Five steps to create first-class customer experience

Customer experience is not only a key differentiator, but also a potential pitfall. If you let your customers down, they will leave in droves as bad reviews and social media comments spread the message: “this company doesn’t care”.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the customer experience has become a major topic in Britain’s boardrooms. The question is, how can you make sure your company is offering great service, to all customers, all of the time?

The key to doing that is information.

Managing Customer Data

In the modern marketplace, failure to provide a complete and tailored view of the information held on each customer is the single greatest stumbling block to building positive customer relationships.

When a customer calls, emails, engages in an online chat with your employees or happens to visit one of your shops, the representative they engage with has to have all the information at their fingertips. This is because there is nothing more frustrating to the modern customer than having to repeatedly give information that they know you hold, but still end up not getting an answer.

We’ve entered an age where your customers assume you know who they are and what they want. So if you’re talking, emailing, or even chatting with them, you need their most current information at your fingertips. And the best way to do that in the age of information overload is to utilise content services.

Formerly known as enterprise content management, the evolution to content services represents a more flexible way to pick and choose the technology solutions you need to deliver that ever-important information to the right people at the right time – across a range of repositories and locations.

Gone are the days of monolithic, all-encompassing implementations that change the way everyone works.

In order to deliver great service, you need to think of your front line staff as customers too: they are customers of information, which they need in order to provide top quality service. Your recruitment and training system, as well as genuine human helpfulness, will do the rest.

Yes, there will be bots and AI, but backed by content services platforms that provide information in context. By connecting data and systems across the enterprise, these serve to enhance the offer to customer-facing teams and customers themselves, with a complete view which is easy and secure to access – anytime, anywhere, on any device. How you use technology to make the most-informed decisions possible will help raise the bar in service - internally and externally.

You can reach this level of service through the following practical steps, which are all focused on facilitating frontline staff and allowing them to consistently deliver faster, more responsive, meaningful customer interactions, which enhances overall experience.

Five Practical Tips for Top UX

1. Create a CX that is Tailored and Personal: Customer experience (CX) is the evolution of customer service. Your customers know you have a plethora of in-depth information about them, so they expect you to deliver – now. And they want a tailored experience. If they don’t get it, they’ll tell the entire world in less than a minute.

That’s where the right content services platform can help – by delivering a complete view of the right information to the right people, where and when they need it. Serving as an information hub, it surfaces content in context by connecting data and systems across the enterprise.

By providing users with easy, secure access to complete information – anytime, anywhere, on any device – your organisation delivers more responsive, meaningful interactions.

2. Embrace Digital Transformation: To be transformative, we have to improve the speed of business. Improve processes. And make the most-informed decisions, armed with the most current information.

Maybe you’re serving students. Or patients. Or citizens. Or customers. Or members. No matter who they’re dealing with, your employees shouldn’t spend their time looking in multiple systems to see the whole picture.

Digital transformation will involve using the cloud to save money, time, and resources; and offering mobile solutions to keep work moving in the field. The right platform will also empower your organisation with the freedom and flexibility to quickly adapt to evolving business needs and customer demands. You stay ahead of the competition with agility that allows you to continuously innovate, adapt, and enhance the experiences of the people you serve.

3. Intelligent Automation: By harnessing innovative and intelligent automation technologies that anticipate the needs of users and customers, the right content services platform helps employees focus on high-value tasks and develop more meaningful, relevant connections with the people they serve.

Automation should therefore focus on tools that employ built-in logic, intelligent routing, and machine learning. These will help reduce costs and improve speed, accuracy, and transparency. Use innovation to cultivate meaningful relationships with both employees and customers, by ensuring that the right contact is made at the right time.

4. Harness the Cloud. I’ve mentioned the cloud before but it really is so important to modern content management that it’s worth further attention.

The cloud is a very powerful technology tool. It empowers vendors to provide frequent product releases and simplify the upgrade process. As a result, IT users gain more capabilities, faster, and are able to provide better user experiences by creating tailored, responsive applications.

The cloud is therefore a key component of your digital transformation, because it will ensure that your investment stays up to date. The cloud also ensures flexibility across your organisation, allowing instant scale-up of successful features.

5. Unleash Your Expertise: If you’ve been doing your job as an executive correctly, your organisation will be full of industry expertise and winning legacies. Cloud-based content services allow you to unleash that skill, creativity and knowledge across your business, and leverage it to build expertly tailored solutions that transform the way everyone works. You also have a great human resource at the base level of your company. The staff who deal with customers are experts in your customers, and are best placed to meet the specific needs of the people they serve.

Good digital transformation, cloud based services and even investments in process automation are designed to facilitate that human-level interaction. If you can make it really good - and that means specific, tailored, seamless personal service every time a customer makes contact - then you can use CX to gain customers.

Winning CX

Not everyone who gets great service will tweet about it or write a positive review. People are much quicker to complain about poor service than they are to praise the good.

But if you can surprise your customers time and again with great service, by anticipating their needs and helping your staff to go the extra mile, you will find that the good reports do surface. In the modern age of peer-to-peer power, they are worth far more than any advertising you can buy.