Customer expectations forever change. They want more from the brands they choose to shop with, they demand that companies know who they are, and, they want to be able to shop 24/7, in a way that suits them.
With this in mind, we are sharing considerations on how to prepare your business for the future of customer engagement by creating simplified and outstanding customer experiences.
Introduce innovative ways for customers to get in touch
Long gone are the days when customers had time to telephone contact centres. Today, when they do make that call, the last thing they want is to listen to a recording or to speak to someone who cannot help. Make it easier for customers to contact you by enhancing the contact experiences:
- Introduce customer self-service tools, chat tools and social media communities.
- Consider a personal touch by engaging with customers through video-link.
- Provide a flexible omni-channel customer experience.
- Use collected data to know who the customer is when they do call.
- Empower & upskill customer facing / contact teams to become specialists who engage customers, building positive rapport and trust.
Create positive customer engagement across all touch points
Customers are savvier, and in the future they will not remain loyal to brands that do not make engagement easy, relevant and personalised.
- Today customers are more willing to give their data, once it is used properly and once there is something in it for them.
- Build Customer Journey Maps to discover how customers connect and the places they give their data.
- Identify the barriers and processes that need enhancing to improve on customer engagement experiences.
- Introduce higher levels of personalisation and relevancy into direct communications and query handling processes.
Harness a wealth of customer information to better understand them
With customers using so many different methods to communicate its important to use data analysts and customer segmentation managers to align the business and strategies around the customer life-cycle.
- Use advanced analytics to review gathered data across all contact channel sources.
- Build a single view of the customer to support their needs.
- Capture social media queries and resolve them in a personalised way.
- Share information with teams so they can make instant decisions based on the customers’ best interest.
Reflect the customer experience needs in the culture of the company
To manage customer demands the company culture needs to move to a customer-centric focus.
- Encouraged staff to become customer-centric by taking good care of the customer throughout their entire life cycle.
- Hiring people whom naturally build on customer experience and trust is a big help.
- Encourage an open and collaborative workplace where ideas and learnings can be shared.
- Create customer advocates and register them to attend seminars to learn about new customer experience trends such as gamification and multimedia usage.
Enjoy reviewing and redesigning your internal processes around the customer of tomorrow to future-proof your customer engagement needs.