How often do you hear someone say, “I love dealing with customer service!”
Not very, maybe not ever. And why is the language always so pointed – “dealt with” rather than “spoke with” or “chatted too”?
Between work, family, and friends, most people have a lot on their plate. Factor in pandemic repercussions and the potential impact of global natural disasters – and life becomes overwhelming, quickly.
Of course, this means that “dealing with” customer service is often the last thing anyone wants to do. Particularly because this activity usually signifies spending time and effort resolving an issue.
But what if that wasn’t the case? What if that experience was exceptional, dare I say enjoyable?
So, what is exceptional CX?
Exceptional CX is driven by a genuine understanding of end customers: where they are, what they want, and how they want it. But what does this look like in practice?
Exceptional CX is acknowledging that customers almost always start their service journey outside of a business’s purview – be that in search or social media. And it is adapting the CX flow to meet customers where they are, at any point in the journey, and bring them back to the dedicated customer service channels in a frictionless way.
For example, energy companies reacting to a search trend like “when will energy prices go up” by emailing customers with information on pricing and timelines as well as building out webpages that make it easy for vulnerable people to get in contact.
Exceptional CX also recognises the resourceful way in which consumers behave today and offers simple and effortless ways for the customer to resolve the issue themselves digitally. Better still, it greets customers by name and doesn’t force them to repeat themselves.
For example, an agent commenting on a popular YouTube video, which includes frustration with a product or service, with reassurance and a product tutorial or ‘how to’ blog on the website.
The good news is, in a world of infinite data, exceptional CX can be the norm. And partners have a crucial role in helping businesses deliver it through your CCaaS product and service portfolios.
Ensure your CCaaS proposition enables exceptional CX
There are an abundance of products and services now available to help businesses differentiate themselves through exceptional CX – making it the rule, rather than the exception.
Here are my recommendations for any exceptional CX flow:
- Automated tools and technologies: As I mentioned in my previous article, the reason many self-service options are frustrating is that they do not leverage data from past interactions. The same can be true for the whole CX flow. Today, businesses have an abundance of data, and they must use it. This requires the right automated tools and technologies that enable both analysis and drive insight. With the right solutions, businesses can understand customer intent (i.e., what questions they ask and what words they use) and use those insights to fuel meaningful improvements that create exceptional CX.
- Out-of-the-box solutions: This is a must as it allows businesses to easily launch their own intelligent bot, which can be trained to understand different customer intents. Depending on what that business wants to accomplish, these solutions can be ready in a matter of minutes and deployed with speed. But a word to the wise, don’t fall for basic Interactive Voice Response systems and chatbots. These are novelties, at odds with the exceptional self-service options that consumers crave today.
- AI-powered tools for agents: There’s no shortage of solutions that help agents work smarter and faster. Exceptional CX, however, requires solutions that offer agents real-time guidance and coaching as well as real-time translation – displaying the customer conversation on-screen – and real-time context and sentiment.
- One platform that brings it all together: Different business units solve different parts of a customer problem, and all play a crucial role in the end-to-end customer journey. Sadly, these units often use different tools that prevent communication and data insights from freely flowing between them. Exceptional CX requires multiple units to seamlessly work together to resolve what customers see as a single issue. One platform that can banish silos and bring the customer experience journey together on one platform.