Welcome to the hybrid age of CX

When it comes to driving increased customer loyalty it’s commonly accepted that a great customer experience (CX) is essential. With 86% of brands actively working on their customer experience reporting an increase in revenue, it’s no longer about whether you should invest in your customer experience – the big question is how you invest in it.

In a recent study undertaken by HubSpot, one potential answer to this question stood out - the idea of combining a digital customer experience strategy with ‘the human touch’ to create a hybrid approach that genuinely meets both business and consumer needs.

The data in their report ‘The Human Touch’ is compelling, with similar statistics emerging for both B2C and B2B customer experience. One surprising finding was that 52% of CX professionals said they saw a positive impact on their business from a reduction of ‘human’ interaction with customers.

The past ten years has seen a steady shift in using tech to streamline customer journeys, make the customer experience easier and more intuitive, and free up key employees to enable a business to deploy them where they are needed most.

HubSpot firmly believe that modern CRMs need to make it easy for marketing, sales, and customer service teams to access a single source of customer truth to understand every single touchpoint across the customer journey, which definitely makes sense. If it’s as simple as possible for all the teams who impact the customer experience to access and record customer data, then not only will it drive internal adoption of the CRM, it will also help empower the entire business to raise the bar and consistently deliver remarkable customer experiences.

There’s a definite business case for all organisations to invest in technology by improving CRM systems, opting for intelligent call routing, and utilising innovations such as chatbots – but this needs to be done the right way and with an eye on what your customers want.

With 58% of consumers stating that if they’ve interacted with a real person they’d be more likely to shop with that brand again, and 45% of CX professionals claiming that in a B2B relationship they’ve had to resort to raising a public complaint via social media or review sites due to not being able to get hold of a person when they’ve needed one – it’s clear that technology alone can’t hold the answer for the future of customer experience.

So, what can your business do to find the right balance between technology and human interactions? Here are five top tips for you to consider!

1. Use modern tech to speed things up

If you want to deploy a technology solution as part of your customer strategy, you should consider where you can use Customer Relationship Management solutions (CRM) to drive more efficiencies, or perhaps where a chatbot could answer frequently asked questions and reduce call volumes into the business.

Modern CRMs are responsive, powerful, and intuitive to use, which means they can help call handlers access data and important customer history in real-time (which is especially useful during complex or fast-paced calls). This helps your business to act in a ‘joined up’ fashion, saves the customer repeating themselves, and ultimately can even help reduce call times without detriment to the customer. A well-deployed CRM also enables easy reporting and high-level oversight of key trends without any of the historic pain that was synonymous with legacy systems.

Building CRM software into your customer strategy can not only save your customer’s time and increase satisfaction, it can also free up your employee’s time. It could give them the all-important insights and flexibility they need to make the switch away from a reactive service, towards driving proactive improvements to the customer journey.

2. Ensure consistent, easy access to humans throughout the journey

It can be tempting if you’ve invested a significant sum into chatbot functionality to use it exclusively and divert your human resources to other areas of the business. Chatbots can be used with great effect, providing that there’s always the option for your customer to reach a real person at any time.

With HubSpot’s Human Touch report highlighting that 16% of consumers completely abandoned a purchase if they couldn’t gain access to a person at key moments in their customer journey, it’s clear that making it as easy as possible for customers to switch channels is crucial. Not only is it crucial, but it’s important to understand where the key moments in the customer journey are for your customer and to staff accordingly to make sure that there is always a friendly voice available to anyone who gets stuck, or that a chatbot can be abandoned in favour of live chat at the click of a button.

3. Use journey mapping to move towards a more consistent CX

A lot of businesses will report that they answer most of their calls in time or that their live chat is manned most of the day. Most successful businesses get most things right, most of the time (that’s why they’re successful!). What most customers crave is consistency, so it’s a good idea to consider the loss in revenue to your business that the above referenced 16% of consumers could represent if a customer can’t consistently reach a human being, or their experience isn’t consistently easy.

Journey mapping can be an analytical method to ensure that each stage of the customer journey is accounted for, analysed, and any pain points are identified and fixed. Using customer journey mapping is a powerful way to move your business from mostly great, to consistently delivering, ensuring there is always a person available to help for the key touchpoints and reducing any avoidable customer churn.

This is a fantastic example of just how well technology and the human touch can blend to create a hybrid approach. The technology is used to map the journey, but the human touch is used to identify, empathise with and fix the pain points that are identified during the journey mapping. It can be a compelling element to any customer strategy and one we often use with our own clients.

4. Utilise intelligent CRM applications to collect insights - then act on them

A CRM shouldn’t just be about storing customer contact details or managing leads - a CRM system is only as good as the insights it provides and, by extension, the people interpreting those insights. Be sure that your CRM provides reporting features that make it easy to export and distribute the trends the system reveals. If you can use one CRM consistently across all departments then the technology available these days means you can collect insights on areas such as the average time your team take to reply to emails, at what point in the journey you lose most leads, or your most raised concerns, amongst other things.

Feed any data captured into your customer steering groups, or customer experience teams to help them drive the proactive improvements required to create increased conversion, and uplifts in customer loyalty.

5. Create a robust feedback strategy to prevent reputation damage

Each business will need to reflect on what the right balance of people vs technology is for them, for their customer base and for their employees. There isn’t a one size fits all approach that can be adopted but by surveying your teams, talking to your customers to collect their feedback and providing easy access for your customers to flag issues directly with you as opposed to online in public forums, you can learn what their expectations are and how best to meet them without fear of damage to your brand reputation.

The HubSpot report highlighted that one of the more damaging side effects of customers not being able to reach a real human, was that often they took to social media and review platforms to complain when they couldn’t talk to someone. This could damage your brand reputation and cause previously happy customers to lose faith in your business.

If you want to build a brand that inspires confidence with everything it does, then creating a robust feedback strategy can help. Your feedback strategy shouldn’t just rely on which surveys you send and when though, it’s important that it covers off details such as who owns the feedback, who is responsible for closing the loop with the customer, even who collects customer permission to utilise great feedback in marketing and PR. It should be a well-rounded strategy considering both technological elements and the human roles required if you truly want to utilise it to drive customer satisfaction and at the same time boost your positive reputation.

So there you have it, a hybrid approach to customer experience that will help take your business into the future. Whether you lean more in favour of using tech to help you scale your business swiftly without the need to increase headcount, or you take things back to basics with a human-to-human focus, it’s clear that finding the right blend of both for your employees and your customers has never been more important.

For more information on the HubSpot Human Touch report, click here!