The Value of Prioritizing the Customer Experience

Contact centres who focus their efforts exclusively on customer service may be missing out on the benefits to revenue and loyalty that an enhanced customer experience can provide.

Most contact centres these days are allotting a fair amount of their budget towards improving their customer service initiatives.

Why wouldn’t they? It’s the whole reason they exist, right?

While it sounds right, focusing exclusively on customer service may not be helping as much as you realize. A new type of service initiative is on the horizon that promises benefits far beyond what traditional service can provide — the enhanced customer experience.

Service vs. Experience

Despite how similar they sound, the customer experience and customer service aren’t the same thing.

The customer experience encompasses your customer’s entire relationship with your business, including interactions, thoughts, and feelings about your brand. This is a long-term relationship that defines their perception of your company.

Customer service is a subset of this, relating more to a single engagement in the customer’s journey. A phone call to tech support or complaints lodged online fall into this category.

The 2015 State of Marketing Report revealed that 86 percent of people are willing to pay more for an enhanced customer experience, and 89 percent are willing to leave you for a competitor after they’ve had a bad one.

Clearly, the customer experience should be focused on more heavily than simple problem resolution. So how can we prioritize the customer experience?

Your contact centre needs to be digitally optimized to facilitate a seamless experience
Agents have to be ready, willing, and able to provide this experience
The experience has to create an emotional connection with your customers

Let’s take a closer look at a few ways the contact centre can enhance the customer journey.

Digital Service Enhancements

First, your contact centre needs to be updated with the necessary technology to decrease the burden of problem resolution on both your agents and customers. After all, the McKinsey Customer Experience Survey found that businesses who were able to provide a superior and low-effort customer experience saw a 10 to 15 percent increase in revenue and a 20 percent increase in customer satisfaction.

A big part of this is optimizing your call centre software with browser-based solutions that can give your agents options for problem resolution. These can involve call queues, call recording and monitoring, inbound caller ID, or personalized greetings. This translates to faster and more agile service which will improve KPIs such as average handle time and first contact resolution. Optimized software can also be integrated with CRM applications to provide personalized information and caller details — a necessary aspect of a good customer experience.

Engaging Your Employees

That said, it’s important to note that the customer experience and brand loyalty are completely dependent on the ability of your agents to provide the service that customers expect.

To this end, agent training and coaching are essential to creating the type of environment that makes the customer experience a priority:

Prioritize engagement: Customers can tell the difference between a call centre agent who is involved in their issues and one who is just “phoning it in.”
Give your agents a voice: Help agents feel that their input is valued in building a better customer experience.
Use social media: This platform can enhance communication, collaboration, and agility of service. This will also give your employees more flexibility in connecting with consumers.

Emotional Appeals

It’s important to know what emotions drive an effective customer experience. Customers need to feel valued and important, and should never get the impression that they aren’t a priority.

This type of initiative can be huge, as emotion was found to have the biggest impact on customer loyalty across 17 of 18 brands, according to research by Forrester.

On top of that, Capgemini Consulting found that fully engaged customers who had strong attachments to a brand were willing to pay a 23 percent premium over less engaged customers in share of profitability and revenue. In today’s age of service options, your brand can’t afford to be ignorant of how your customers feel — it’s a big factor in influencing brand perception, loyalty, and the customer experience.

Conclusion

Prioritizing the entire customer journey is a new way of thinking about service. Instead of simply responding to problems as they arise, contact centres can utilize integrated technology and properly trained agents to get an understanding of the emotions and needs of their customers.

This will allow your business to guide your customers throughout every step of their journey with your business and guarantee that they’ll always feel like a valued part of your enterprise. That’s loyalty worth bragging about.

Curious about more ways to enhance your contact centre to provide a better customer experience? Download our free white paper!