Providing an efficient customer experience is at the heart of a business’s success. In today’s day and age, enabling a customer experience that exceeds expectations is what builds a company’s rapport and customer loyalty. In this blog, we will look into what exactly customer experience is and how it can be measured. Moreover, we will also identify the role of contact centers in enabling the customer experience and how MCG Technologies ensures a satisfied customer experience.
What is a Customer Experience?
Do you ever develop an instant liking for a business and immediately want to spread the word about a certain service that a company provides? Or a certain add-on they provide to make your buying experience wonderful? Have you ever faced a problem and instantly thought of contacting customer service for that, and it got resolved in a matter of hours? Or have you ever visited a restaurant where the staff is always available to you for orders or complaints? What does all of that make you feel?
Does it make you a loyal customer of the brand, or does it push you toward encouraging your friends to buy from the company? All this is made possible by a good Customer Experience provided by a company. The customer experience is at the heart of the relationship between a company and its customers. It is the relationship that a business maintains with its customers from the start of the buying process until the end of it. Along with the customer service that a company provides to its customers after the purchase deal is done.
1. What Counts as Customer Service Experience?
Maintaining a good customer service experience helps a business experience growth. That will only be possible if the company understands and comprehends the customer and aligns its service to solve customer needs. The perception of a company’s capacity to give its customers satisfying experiences is the customer service experience. The customer service experience involves conversations between the customer and the customer support agent during the whole purchasing process. Customer Experience helps build trust with customers. It helps businesses build a loyal customer base, and helps a business stand out and compete in the market. According to statistics, more than two-thirds of marketers say their companies compete mostly based on customer service. A customer’s service experience is made up of a variety of actions, including, but not limited to:
- Resolving complaints or issues
- Providing self-service options
- Navigating customers during their customer journey
- Providing post-purchase support
- Interacting with the customer service team via the helpdesk
2. How to Improve Customer Experience
Providing a good customer experience is an essential part of building a brand that every customer would want to form long-term relationships with. According to findings, providing a good customer experience to your customers will create goodwill for your business. Also generating three times more returns for the companies that do adopt the practice. A company must constantly make efforts to enhance its customer experience and make the customer journey fulfilling. A company can enhance the customer experience by:
Empower your employees
There exists a unique relationship between employee experience and customer experience. Companies that work towards the betterment of employees, and put in efforts to keep their employees satisfied have been reported to have better customer experience metrics and a more satisfied customer base. How do the two of them relate to one another now? Employees who are content, challenged, happy, and motivated provide better products, services, and guidance. Customers are delighted by these extraordinary experiences and then leave positive reviews, make larger purchases, and use word-of-mouth marketing to promote the brand, enhancing an organization’s perception of its brand and position in the market.
Start with your customer’s needs
To improve a customer’s experience, a company needs to focus on what the customer wants. The first step in working for a better customer experience is to identify the needs of the customers and what gaps in their experience may force them to change businesses. To create customer journeys that produce profitable business outcomes, you must first consider your customers’ needs.
Personalize the customer experience
A business needs to personalize the type of customer experience that they provide to their customers. In today’s time, the customer is aware of their needs and wants the business to be aware of what they want, which has to be personalized for the specific customer. According to a study, 66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations (State of the Connected Customer, 2020). Connect with your customers in a variety of ways and make the experience unique and tailored just to their problems, rather than sending out a generic automated message. Making experiences for your customers more unique can promote brand loyalty. For instance, providing vouchers to customers after their first purchase can personalize their experience and make them more brand loyal than competitors.
Incorporating AI into customer service and providing self-service options
Automate the customer experience journey for your customers by incorporating AI into the processes and enabling 24/7 chat help for them. This will not only help build a stronger customer relationship but will also help eliminate human error while providing manual customer support. This will also help eliminate bottle-necks that are created by humans. Furthermore, AI-powered chatbots help businesses save on customer service costs by speeding up responses and answering 80% of routine questions.
Moreover, providing customers with the option of self-servicing will help them make autonomous decisions. Moreover, self-servicing enables customers to look for answers themselves and take charge of solving them themselves rather than relying on a customer service agent for the resolution of issues. Around 70% of customers want the company to incorporate a self-service option on their website, including guides, case studies, manuals, etc.
Sentiment Analysis to Improve Customer Experience
Sentiment Analysis is an AI-powered tool that analyzes how a customer feels about your brand and what they feel about your products and services. This tool extracts customer sentiments from textual data obtained from various sources. This helps a business get a deeper understanding of how the customer feels about your brand and what could be done to improve it.
- Constantly track social media for any feedback that the customer might be providing. Sentiment Analysis can be used to track consumer sentiments in real-time and work on getting anything fixed that is leaving customers dissatisfied.
- Moreover, identify customer sentiment patterns using sentiment analysis while conversing through customer support chats and analyze whether they are happy or sad. Real-time analysis helps companies resolve any issue quickly and ensure seamless customer service.
- Sentiment analysis can assess both previous and current interactions between customers and agents to give agents the knowledge they can use to tailor their communication. It can also identify what types of messages trigger negative or positive emotions in customers.
- In both cases, agents can customize friendly responses that can positively impact customers’ emotions and leave them with a positive experience.
Adopting an Omnichannel Customer Experience
An omnichannel experience provides the customer with the ability to maintain seamless and integrated communications across platforms. This method provides support through several channels as compared to traditional methods like voice and email, which are demanded and used by customers more frequently. These channels are thus integrated, which enables the customer to ensure seamless conversation from one platform to another. Moreover, the omnichannel system helps build deeper and more insightful relationships with customers.
Furthermore, this practice enables the customer to start/continue the conversation from anywhere, wherever they deem fit. Thus, agents must continue to maintain the context of the conversation and provide a personalized experience for the customer. Furthermore, an omnichannel network provides rich data that can be later collected to gain a deeper understanding of the customer. To create an omnichannel experience, it has to be ensured that the experience meets the customer wherever they are and provides a consistent communication journey where their conversation history and context can be integrated into any channel.
3. How to Measure Customer Experience
Once a company has successfully enabled the customer experience, now comes the part where you measure how successful you have been in changing consumers’ perceptions to be positive and how satisfied the customer is. Even though customer experience is a subjective term, there are multiple ways in which a company can measure customer experience based on how good or bad it is for the customer.
The basic way of obtaining information related to customer satisfaction will be through surveys that can be provided at any level of the buying process and can be used to identify the level of customer satisfaction.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
You can calculate a Net Promoter Score (NPS) to obtain data related to how many customers would be promoting your business to their circle of friends through word of mouth. You can determine where you need to improve and where you are already providing a great experience by analyzing NPS at various touch points throughout the customer journey. This will also demonstrate to customers that you value their opinions and listen to what they have to say.
On the other hand, multiple metrics help analyze consumer data more quantitatively:
Customer Effort Score (CES)
This is used to measure the experience of a customer while using the product in terms of how easy or difficult it was for them to complete an action related to the product or service. A company can then ask them to respond on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is very difficult and 7 is very easy.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
This measures the customer satisfaction received from your product or service. This is measured on a scale of 5 or 7 and starts with very unsatisfied and goes to very satisfied. While NPS measures the overall customer tendency to promote the brand, CSAT, on the other hand, measures customer satisfaction at various points across the whole interaction.
Time to Resolution (TTR)
TTR measures the typical time it takes for customer service representatives to address a problem or ticket after it has been submitted by a client. It is determined by adding up all resolution times and dividing the total by the total number of cases resolved.
Long wait/response times were discovered to be the main source of customer annoyance in CX stats and trends. TTR is an important metric to monitor and optimize in this regard because the shorter your TTR, the more likely it is that your customers will not be frustrated when they contact you for support.
Contact Center and Customer Experience
Despite significant technological advancements, customer care agents still play a crucial role in business. To keep customers satisfied, contact center personnel must continue to leave a positive impression on callers.
Customer interaction with a representative is still favored over all others. While a lot of client questions may be resolved with digital help, more sophisticated issues still need a human touch. According to a recent Verint Experience Index study, 73% of banking clients who called a contact center had previously attempted a digital channel but failed to complete their work there.
Improving Customer Experience in Call Centers
It is equally important to improve the customer experience in the company’s contact center as it is during physical interaction or any other stage of the buying process. This is important because creating a positive experience ensures that you create a loyal customer base, and a loyal customer base also assures you of positive word of mouth and positive branding. Enabling the service of a good contact center will only be possible if the company guarantees constant improvement in its customer-centric approaches. An improvement in the contact center customer experience can be brought about by:
Discover your customer:
The contact center team might be aware of the customer’s details and demographics and what they expect from the company. One way to improve the customer experience would be to create customer service personas to better understand the customer profile. Since all customers are different, creating a persona might help them identify who they are talking to and how they can ultimately improve the customer experience for them.
Understand the phases of the customer journey:
It is a regular practice that customer service usually sends out a generalized message to all their visitors or customers seeking help. However, using a generalized message for a repeat customer is not the best practice, as the message may seem cold and the customer may feel alienated. Customer service needs to form deep and meaningful relationships with customers, and to achieve that, they should first identify what stage of the customer journey they are at. Once that is done, only then will the agent be able to send out personalized messages.
Make it convenient for the customers:
With the increasing competition in the market, every business is trying to provide the best possible customer experience to their customers. The most essential element of a good experience is the ease of access, or, in other words, the convenience that a business brings to its services. Incorporate certain elements while providing services to your customers that ensure that the customers have a seamless experience and can easily navigate through whatever their action is. For instance, providing them with the option to call back after disconnection, chatbot services, short waiting periods, etc.
MCG Technologies: Customer Experience
MCG Technologies firmly believes in providing the best customer service to ensure premium customer satisfaction and foster long-term relationships with customers. The customer success team constantly makes sure that there is a constant improvement in the experience provided to the customer; that is the key to forming deep and meaningful relationships. This constant improvement is done to ensure that the customers are satisfied with the products and services so that the company can achieve its desired Key Performance Indicators. MCG Technologies provides the following services to support its clients:
- Onboarding: The customer success team ensures that they hire the best employees to provide customer service to their customers and provide them with the essential training to deliver only the best to them.
- Account Management: The customer success team employs 24/7 monitoring of the customer accounts to ensure that none of the customers come across an issue and is always available to provide the necessary support to them whenever it is needed. This live monitoring is done using a system called “Zabbix”.
- Customer Support: The team also ensures that whenever a problem occurs, they immediately get on to solving it for the customer, which is then followed by some follow-up calls to the customer to monitor if the problem was resolved or if they have any other problems. They also assist customers with questions, troubleshooting, and product guidance through the 24/7 contact center.
- Retention: The team assures customers that all their problems are resolved promptly and that they can contact customer support for any issues they face whenever they want. They conduct bi-annual meetings with the customers to ensure that all is working well at their end as well as to receive feedback on the service provided by the company. As a result, in 2023, it was reported that the company maintained a customer retention rate of 96%.
- Upselling and Cross-Selling: Our team is skilled at identifying customer goals and objectives, and then adeptly recommending products or services that best align with those needs. This tailored approach enhances customer satisfaction, while also increasing our opportunity to boost sales and build long-term customer relationships.
- Analytics and Reporting: Analytics are a key aspect to monitor when it comes to improving a service or adding something that the customer needs. The customer success team at MCG Technologies uses reporting and analytics to track customer engagement and provide insights and recommendations to senior management. This data is usually collected through customer satisfaction surveys, which are analyzed quantitatively to obtain feedback about the TAC team and Project Management team. The survey is provided to the customers so they can mention how their experience working with the company was and what issues (if any) they would like addressed for further improvement. All of this information helps the company report 93% satisfied customers in 2023 and helps them constantly improve their customer experience.
