A great customer experience can make the difference between business prosperity and failure.
When customers have a positive interaction with the company, Almost all (94%) They say it increases their chances of buying again. In other words, great experiences increase revenue. And while there are a few ingredients to deliver a premium experience, two of them stand above the rest – consistency and vision.
Chris Mills, Head of Customer Success, EMEA, Slack, says that a consistent offer builds loyalty, while inconsistencies drive customers away. Unfortunately, this is where many companies struggle. Three-fifths of consumers say they usually feel they are communicating with separate departments rather than one company, when they contact service teams.
Besides addressing these consistency issues, companies also need to build a 360-degree view of the customer. This is because a lot of times issues can slip through the radar without being reported or noticed. By being clear about how they are performing against expectations, companies can provide a service that keeps customers coming back for more, and proactively identify any issues they need to resolve.
Conversely, if they fail to get each of these elements right, the company is likely to see a growing wave of ‘silent switchers’ – those customers who quietly and quickly abandon a business to a competitor because of a bad incident, without the company even realizing what went wrong.
Of course, all of this is easier said than done — so here are some tips on how to get your customer service right and create an antidote to the scourge of silent switching.
Building a connected and consistent team
If internal teams, such as sales and customer support, are separated, the customer will realize that. The reason may be that they have to repeat their words every time they call, or that they receive conflicting answers to the same question. This makes the organization appear unprofessional, which leads to distrust and frustration in the customer. In short, it puts clients on the right track to become silent converts.
To consistently better serve customers, it is important that cross-functional departments can easily share knowledge or seek existing knowledge across the entire organization. For a customer support team, that might mean they can quickly find a solution to a problem that plagued a previous customer and share it with a new one, find out the latest updates on a service from the product team or call sales to pass on details if someone wants to renew a contract.
Enabling knowledge sharing across departments requires a single platform that connects and engages everyone in the business. If the sales team is communicating via email, service agents are cut off from an independent customer support tool and product development teams are chatting live in the office, it’s impossible to deliver a consistent experience to customers – because the teams themselves have inconsistent processes.
Instead, with everyone unified around a single productivity platform that houses all communication and collaboration, they can easily find and share the answers they need. What’s more, they can connect and interact with other departments not just through messages, but with instant audio or video calls, asynchronous videos, and more – so it’s always easy to connect with co-workers from one centralized platform.
All of this helps build the level of consistency customers demand – and will enable companies to foster relationships with customers that build loyalty and reduce turnover risk.
Create a 360-degree view of the client
While keeping internal teams connected is key to delivering a consistent approach to individual clients, it is also important to gain insight into those experiences in general. Without clarity about customer feedback, whether it’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) or other metrics, companies remain blind. Delivering a meaningful customer experience is an ongoing process – which means taking lessons and constantly developing the service on offer.
By gathering insights and data through automation and integration, and measuring the success (or shortcomings) of customer interactions, any issues can be caught early. It can then be dealt with quickly – before it leads to the customer giving up and turning around.
For example, by automatically sharing feedback surveys through a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to collect results, a team may discover that customer experiences have decreased after a new product launch. Further investigations reveal an error or bad user instructions – and they can then take action to rework or fix it.
Crucially, though, this type of data analysis doesn’t have to add additional administrative work to support or sales teams. At fast-growing fintech company Revolut, for example, the sales team has been able to reduce time spent on operations and admin by integrating Salesforce’s CRM so that it automatically captures customer activity and shares it to the platform where they collaborate.
Not only does automation like this speed up work for the team at Revolut, it means they always have access to the latest information they need to better serve customers, while freeing up their time to focus on high-value work — like connecting with customers and closing deals.
Combine consistency and clarity into a single productivity platform
In a highly competitive world, customer loyalty is hard earned and easily lost. The ability to present a united front, keep internal teams connected, and gather the insights needed to understand customer experiences are all key to keeping customers in line.
Uniting teams on a productivity platform that integrates with critical apps like CRM makes this happen. It brings consistency to departments by standardizing collaboration and communication, and puts customer challenges under the microscope—and uncovers pain points before they pile on the ice.
While this will require adopting a new approach, companies need to make a call: either to transform the way they operate today, or to see their customers switch to competitors tomorrow.
