How To Design A Bulletproof Customer Experience
What does a bulletproof customer experience look like for your customers? Is it the ability for your company to constantly delight the customer, or just to keep on delivering a satisfactory level of service that never generates complaints?
You can take many steps to move your service from good to great, but when you focus on bulletproof service, the focus is on where the customer experience fails. How can you design your customer service processes to make these failures rare or impossible?
It’s worth noting that customer experience is a much wider area of focus than customer service alone. When focused on service, we explore those interactions where the customer and brand are engaged in a conversation – the customer needs help or has a question. Customer experience could be any interaction from marketing and sales to a social media post – every possible interaction between the brand and customer, regardless of whether it involves a service call. All these interactions form the experience that the customer has with the brand.
Any executive designing a customer experience strategy needs to think first about how they want customers to see the brand – what are the vision and values of this company? Understanding how you want customers to feel when they engage with you is essential. It’s easy to say, ‘We want to delight every customer’ on a PowerPoint slide, but what does this mean in practice?
Things to Keep in Mind
When designing the customer experience strategy, one of the first steps can be to consider all the places where it can go wrong. This may sound negative, but it is a helpful exercise because it can be applied to the ‘positive’ strategy – how might our vision fail if any of these problems occur?
What are some of the most common mistakes when designing customer service processes? This could be a long list, but let’s consider some of the most essential points:
- Not training the service team effectively enough.
- Not listening to what customers need.
- Not expressing empathy – not caring for customer needs.
- Not being proactive and helping customers before they ask for help.
- Not providing help on channels the customer wants to use.
The critical aspect of preparing for a bulletproof customer experience strategy is protecting the business’s reputation and retaining existing customers. Losing regular customers because of a poor customer experience is extremely expensive, and customer service disasters often end up in the media – making it hard to attract new customers.
So, what are the key areas to focus on for the creation of a positive customer experience strategy that also includes bulletproof elements to protect against failure?
Employee Training
This includes the hiring and onboarding process but also any ongoing training. Employees who lack proper training may not have the necessary skills or knowledge to address customer needs effectively. This gap can lead to misunderstandings, incorrect information, or an inability to solve problems, resulting in a negative customer experience.
Lack of Empowerment and Flexibility
If employees are not empowered to make decisions or offer solutions beyond a rigid set of rules, they might be unable to resolve customer issues satisfactorily. This rigidity can lead to inflexible service that doesn’t address specific customer needs or concerns.
Don’t forget, modern customers are searching Google for solutions; they have probably searched your website or asked a Chabot for help. When talking to your agent, they really need expert advice that is knowledgeable and flexible – not someone following a script. Google has failed – now they need an expert.
Inefficient Processes and Systems
Outdated, slow, or complicated processes can hinder customer service efficiency. This includes cumbersome return processes, long call hold times, or convoluted website navigation. Such inefficiencies can aggravate customers and lead to a poor service experience.
Delivering the tech you need for an efficient customer service process is just table stakes today. However, it is surprising how many companies still struggle to answer calls when there are volume spikes – or their website crashes when too many customers need help simultaneously.
Technical problems, such as website downtime, malfunctioning apps, or issues with payment processing, can disrupt the customer experience and lead to service failures.
Inadequate Follow-Up or Feedback Mechanisms
Not following up with customers after resolving their issues or failing to have a system to gather and analyze feedback can prevent businesses from understanding and rectifying the root causes of service failures.
This is an essential part of keeping your promise to the customer. Listen to what they need and create a process that allows ideas and suggestions to enter into a line of actions that will be processed. Your customers might have the best ideas – listen to them.
Addressing these common causes of customer service failures involves a combination of training, efficient processes, effective communication, and a deep understanding of customer needs and expectations.
By proactively tackling these issues when building an initial customer experience strategy, businesses can enhance their customer service quality and build stronger, more lasting relationships with their customers. Avoiding failure by designing a bulletproof customer service strategy can be done right from the start.
What do you think about this idea of designing to avoid customer service failures? Follow our LinkedIn company page always to see our articles in your newsfeed. Click here to visit our website.
