Tending to anything in life takes meticulous care and attention — and your customer experience is no different. Managing your customer experience requires constant vigilance and proactive engagement — you must listen discreetly and provide the right resources at the right time to keep relationships with your customers warm, inviting and prosperous.
In the age of online reviews and nearly everything existing on the internet, a business's success relies heavily on their customer experience (CX).
What Is CX?
Customer experience (CX) encompasses every interaction someone has with your brand, from seeing an ad or browsing your website to purchasing and interacting with your product to receiving customer support and renewing or upgrading when the time comes. Effectively managing these individual experiences that make up your overall CX is imperative, as they directly influence customer satisfaction, loyalty and, ultimately, your business outcomes.
As companies navigate the significant shift in business models, service dynamics and customer demands, the strategic importance of CX in driving business outcomes becomes more apparent. Companies are now challenged to meet or exceed the expectations of a more informed and connected consumer base.
How to Improve Your CX and Create Lasting Customer Relationships
1) Refine the End-to-End Customer Journey
Each touchpoint in a customer journey is an opportunity to impress or disappoint your customers, and creating a helpful onboarding experience is the first step. By mapping out each step in the process and asking for customer feedback, you can identify critical CX gaps and give new customers everything they need to use your product effectively.
Utilize technology to gather and analyze data on how customers interact with your services and products, ensuring you’re not missing any insights. When using such tools, dedicated CX teams can increase cross-selling and upselling, as they are in a prime position to listen to customer challenges, quickly improve their experience and then recommend advanced solutions that can generate revenue and product adoption.
If you’re unsure how to assess your customer journey successfully, an outsourced customer experience management partner can tailor a scalable service solution for customer success.
2) Implement AI and Automation Thoughtfully
Although technology steadily improves year over year, 44% of consumers in the UK believe that customer service has worsened in the past three years, and over a third of them want businesses to use AI and automation to reduce wait times.
While AI and automation can significantly reduce wait times and streamline service processes, striking the right balance is crucial. Over-relying on automation can detract from the personal touch many customers appreciate and can lead to frustration when they need support that requires more meticulous troubleshooting. Integrate these technologies into your CX in ways that enhance efficiency without sacrificing human interaction.
3) Foster a Culture of Customer-Centric Collaboration
Gathering ideas from multiple sources is a surefire way to succeed at anything in life — and it’s no different when it comes to CX. Fostering experimentation and collaboration across your internal teams — especially between those who interact with your customers regularly and those who don’t — is a great way to improve the customer experience.
Encourage teams from different departments in your company to collaborate extensively with each other by sharing insights and developing innovative CX strategies within their respective areas of specialization. For example, interacting with customer-facing teams can be eye-opening for your product design and product marketing teams about how they can impact the customer experience, too. A cohesive environment in which everyone is aligned on enhancing CX can lead to more creative solutions and a stronger brand overall.
4) Drive Desired Customer Behaviors
Do you know how to measure your customers' behaviors effectively? Are there any unmanaged spaces — such as untouched prospects, long-tail inactive partners or untapped renewals — that are leaving potential revenue opportunities on the table? Beyond that, do you know the specific customer behaviors that will help fuel your business's desired outcomes and boost revenue?
When looking to improve CX, focus on metrics and cultivating behaviors that contribute to business success, such as repeat purchases and increased loyalty. Develop incentives and engagement strategies that motivate these behaviors, creating a win-win scenario for customers and your business.
5) Invest in Your Post-Sales Process
In some cases, businesses lack important analytical tools and capabilities or they provide such a large portfolio of offerings that they don’t have the complete picture of what their customers are experiencing, which leads to a gap in their perceived value. Companies must use robust feedback systems and in-depth insights to ensure that the experience they think they’re delivering matches what customers are actually experiencing. From there, it’s essential to adjust strategies based on this feedback to close CX gaps and accurately meet customer expectations.
6) Offer Tailored Premium Services
There’s no question that happy customers lead to overall business success. If consumers are satisfied with a brand, they’ll be loyal to it for life. However, that loyalty extends far beyond what one may initially expect. Studies have shown that when customers receive a great customer experience, they are willing to pay a premium of up to 13% for luxury services.
With that in mind, consider introducing premium service options that provide greater value for an additional cost. These services, such as expedited support or personalized products, can serve as powerful differentiators and enhance customer satisfaction while increasing your business's profit.
7) Prioritize Convenience and Flexibility
Convenience is king in a world that moves a million miles a minute. Customers expect seamless interactions with brands at every turn, especially when they adopt a new product. Ensure your CX strategy is flexible, efficient, timely and capable of catering to modern consumer needs.
Doing so will help build lasting relationships and encourage customers to become brand advocates. Positive word-of-mouth and recommendations from satisfied customers can be your most effective marketing tool.
The Number One Consideration in Purchasing Decisions
On the front end, investing in CX can be perceived as a time-consuming expense. But doing so can enhance the overall brand experience and foster customer loyalty, which drives revenue growth for your business.
Partnering with an outsourced customer experience management partner like Shyft Global Services can make managing your CX even easier. Our listen-first, people-centric approach to effective CX management combines human engagement and connection with strategic technology tools that drive efficiencies, giving customers a white-glove experience with every interaction. Additionally, Shyft’s dedicated customer management team is well versed in both managing channel partner relationships (B2B) and tending to the specific needs of end users and consumers in a B2C environment.
With Shyft handling your non-core, potentially unmanaged or untapped business areas to expand your pipeline, improve the onboarding experience and retain revenue, your customers, end users and partners get the most value from their technology investments.
Learn more about transforming your customer experience in this CX Today interview with Antonio Masis, Shyft’s Vice President of Global Customer Management Services and General Manager of the Shyft Costa Rica location.
About the Author
Antonio Masis serves as the Vice President of Global Customer Management Services and the General Manager of the Costa Rica location for Shyft Global Services, a division of TD SYNNEX. He has been with the company since 2009 and has more than 15 years of experience as a business development leader, with a focus on directing operations, implementing sales strategies and managing outsource agreements.
