Loyal customers are the bedrock of any booming business. After all, loyal customers are repeat customers; they’re generally the most likely to promote a business on social media; they tend to report the highest levels of customer satisfaction; they have the lowest churn rate; and they can boost a company’s net promoter score. Customer retention is critical. But keeping customers happy and loyal for the long haul is easier said than done.
Businesses are laser-focused on customer experience and customer service today. And as work transitions from in-person to remote, customers are heavily relying on digital channels for help. This is no different for your employees — they need digital internal help desk solutions now more than ever. Companies are leaning even more heavily on technology to keep their customers and employees connected while the world is in survival mode.
Forget what you think you know about customer support, for now. In just a few short months, COVID-19 has transformed the way businesses and customers interact. As customers, we’ve heard from just about every company we’ve ever done business with. Remember that hair salon you went to in college? How about that time you bought dad new grill equipment from an online supplier? One after another, subject lines read like concerned emails from friends.
Does your company currently measure customer satisfaction? If so, how accurate and time consuming are your measurements? With so many different touchpoints factoring into customer satisfaction, from ticket response time to NPS (Net Promoter Score) and everything in between, getting actionable information in a timely way can be a challenge. This doesn’t mean you should take the easy way out when it comes to measuring customer satisfaction.
Managing change isn’t just a normal part of business, it’s a normal part of life. Yet learning how to manage change well doesn’t come naturally, it’s a skill that has to be developed and honed. That’s especially true for organizational change, which often involves a lot of moving parts, including different people, systems, technologies, and goals. For your desired changes to take root, your organization needs people that possess change management skills.
The need for better and more specialized systems has been the major call for the fast-paced evolution of technology over the years. Newer hardware and software systems are constantly introduced. Hence, it is always a matter of time before older special-purpose systems are outdated and deprived of resources for support and maintenance.
Increasingly, customers are expressing their strong, independent selves by helping themselves and solving problems on their own. In fact, high performing customer experience teams are 76% more likely to offer self-service for just this reason, according to Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends Report, 2020. However, simply offering a standard knowledge base portal isn’t enough—the design of your help center affects your customers’ experience with your brand.
With how fast industries move, technologies advance, and current events shift, organizational change is now a normal part of doing business. But change is rarely easy. And the bigger and more complex a business is, the more challenging it is to implement change effectively. Yet the ability to incorporate necessary changes into how you do business plays a direct role in long-term success.
