3 Simple Steps to Improve your Customer Experience Skills
If you ask a marketing guru the most important focus point for business success, their reply would be customer experience (CX). The fact remains that the success of a business is directly linked to the customer experience they provide. CX professionals are busy developing strategies to monitor real-time customer experiences and improve them.
Businesses are now ever-dependent on the internet. Imagine a day you go into the office just to find out that there’s an outage in Spectrum internet only service. A person’s entire day would be ruined by something they can’t even control. Whether it’s for communications, storage, marketing, or customer service, it all relies on the internet.
Giving Your Customers a Good Experience
Good customer experience can only be achieved with the help of the internet or internet-based technology. Customer experience professionals are working hand in hand with the technology giants to develop technology-based CX objectives and goals for both B2B and B2C organizations. The aim is to make cross-functionality possible. Bring customer understanding onto the table, and offer tools to improve customer experience.
Let us now discuss some of the things CX professionals are thinking.
Influence Vs Control
Control is defined as an absolute ability to predict possible situations and to determine a preconceived outcome. This is impossible to achieve, no matter how well thought out your original plans, contingency plans, strategies, and results are, something is bound to go wrong.
The human factor as it’s called when things go beyond your control, can’t be ruled out.
Things more than often do not go as planned. Thus instead of striving for control, focus on influencing change. It is more feasible to focus on influence rather than control. Instead of trying to move every obstacle or change every behavior, try to influence and change some of it rather than all of it.
It’s not possible to control the processes of every functional area. It is however possible to provide customer feedback and look into CX experiences to influence change.
There are some techniques to develop persuasion and influence. It would be a good idea if the CX professional would apply these techniques to gain resources for CX projects, influence members of the project group and most importantly influence the CX team towards success.
Direct Link of CX With Organization’s Success
Researchers believe there is a direct link between CX and the financial gains of a company. They have developed formulas to gauge the financial impact directly influenced by successful CX projects and campaigns.
Unfortunately, there are still some old-school thinkers in senior positions, who are skeptical of these claims. Part of the job of a CX professional is to convince your decision-makers.
CX projects require the allocation of resources and commitment from the organization. Sometimes even initiation of the change in organizational behavior. To achieve all that requires the backing of the senior executives including the skeptical ones. It is a good strategy to first come up with a formula calculating your return on investment (ROI) linked to the CX project with the help of the finance department.
After convincing the senior managers of the formula to calculate the ROI of the CX projects or campaigns. It becomes easier to get approvals and resources required by the CX professionals.
Address Root Causes Rather Than Symptoms While Addressing Customer Issues
More often than not, customer issues are stamped down at the first point of contact. Most customer service managers would look downstream to find the solution. They end up adding more staff to be more efficient.
CX professionals don’t just look downstream, they also look upstream to find the root cause of a problem faced by customers. They then initiate a streamlining of the process to eradicate the root cause of a problem rather than finding a temporary solution. If the problem is, that the reaction period of the CX team is longer than the expectations of the customers e.g if a customer has to wait for 2 days for his cash, on a return policy. This would mean that customers have to make a return visit to collect their refund rather than then and there.
The possibility is that the process of reporting a return back to the warehousing department and then to the finance division is taking longer and the customer is made to wait for internal processes. This leaves a negative CX and might act as a deterrent in repeat purchases from the customer. This can’t be resolved by downstream solutions. It can only be resolved by improving the processes that can only come from upstream and cross-functional analysis by a CX professional. They address the root cause rather than symptoms of a problem.
