How do your customers really regard their experience with your brand when they use your companies’ products or services? Customer experience (CX) relates to just this. Spanning the entire relationship that a customer has with a company, CX encompasses each and every touchpoint – from in-store to online shopping, browsing a website, and interacting with customer support teams.
Many of us have experience interacting with customer support agents in various contexts, from streaming service subscriptions and car rental bookings, to online clothing purchases. For businesses worldwide, offering timely support across multiple channels and touchpoints is critical in today’s highly competitive and digital-first world. A strong customer experience strategy is a defining feature that sets companies apart – yet what do customer service and customer support truly mean?
If you’re not yet focusing on the customer experience with your organization, it’s time to get started and kick it into high gear. Customer expectations are higher than ever and evolving. You’ve got to get ahead of that. There are often challenges to getting a customer experience program off the ground in any organization, so let’s overcome those and get moving.
When it comes to optimising the customer experience (CX), your work is never really done. Consumer expectations are increasingly rising, and the world of technology is constantly evolving – making it difficult for business leaders to keep up.
As the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many industries worldwide, customer experience proved to be more important than ever. From introducing cryptocurrency to the Latin America market, to offering a free learning online platform for students and playing a key role in the digital transformation of health services, these leaders are making waves in the CX space, and inspiring others along the way.
Artificial intelligence (AI) in customer service isn’t a new concept. Harnessing the true power of AI has been an ongoing conversation in the CX world for years, but it’s a notoriously hard thing to get right. Customer-bot interactions can swing wildly from absolutely incredible to brand-damaging, depending on how AI was implemented and how successfully it learned from prior interactions.
The last two years have proven that customer-first businesses must be flexible to thrive. That means meeting customers where they are—and where they haven’t been able to be. How do you, as a business, satisfy the human need for social interaction amid physical distancing? How do you nurture brand loyalty when you can’t work off of facial cues? And—keeping your ultimate goal in mind—how do you convert interactions into sales and ensure a good experience remotely?
Although most agents enjoy solving customer problems, the pandemic has put them under a new kind of pressure. Mix frustrated customers, soaring query volumes, budget cuts, and new remote work setups, and you’ve got a recipe for burnout. In 2022, many businesses recognize the importance of workplace mental health, and are taking steps to ensure the well-being of their teams.
In 2022, omnichannel will replace multichannel as one of the top strategies for brands to reach digital-first consumers in a highly personalized manner. The 2022 CX trends report confirms this statement. How do the two differ, you ask? Omnichannel customer engagement uses data points from several channels (like email, SMS, and in-store interactions) to craft a cohesive chronological customer journey, while multichannel takes a siloed approach to manage the channels it makes available to customers.
