Everybody who has worked in customer service could relate to that unpleasant interaction with a customer that quickly raises your anxiety. The customer’s hostile reaction, immediate to a welcoming greeting, an unexpected reaction to a simple answer, it all comes from frustration.
When you work in Customer Service, you usually encounter these types of reactions time and time again. So, it is important to know why these patterns emerge and more importantly, how to fix this.
Once you start paying closer attention to these cases, you’ll be surprised by finding that most of these angry customers’ frustration didn’t originate with the customer service agent.
When you have a problem that needs to be fixed, you reach and call a customer service or support line.
On our end, the customer service agent will have no other choice but to meet them fighting that uphill battle before they can even express their problem. So, the customer service team is not the source of the frustration; they just end up becoming a feedback mechanism in a customer service ecosystem, called customer experience.
What is Customer Experience?
It is the customer’s overall perception and sentiment of every interaction they have with your company. It begins with the first contact and ends with the feedback outlets. This evaluation should be part of your marketing strategy.
Customer Experience it’s about understanding what led the customer to the support call and why the previous experience with the company is the source of this frustration.
A good and positive customer experience can create a loyal and satisfied customer base, and a negative one can negatively influence potential customers that haven’t even had an approach with the company.
Having a clear approach to the way your company will handle and measure their customers experience, will help your team solve for these tricky customer situations, and will help you create a long-term plan for problems that may occur down the road.
We have noticed five key aspects that can help you get started on providing the best customer experience ever! You’re welcome.
4 Tips For An Over-The-Top CX
Before we stir everything up with a company-wide initiative, it is better to have a clear game plan. Understanding your customers is a great place to start, and finish.
1. Create a Customer Journey Map
First, create a customer journey map, which is an outline of every step your company’s customers go through when interacting with your company.
This includes all the interactions, it goes beyond just purchasing the product, like social media engagements, online advertising, and customer service cases.
It is necessary to take into account both the pre- and post- sale aspects of the customer experience.
Focus not only in the interactions that lead to the sale, the post- sale interactions are equally important to build the complete customer experience. Include the different touch points that the customer interacts with and how those experiences can impact their perspective.
Doing this mapping will make it easier for employees across your organization to visualize the overall customer experience.
Their point is to make them improve their individual understanding of the customer’s needs and expectations as they can point out exactly where their work will influence the customer’s journey.
2. Audit CX from Several Perspectives
Since the customer journey is affected by every aspect of your business and customers interact in some way with every part of your company, to acquire a complete picture of CX, you will need to consider the unique perspective of each one of your company’s internal departments.
It is vital to have a clear focus on the new initiatives from the beginning and understand that the customer experience provided by the company may not change overnight.
Set up a team to the execution of your customer experience plans. Their job will be to communicate changes, facilitate operations, organize research analysis and perform any necessary actions to ensure that your new approach to CX is consistent across all departments of your company.
Around customer experience you can find three detrimental roadblocks:
- Inconsistent interactions between company and customer.
- Blocking information potentially helpful to customers or employees
- Lack of support from employees
3. Share the New Plan with Everyone
You will need the entire company on board with your new customer experience plan that is why it is important to make sure that everyone has access to the plans and strategies. Having your employees in the loop will help in the overall development of the customer experience plan.
Distributing customer insights across your entire company can also help:
- Address Customer Needs Faster
- Improve Product/Service Quality
- Increase Upsell Opportunities
4. Learn from the Churn Rate
We must learn from every experience and interaction with the customers, even for the customers that you are not able to prevent from churning, you should make sure to find out why they decided to move on.
Providing multiple channels for customers to leave feedback and taking their opinions seriously is a great way to start improving your customer experience.
When you are focused on creating a better experience for your customer, you will want to hear about the instances where your company came back short. You should make it easy for the customer to cancel their account, but make it a task for your team to find out exactly why this customer decided to cancel.
Changing your customer experience begins with being proactive and planning out your strategy.
