for ad hoc feedback. Giving employees a voice can offer valuable insight.
Even more importantly, take action on the feedback your employees provide. Making a clear connection between what they give you and what you’re able to do as a result will underline how important they are to you.
Управление взаимоотношениями с клиентами
Согласно Дасу (2007), управление взаимоотношениями с клиентами (CRM) — это «установление, развитие, поддержание и оптимизация долгосрочных взаимовыгодных отношений между потребителями и организациями». Официальное определение CRM Исследовательского центра управления взаимоотношениями с клиентами — это «стратегия, используемая для того, чтобы больше узнать о потребностях и поведении клиентов, чтобы укрепить с ними отношения». Цель этой стратегии состоит в том, чтобы изменить подход к клиентам и улучшить впечатления для потребителя, сделав поставщика более осведомленным об их покупательских привычках и частоте покупок.
D4 Company Analysis — это инструмент аудита, который рассматривает четыре аспекта стратегии, людей, технологий и процессов при разработке стратегии CRM. Анализ включает четыре основных этапа.
- «Определите существующие процессы управления взаимоотношениями с клиентами внутри компании.
- Определите представления о том, как компания управляет отношениями с клиентами, как внутренними, так и внешними.
- Разработайте идеальные решения для управления взаимоотношениями с клиентами в зависимости от компании или отрасли.
- Разработать стратегию выполнения рекомендаций на основе полученных результатов «.
Related stories
Article
Why companies need customer tutorials
Leverage customer tutorials to educate your audience, create trust, and attract new buyers.
Customer expectations
Article
- CRM
- Customer satisfaction
Article
B2B customer service: What it is and how to do it right
Provide world-class B2B customer service to build trust and create long-lasting relationships.
Customer expectations
Article
3 ways healthtech startups are improving the patient experience
VC funding for healthtech startups is at an all-time high. Here’s how industry leaders are rethinking the healthcare experience, from app visits to doctor visits.
Startups
Decide when to send it
Timeframes for survey research can vary depending on your business goals, resources, and audience makeup. Some customer satisfaction surveys only make sense at a certain point in time, while others are more general and can be sent out periodically. For example:
- Post-purchase evaluation: Feedback from an individual customer at the time a product or service is delivered, or shortly afterward. Again, this will depend on the product. For example, if the recipient bought a pair of trainers then you might send the survey earlier than if the recipient bought a new car.
- Periodic satisfaction surveys: Feedback from targeted groups of customers to provide periodic snapshots of customer experiences. An annual customer survey is an example of periodic satisfaction surveys.
- Continuous satisfaction tracking: Regular surveys (daily, monthly, or quarterly) that provide continuous satisfaction feedback on post-purchase evaluations over the entire customer lifecycle. More and more channels are being used for this too, as businesses try to meet the customer where they are in real-time.
Remember, if you’re sending periodic or continuous surveys, the goal is to collect like-for-like data, so make sure your questionnaire is consistent and resist the urge to make any tweaks or changes unless they’re absolutely necessary. Even changing question order can affect your results.