Creating the best customer experience: Make it real for your business
If you’re looking to engage with your customers in a way that will build up your business or brand, the best kind of experience is the one customers won’t even notice. This experience should be simple and seamless.
Achieving this, however, can be complex and requires some careful thought. Setting up a user experience that is easy-to-navigate requires a lot of behind the scenes work and often includes incorporating a diverse set of tools, processes and technologies. Here are some steps to consider along your journey.
What does the customer need?
New technology can help, but figuring out which solutions make sense for you and your customers is a little trickier. Data is critical to uncovering the kind of personalized experiences your customers are looking for. This data can come from customer surveys or market research, but it will also come from analyzing resources you have in place: call volumes, trend analysis and even information obtained from IoT sensors or other smart technologies. Once you’ve collected that data, you can start building a solid strategy.
Stick to the strategy
Businesses who go above and beyond customer expectations often have a strategy that puts the customer first. Take Amazon, for example. Their mandate is to be earth’s most customer-centric company, where you can find and discover anything you might want to buy online at the lowest possible price.
To develop your own strategy, you first need to ask the right questions. What kind of experiences do we want for our customers? What do we need to do to give customers a simple, low-touch experience? How close are we to that reality, and where do we need to be? What are the sticking points and how can we sort them out? These questions are critical.
Try the solution. See what happens.
The next step is to assess your IT environment and upgrade or deploy essential solutions that will support the user and customer experiences you are designing. These will depend on your business, industry and the experiences you want to enable – but the information you have gathered will be key to making choices.
As you launch these applications, advanced networks and reliable connectivity will help ensure that cloud solutions, collaboration tools and devices have the support they need – with security integrated throughout. At the same time, business processes need to be simplified in order to best serve customers, end-users and employees. Finally, any new technology must be monitored to ensure that your investment is continuing to succeed.
Keep going back to the data well
The best solutions help your operations and customers in multiple ways. A company that uses service vehicles to help customers will benefit from vehicle tracking data to support everything from live routing decisions to driver behaviour to weather conditions. When taken as a whole, that tracking data can also show patterns that lead to opportunities for improvements in operations and quality. Data can even help a third time if customers can check the real-time location and status of the service request.
Get your ducks in a row
Sometimes the easiest way to simplify the customer experience is to reduce friction in your vendor experience. When choosing a cloud provider, for example, it can’t hurt to consider who your partners and suppliers are using. If most use a particular platform, it might make sense to do the same. That way everyone is speaking the same language – and it will be easier to share data and deploy applications to improve the customer experience. Even using the same collaboration tools will speed up communications and document sharing.
Don't sleep on security
Relying only on technology while neglecting process and training can leave you exposed. It’s vital to implement training and solutions to protect your data and endpoints. Beyond that, it’s also important to ensure you have solid crisis-management protocols in place to “get back to normal” as quickly as possible, keeping downtime and inconveniences to your customers to a minimum. During such situations, clear and timely communication with customers can temper frustrations, so a solution that gives you reporting and real-time insight is a must.
Get some help from a friend
Before you can take the right steps towards achieving your goal, you need to figure out which steps to take in the first place. Having a partner by your side with the right experience and expertise can make all the difference.
Bell can help build and manage the operational environment you need to better meet the expectations of your customers. Bell’s professional and managed services teams have worked with Canada’s largest businesses to assess, design, deploy and support the solutions required to realize their customer experience ambitions. Let us help you today!