Elevate your customer experience
If you’re a customer experience manager or contact center manager, you know customer experience (CX) is important. Your customers’ perception of how your company treats them has a profound impact on your relationship and your organization:
- A Deloitte survey found 88% of companies prioritize customer experience in their contact centers.
- 83% of executives say their service department plays a strategic role in the overall business.
- 56% of consumers have higher expectations for customer service today than they had one year ago.
With company leadership and customers demanding a quality customer experience, it pays to understand the challenges and the benefits of delivering an excellent CX.
Keep reading to learn how you can continue to deliver on the customer experience as customer demands continue to evolve and grow.
The importance of customer experience
It’s hard to overstate how important the customer experience is.
In fact, 58% of customers will go out of their way to buy a product or service from a company they know will offer excellent customer service. Not only will customers take extra effort to ensure they’re treated in a certain fashion, but when your company provides an excellent customer experience, customers are:
- 86% more likely to repurchase from the company
- 77% more likely to recommend the company to others
- 79% more likely to trust the company
- 62% more likely to forgive the company
It’s clear that customers want organizations to continuously improve their customer experiences. But is that the only reason CX is such a hot topic?
Are you ignoring your most important metric?
When it comes to customer service, too many businesses only have a “contact us” form, or a support email address that rarely responds.
In 2020, that simply won’t do. Especially when 60% of customer service managers say customer satisfaction is the most important call center metric
Organizations must continuously monitor their customer experience and work to improve upon it. CX is not something you can “set and forget.”
Why?
Today’s consumers don’t base their loyalty on product or price. Instead, they stay loyal to companies because of the experience they receive. If you can’t keep up with their demands, your customers will leave you.
When it comes to satisfying customers, cross-device shopping via a wide range of channels has made it difficult for companies to maintain consistency. Processes and technologies need to change in order to provide a consistent experience across all platforms. Consider:
- According to a Walker study, by the end of 2020, customer experience will surpass price and product as the key brand differentiator.
- The Northridge Group’s research –shows 61% of consumers must interact with a company on more than one channel to resolve a customer service issue.
Now that you see how important customer satisfaction is to a successful contact center metric, let’s take a look at how to improve.
How to improve your customer experience and empower agents in your cloud contact center
It will take more than skilled call center agents to deliver the customer experience your customers want. If your entire company isn’t working together to elevate the customer experience, it will show.
Here are some practical tips for going above and beyond your customers’ expectations.
Listen to your customers
Listen to your customers by monitoring interactions (RingCentral’s customer engagement solutions provide supervisor monitoring and supervisor coaching tools such as monitoring a call, a whisper feature, and a barge in feature).
Use analytics to shape business processes
Review analytics for the contact center. Using the data, ask questions to determine whether or not interactions are related to the company’s goals and objectives or if they’re related to particular areas of concern like customer attrition.
Capture customer feedback
Capture feedback on all of your customer channels (voice, email, chat, messaging, and social). When collecting feedback, use the same quality standards you would apply to calls or text-based interactions like email and chat.
Ask the right questions
Instead of leaning on your organization’s internal metrics to measure the quality of a call, ask your customer what they think. For example, you could ask “What did you think of the agent who helped you and your overall experience?” or “Did your service experience live up to the promises we made in our marketing?” It’s crucial to look at all of your interactions with your customers’, comparing internal evaluation scores with customer scores and expectations.
Adapt and adjust
Organizations should then apply changes to their contact center and customer experiences.
As customer’s needs and demands change — and the environment customers find themselves in (recessions, COVID-19, etc.) changes organizations must change and adapt.
For example, if customers can’t go into physical brick and mortar locations (for example a cell phone store to ask questions about their phone, their bill, or their account) businesses should anticipate higher inbound call volumes and staff up accordingly.
RingCentral has the tools to help you succeed
Once your company recognizes and responds to most of your customers’ pain points, it’s time to focus on how to provide proactive and differentiated customer service.
RingCentral offers a suite of tools including cloud contact center (Engage Voice) and Engage Digital.
- Give your customers the service they expect with a 100% remote support team. Our cloud-based platform makes it easy for agents to get up and running with just an internet connection. Service customers without them knowing your agents are at home.
- Incorporate channels like live-chat, messaging, and social to reduce inbound call volume and service customers on the channel of their choice.
- Our collaborative contact center allows for real-time communication through team messaging. That way when agents need quick answers or input from someone within your organization, they can get it… and customers’ questions are answered right the first time, every time.
The takeaway
It’s important to keep up with your customers’ needs as their demands — and the environment they find themselves in — changes.
As economic uncertainty increases, it’s tempting to cut spending in areas that aren’t directly related to revenue. But cutting corners with your customer experience may cost you more than you know.
To learn more about how RingCentral can help you deliver on the customer experience as your customer demands continue to evolve and grow. Visit RingCentral.com to learn more.
Originally published Aug 12, 2020, updated Jan 30, 2023
