Providing a great customer experience should be seen as an investment rather than as an expense. Neil Hammerton, CEO and Co-founder, Natterbox, discusses how businesses should work to gain customers’ loyalty and stay ahead of the competition to provide them with a personalised and seamless customer journey.
Technology is becoming more accessible to businesses every day, thanks, in part, to reduced costs resulting from multiple technology start-ups fighting for market share. And as it becomes more integrated into our everyday lives, keeping up with the speed of digital innovation is more vital than ever for organisations that want to remain competitive.
When it comes to customer service, the rising use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the likes of chatbots threatens to cut out the human connection entirely. But is relying on technology for every customer interaction a risky business? We all know that a single negative encounter could potentially lead to the loss of a loyal and lucrative client.
Poor customer service has a long-term impact on buying decisions and some customers avoid companies for years after an initial negative interaction. And with the rise of social media as a communication tool for brands, unhappy customers can amplify their voices. One bad review can spread like wildfire, deterring hundreds of customers from doing business with a brand. In fact, studies show that 80% of customers won’t buy from companies with negative reviews.
Social media is one of the many digital assets that organisations are investing in, in order to improve their customer communication. But organisations that want to enjoy long-term success must find the right balance between automated customer service and human connection. While the former can help increase productivity and enable faster customer transactions, the other is indispensable when it comes to creating a personalised and pleasant customer experience that will gain long-term loyalty and trust.
The human touch is ultimately the superpower that will differentiate customer service-orientated businesses from their competitors. These businesses should certainly be focusing their investments on digital innovations, but they must ensure the technology and tools they invest in enable customer service agents to enhance their performance and build a business’ reputation for offering exceptional customer experience.
The speed priority
One crucial aspect that organisations should prioritise if they want to keep their customers happy is reducing waiting time.
We’re living in an era where consumers want immediate gratification and if they don’t get it, they’ll simply look elsewhere. A recent study from Gartner revealed that almost one-third of people believe that waiting on hold for more than two minutes is too long. In reality, consumers will actually wait on hold for an average of 11 minutes before hanging up. However, one in three customers will never call back if they don’t get an agent on the line on their first attempt.
These stats aren’t just frustrating for consumers, they can also have a significant impact on a company’s bottom line and overall performance.
As such, keeping wait and hold times low is a vital component of providing a satisfactory customer service – so businesses should be investing in technology that can help monitor and improve them. Innovations, such as automatic call backs for instance, ensure that when lines are busy and waiting times are likely to be long, the customer does not have to hold the line for a seemingly infinite amount of time and can request a call back later – without losing their place in the queue. This type of technology is just one of many that enhances customer experience: once the customer gets a call back, the interaction is free of stress and frustration, which leads to a happy, satisfied customer.
Super strength
Constant technological innovations have altered customers’ expectations and nowadays, customers don’t invest much time or effort into resolving any potential issues that they might have with the products or services they purchase. Instead, they contact customer services.
While service agents are more equipped than ever to deal with demanding customers, some contact centres still use outdated, legacy technology that has a significant negative impact on the customer journey. Indeed, studies show that 42% of service agents are unable to efficiently resolve customer issues due to disconnected systems, archaic user interfaces and multiple applications.
Businesses that want to gain customers’ loyalty and stay ahead of the competition need to shift gears and adopt smarter solutions that can easily integrate with their existing digital infrastructure and provide a personalised and seamless customer journey.
For example, one of the major pet-peeves many clients complain about when it comes to customer service is having to explain their problem to multiple people and departments. But by implementing a smart telephony platform that safely records and keeps customer interaction data, businesses can provide their customer service staff with a 360-degree view into any customers’ previous interactions with the brand – everything from purchases to previous calls and complaints. With this information, agents can address a customer’s issue faster, without having to put them through several conversations and various departments. This allows them to take the burden off the customer, lighten their load and make the whole experience with the company more pleasant and dynamic.
The multilingual advantage
Another major challenge many customer service operators deal with today is interacting with clients that don’t speak their language. This can make communication slow and frustrating for both sides. Language barriers can be a huge problem for many organisations, especially when an increasing number of companies are expanding their global reach at a fast pace, and multi-national contact centres are on the rise. To address this challenge, technology is being developed that leverages Machine Learning and AI to deliver real-time translation, helping contact centre staff to understand customers more easily and establish better connections with them.
By using technology to remove the language barrier, clients and customer service agents can focus on the real issues at hand, improving efficiency and ensuring happy customers and more focused staff.
The price of positive customer experience
For many companies, the contact centre and customer service departments are still treated as an afterthought. Unfortunately, the reality is that this attitude could come at a very high price for them.
A recent study conducted by the Northridge Group highlights the risks businesses face when investing in automation thinking it will be the panacea for customer service, without considering the customer need for efficient human-to-human interaction. The study shows that:
- 69% of customers have difficulty navigating automated systems
- 65% of customers have trouble using websites
- Fewer than 50% of customers find any channel easy to use
- 62% of consumers reported needing to make multiple contacts to resolve their most recent customer service need
- Only 46% of consumers reported resolution of their customer service need within an hour. Almost one in 10 customers indicated their problem was never resolved
These statistics show that it’s high time for companies to stop seeing the contact centre as an afterthought of their customer experience strategy and acknowledge it as a goldmine for creating positive customer interactions. It is, after all, the first port of call for customers trying to get in touch with the company – their first experience cannot be sub-par and disappointing.
Waiting until a problem arises, or pretending it doesn’t exist, increases the time and cost of recovery. Therefore, providing a great customer experience should be viewed as an investment rather than an expense. Every call taken presents an opportunity for service providers to emerge as a hero for their customers and save the day.
Organisations that want to thrive in the long term must ensure that their contact centres have the human and technological resources they need to do an outstanding job. They must realise that being average in the customer contact world does not lead to business success. By using business tools to enhance their contact centre’s customer service capabilities, businesses can significantly improve their customers’ experiences, putting them back at the heart of the business. And at a time when customer expectations are so rapidly fluctuating, offering a personalised and exceptional service could be the key to maintaining brand loyalty.
