The CX-Factor: Part 2 - "Bring it"

Move your customer experience from good to great

Once you’ve defined and aligned around your customer experience metrics, how do you move your customer experience towards ‘exceptional?’ The best way is to imagine the service you would want to receive and then provide that to your customers. Sounds simple doesn’t it? But it’s hard.

The technology and data exists today to help organisations achieve the CX-Factor, but this needs to be balanced against organisational blockers such as processes, empowerment and working in departmental silos. Once you’ve defined the metric or metrics, you’re going to use to measure your customer experience (see part 1), to achieve an exceptional customer service, you should consider the following:

1. Commitment

Organisations that are prioritising customer service, have a leadership team that make it a key priority and strategy. Organisations and industries that have moved from poor or average customer service to industry leading, have all made a commitment that starts and finishes at the top. Senior leaders need to understand the impact of CX and how happy customers mean a healthy bottom line.

2. Engage the team(s)

The team need to understand and be on board with the defined CX strategy. Once you’ve established the metric you’re going to use, they need to understand it and why it is important to them. Transparency, openness and being approachable are some of the most important management qualities to building and maintaining excellent relationships with a team.

3. Personalise customer communication

Customers are fast becoming intolerant of doing repeat business with companies that still seem to have no insight into their service history or that understand them. It’s important to have a complete view of the customer, regardless of the channel they use to contact you, so choose technology that works across email, chat, phone and web. This enables teams to have a customer’s personal information at their fingertips so they can quickly and effectively address issues.

4. Be agile

When something impacts a customer, the company must have the ability to react and respond to as near to immediate as possible. Taking action in near real-time, especially in today’s digital-driven economy, shows a proactive approach that tells customers they are a priority. It also eliminates the need for customers to repeat their queries and spend more time chasing the company for a response.

5. Let customers help themselves

Forrester research shows that customers prefer self-service support to find their own answers. Thanks to machine learning and AI its easier than ever. Making it as easy as possible for customers to find the answers they want online, takes pressure off customer service agents. Customers use self-service because they want quick answers to their questions. Customers use self-service because they want quick to be self-sufficient and efficient. This is especially true if its a simple solution and the can find what they want 24 hours 7 days a week.

6. The People

While technology is the enabler, but people will be the factor that lead and inspire the CX-Factor. The ideal, after metrics and alignment have been established, are to have an empowered culture and have people live your brand throughout the company. This includes empowering all people including frontliners to make decisions and have the discretion that is needed to service today’s demanding and evolved customer. Frontline people in your organization need the flexibility and enablement to make decisions that don’t always fit with policies or processes.

How it all fits

We need technology to enable a whole view, metrics to track, efficient self service, and time for your teams to learn how to deliver on these. I think this can get missed at times with everyday challenges getting in the way, like differing priorities, or showing cost savings in the short term versus investment for training. However, service can only achieve the CX-Factor when the individual can make an educated decision that works for the customer and is aligned with the company philosophy. The CX-Factor minimises the gap between getting every single transaction right versus an acceptable percentage of error. This is the true differentiator to achieve the CX-Factor.

For more information, you can download Zendesk’s Customer Experience Guide

Find ‘CX-Factor-Part 1’ here. Let me know your questions and thoughts in the comments below.