Greg Hanover is CEO of Liveops, a top US-based virtual contact center. He’s an inspired leader, driven to deliver better business outcomes.
There’s no denying that customer experience (CX) has a direct impact on business outcomes.
Research from Forrester analyzing 12 industries found that CX improvements drive growth by increasing customer loyalty. In the mass market auto manufacturing industry, for example, improving CX by one point can lead to more than $1 billion in additional revenue.
Yet customer experience can be notoriously tricky to evaluate, measure and improve. Like many businesses that support customers throughout the year, we celebrate Customer Service Week the first week of October. It’s an ideal opportunity to reflect on what’s working well and what we can improve moving forward. At the end of the day, we’re all in the experience business in some fashion. Let’s look at tangible steps we can take to improve CX in small and large ways.
Identifying The Customers You Serve
Before you can improve customer experience, you need to know who your customers are. Who do you serve, and what is important to them?
Our company’s virtual contact center model provides enterprise brands with experienced talent to meet their customer service needs. We say we serve three customers—our agents, our clients and our employees—through our mission to improve the lives of all three groups. I believe that to create an exceptional customer experience, you must simultaneously elevate the experience of your team members. Our company is made up of hundreds of full-time employees and thousands of independent-contractor agents within our marketplace community, and we could not deliver great CX without them.
It’s important to find the balance of serving all three of our customers to truly optimize our business performance. I like to use the analogy of a stool with three legs: if one leg is too short or too long, the stool will be off balance. To ensure that client experience, agent experience and employee experience are all working hand in hand, we’ve built an entire internal infrastructure around experience, with teams dedicated to each customer. By improving each of your audience’s experience, you can strive to enhance CX overall.
Driving Great CX All Year Round
Here are three key areas to focus on to improve your CX.
1. It starts with the right people.
Brand affinity and loyalty have a huge impact on CX. In a survey conducted by customer experience software company NICE, 57% of consumers said they will abandon a brand after one or two negative CX experiences.
Great CX requires having the right people with the right skills on your teams. You can train employees to develop certain capabilities, but everything—communication, collaboration, education—comes a lot easier when you start with people who have a passion for the customer experience. Focus on defining the ideal candidate profile for your business. Who are the right people to deliver the experience you’re creating for your customers? What qualities are most important to your organization’s culture and purpose?
2. Leverage technology to enable a better experience.
Look for opportunities to use technology, AI in particular, to help your employees and frontline support do their jobs more efficiently and enable a better customer experience.
We send frequent experience surveys across our workforce, and one issue that comes up often is manual processes and workflows. Our goal is to remove or automate many of these manual tasks so our employees and agents have more time to do meaningful work in delivering a better experience. For example, we are incorporating an AI video tool into our agent application and onboarding process to bridge gaps, answer questions and manage expectations for the program. This new tool is making it easier for employees to create helpful content for applicants at scale while smoothing out known friction points at this step.
3. Measure and optimize.
If you are truly going to improve CX, you need to implement systems that track your progress. Identify key metrics and establish a feedback loop for measuring each outcome.
Feedback from our agents, clients and employees is crucial for making positive changes to their respective experiences. We conduct sentiment surveys every quarter, for instance, where we ask a series of questions to assess important metrics. One question aims to measure how well we are achieving our purpose of improving the lives of each of our stakeholder groups.
I believe that it’s crucial to validate your mission within your key audiences to ensure you are walking the talk and delivering on the promise you make to your customers. This may not always produce the results you expect or want. However, feedback is a gift, and you can take any opportunities identified as a way to improve your CX. With this information, you now have a benchmark to measure your progress.
CX has the power to positively affect every aspect of your business and elevate your company to new levels. Great customer experience starts with a realization and commitment to being in the experience business, while ensuring your purpose, people and actions align to this.
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