Customer Experience is now one of the key focusses for any business. We hear all the time that the customer should be at the centre of what we do, but are they really?
There are many organisations out there that talk about multichannel, omnichannel, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Agents, Chatbots etc. yet they can't tell you who their customers are, the reasons their customers contact them, and how their customers really would prefer to communicate with them.
Here are some of the tools you should be considering if you want to run a successful contact centre or call centre environment.
So Where is the Customer in your Strategy?
Let’s start with a few questions:
Do you know who your customers are and what they want?
Do you know why they are contacting you and the journey they have to take?
Do you know how your customers want to interact with you and what their pain points are?
The Customer Journey
Customer contact may be seen as a positive or negative - it can drive frustration for both you and your customers whilst increasing unnecessary costs to your business.
It is therefore fundamental to your business to understand your customers existing journey so that you can define your future customer contact strategy.
Your Customers' Needs
Understanding what your customer needs is key. If you don’t want they want, how can you deliver the service they expect?
After listening to customers, here are some examples of what we heard.
What have you heard?
Have you spoken to your customers?
Do you know what they want?
Do you know your customer demographics?
Customer Contact
Once you have captured all your customer’s reasons for contact, there is a great tool that can be used to help identify opportunities to reduce workload and improve your customer’s experience; it’s called the Value/Irritant Matrix.
This allows you to categorise each contact and gets you to start thinking about how you can improve customer contact which will benefit both parties.
Customer Interaction
Understanding a customer's reason for contacting you and the associated complexity of that contact is also key. The interaction cube is perfect for this. The Cube has been developed to categorise the different types of customer interactions that businesses have to handle, considering the urgency, complexity and emotional input of the interaction from the customer’s perspective. The interaction types are best suited to specific channels that both businesses, and their customers could benefit from.
So where is YOUR business?
Businesses have to continually assess everything about their business and their customers as standing still means your going backwards.
You have to understand who your customers are before you can successfully design a strategy (covering people, process and technology),which will drive your business forward.