It may seem cliche, but we’re going to do it – a list of resolutions that companies are making, or need to be making, in the upcoming New Year in order to stay ahead of the game. What would New Year’s be without a few established goals, after all!
2015 Customer Experience New Year’s Resolutions:
1. Develop a Strategy to Improve the Customer Experience.
For many companies, customer experience is becoming increasingly important, and familiar. The trending topic of improving the customer experience continues to rise, and continues to be attainable. Gone are the days of taking customers for granted. Their options are limitless. Their knowledge and power is off the charts. If you don’t have a CX strategy for keeping customers happy, informed and moving through the buying process at a nice clip, and one that is painless, then you have to work on your CX strategy.
2. Invest More in Technology.
Your executive team might be hesitant to invest in technology to support an improved customer experience, and it’s your job to teach them, and help them overcome the misnomer that CX ROI cannot be calculated. Take a look at these statistics that we’ve gleaned from companies who use customer experience monitoring and measuring techniques and tools:
Some of the performance metrics that have been tracked and improved after implementing call recording with speech analytics include:
* 59% increase to inbound lead conversion rates: How? Employee training and coaching efforts as a direct result of insights gleaned from customer conversations.
* 100% compliance with federal regulations, and reduction in litigation risk: How? Adherence to scripts, which address issues mandated in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act – TCPA.
*90% reduction in manual call monitoring hours: How? Fast, automated audio mining technology sorts calls based on key phrases and isolates customer conversations that need attention.
3. Be Proactive. Listen To and Learn About Customers.
This doesn’t need much explanation, although we often need to be reminded of it. In busy contact centers, as calls are queuing up and pressure mounts, it’s understandable to get through one customer call and focus on taking the next one. But, for a better experience, we should focus on taking our time, not enforcing a call duration goal on agents, but forcing a customer issue completion goal instead. This is different than a FCR goal, although that too is important to the bottom line and the CX.
The more we know about our customers, the better they’ll feel about allowing us to dip into their wallets, or their details.
4. Do the Same For Employees.
Understanding your employees and the issues they face each day while at work is just as important as getting to know your customers. Happy and engaged employees will work harder to ensure that the customers they’re speaking with are equally happy and engaged. Share goals, positive scenarios, and helpful feedback. Using technology, which has been implemented to monitor the customer experience – like call recording and speech analytics mining tools – will provide you with the data you need to incentivize your employees. Highlighting successful customer calls, and specific agents among the team, will empower employees and motivate them to do better.
5. Become Comfortable with Data. Monitor and Measure the Customer Experience Across All Departments.
If you’re going to invent time and efforts into the right technologies to help you implement, monitor, and measure the customer experience your business is delivering, then you have to commit to being comfortable with the data that will start to flow, and understand how it’s best shared among the department, team, and company overall.
There are many options when it comes to the right technology and systems for your business, and even right down to a specific department or team. Remember, the customer experience is in jeopardy if you’re not on top of monitoring and measuring customer satisfaction.
Resources are plentiful on this topic, which is half the battle!
