Organisations have been forced to adapt their business models toward customer and employee experience trends in order to stay competitive, as well as to maintain and build customer satisfaction and loyalty. In our previous blog, we explained “New era of the digital economy is here!”, showing the digital economy is booming. To further that notion, Adobe acknowledged, today’s fast pace of change is only going to accelerate, finding “Eighty-seven percent of our surveyed senior executive respondents agreed that the events of 2020/21 have rewired customers to be digital-first”. This means, customers and employees alike now need a great, more transparent and trusting digital experience including investing in engaging technology.
As a result, organisations are increasingly asking themselves a few strategic questions as they build a greater digital ecosystem and overcome Customer Experience /Employee Experience (CX/EX) challenges. For instance: should they invest in self-service technologies, and trust customers to handle business themselves with less interaction from staff? Should they develop and provide more digital products and solutions? Or should they double down on technology and policies that encourage face-to-face interactions?
In short, the answer is: yes, yes, and yes. And the more integrated and accommodating your digital ecosystem becomes for both the customer and the employees that service them, the better.
Strategies to Overcome Trending Customer and Employee Challenges
Each of these strategies has merit on their own. Here’s how:
1. Self-Service Technologies
In the study, “What Must Customer Service and Support Organizations Focus On in 2022,” Gartner showed 74% of customer service and support leaders believe creating a seamless customer journey across assisted and self-service channels is “important” or “very important.” More than anything, allowing for the integration of self-service technologies is about speed in the initial customer experience (CX) journey orchestration. One of the most important attributes of a customer experience is response time, and the faster the better. What better way to optimize lead turnover time than to let customers go at their own pace? A complete digital customer experience with comprehensive information available online with features such as; FAQs, information libraries, support portals, online discussion forums and more – will equip customers to intuitively walk themselves through the onboarding process in an efficient manner. Self-service is a valued addition to your service and a unique selling point to make your organisation more competitive. – Making your organisation accessible 24/7 to customers leaves them feeling confident about your product offering and, best of all, a confident loyal customer.
Examples use case for self-service that can lead to a sale:
- Chat-bots – enable customer to talk a chat-bot to provide simple insurance information and in turn you gain customer insights with the ability train your staff on how to tailor the next conversation with a prospect or customer
- Support Portals – customers that have access their latest policy information online, also draws an opprtunity for the customer to review other insurance coverage they may need.
Additionally, thanks to data and behavioral insights, organisations can see what content and queries customers are demanding the most – and then produce and personalize the information they need and identify information or process gaps that may exist along the customer journey. Therefore, self-service confinement is critical, opening your organizations to new levels of trust, transparency and an overall better digital experience. That said, the customer experience must be synchronized across multi-channel communications and multidiscipline interaction to proactively meet the client where they are.
2. Omni-Channel Digital Updates and Communications
Ensuring customers have access to the most up-to-date information on your organization and can engage you in the manner that’s most effective and convenient for them is critical for organizations in a post-covid era. Customers must be able to learn and experience more about your unique product and service offerings, all from the comfort of their computer or smartphone.
Organizations should build more future-ready digital products and services and provide a clear picture of those offerings through the new age of digital experience. This means building cross-organization communications, accessible product and service demonstrations and clear information touchpoints. By doing so, customers receive benefits like instant service delivery, real-time response to multidiscipline requests and timely updates on your services tailored to their particular situation. In addition, your organization will have the proper back-end infrastructure to handle customer demands in a timely fashion and you can focus on other pressing business matters. This helps deliver total customer experiences, and equips your team to generate, test and deploy next-best solutions.
After all, if customers find they can’t effectively interact with you how they want, they will take their business to another organization that’s a better fit. It’s no longer cost or time-prohibitive to do so, especially when alternatives are a click, or two away and quick comparison tools are available. Thus, if your organization is behind the new digital era, your customers will find out and quickly find the convenience they desire elsewhere.
3. More Face-to-Face Interactions
Remote work, a trend significantly accelerated by pandemic-related necessities, is here to stay. According to Gartner, 32 percent of all employees worldwide were remote workers at the end of 2021 – up from 17 percent in 2019 – and 53 percent of the American workforce will be remote in 2022. So how do organizations still provide face-to-face customer service and interactions as hybrid and remote work continue to rise?
Organizations can continue to deliver quality interpersonal service by investing in support staff with great skills in that area and utilizing intuitive technology that supports and accommodates remote work. That includes technology with better digital communication channels, as well as digitalized business systems and processes. After all, it still means something to a customer when a really intelligent, empathetic, interested sales or service representative can help them with whatever they need and send them on their way with a smile on their face.
Customers still want a great service and support experience, especially when they need to solve urgent or complex issues. By focusing on that as part of the total experience, customers will feel glad they chose you and become more loyal.
Through integrating these concepts together, your organization can achieve a total end-to-end customer experience that drives loyalty and revenue. Furthermore, by integrating the three strategies simultaneously, your digital engagement will become more efficient and personalized for both customers and employees who service your customers. To allow customers to choose how they want to engage with organizations and offer a helping hand to them no matter where they are in their customer journey…now that’s a powerhouse combination
Enabling Deeper Consumer Experiences
New technologies have emerged that can help organizations tackle all three strategies at the same time. Composable applications are perhaps best equipped to help organizations tackle a more integrated digital ecosystem to overcome CX/EX challenges.
As an example, CoTé builds applications that focus on employees and customers to provide a total end-to-end experience using new cloud architecture. We also understand that every organization is unique, so we focus our lens across business, technology and people with the customer at the centre of it all. This allows organizations to become more responsive, readily accessible to customers and scalable for a digital future.
Organizations would be wise to quickly explore and transform their customer and employee experience to utilize applications like this that optimize consumer interactions, create efficiencies, drive revenue and loyalty, minimize risk and save time and money. Doing so will help ensure they deliver on what their customers want – and stay ahead of their competition in the years to come.
Contact CoTé today to increase your customer experience and become scalable for a digital future: