What Goes Into the Makings of a Good Customer Experience, and How Do You Provide It?

Customers have always wanted to solve their problems with the fewest steps possible. That’s why most call centers have a metric called First Call Resolution (FCR), which has also been extended to the contact centers.

Customers value and relish quick and personalized resolution of queries in the first interaction irrespective of the channel they use to reach customer service.

At my organization, we pride ourselves on the fact that our customers can reach us 24×7 across channels. This includes the most personal telephonic medium where our support engineers are available to handle your queries at all times. To date, we haven’t had any customer churn in India, and we have been in business for slightly more than five years now. Besides, 40% of our customer acquisition is through referrals from our happy customers.

Does That Say Anything about the Customer Experience?

It is not that our customers don’t have issues. It is just that we help them resolve those issues in the shortest possible time. Besides, we proactively let our customers know of issues that we foresee in advance, like preventive maintenance, lack of backups from their side, and availability of call recordings.

How Do You Create a Good Customer Experience?

While the technology infrastructure plays a significant role, it is not just about the technology. There are several other factors involved in it. The empathy and compassion with which you speak to your customers and address their needs are critical.

We have defined KRAs for everyone in the organization around how their work impacts the customer experience we deliver – product teams, product marketing, corporate marketing, pre-sales, sales, inside sales, support, customer success, finance, HR, and admin.

While all soft components need to be looked at culturally, it depends on the space you operate, the kind of offerings you have, and your customer segments. However, you can define what needs to be in place on the technology front to offer the best possible customer experiences.

I will talk about the must-have technology infrastructure to provide excellent customer experiences.

Omnichannel Contact Center Platform

Look at a platform where you can start providing customer experience across channels in a unified manner. That being said, you should be able to pick and choose the channels that you want from the platform and pay for only what you use.

For instance, the channels you want to provide customer service experience entirely depend on the type of your business, your customer preferences, and channels that make sense to give the best possible customer experience.

If you are in B2B and what you are offering does not involve secure transactions, you can most likely do with email as your preferred channel and telephony as extended support. However, these channels also go with some defined SLAs that the customers are also aware of. Likewise, you can pick and choose the channels that would work the best for you and your customers.

Integrations

As an organization, you want to equip your customer experience professionals with all the customer information to provide your customers with the fastest and best possible resolutions. So, you should integrate your platform with your CRM, helpdesk software, ERP, and other backend systems.

Look for a platform that comes with pre-integrations to the systems you use, or it should have provisions for you to integrate easily through APIs.

Bring Intelligence into Your Operations

Let us look at the queries that your customers are asking. If you can answer most of them without human intervention, bring in self-service capabilities for your customers. This way, your agents would be available to handle complex queries while the self-service bot takes the transactional queries.

Also, with intelligence, the complexity of queries handled by your bots can improve with time, as an intelligence platform learns continuously from the interactions and responses.

This would also make your organization proactive in understanding issues that your customer is likely to face and the additional requirements they may require. You can proactively advise your customers on the challenges and how they can overcome them and upsell things based on the understanding of how other customers are using your platform.

Adoption Is the Key

Imagine you bring in a platform with all the bells and whistles, and your customer service professionals find it challenging to use them. If they need extensive training before using the platform, it defeats the purpose, as the adoption levels will be poor.

What Do You Do in Such a Scenario?

You have to ensure that you choose an intuitive platform, and your people should be able to use them without extensive or repeated training.

Provide an Easy Option to Reach a Human Being

Most customers try things independently before reaching out to customer service or customer support. This includes even the self-service modules. So, when they reach out to you on your customer care numbers, provide them an easy way to reach a representative without having to wait endlessly or listen to all your IVR options.

This would give them a lot of confidence and the comfort that they are being cared for.

Customer experience plays a significant role in the success of your business. So, equip your customer experience professionals with the tools to provide the best possible experience to your customers. After all, your customers are the lifeline of your business, and what more can you ask for than happy customers.