How to Enhance Customer Experience through Deskless Workers

0
159

Share on LinkedIn

Deskless Workers

Photo by Unsplash, CC0 1.0

The customer is still king. Customer experience has become an important brand differentiator and can no longer be neglected by big and small businesses. Customers are the essence of a business and the key to survival.

However, in today’s world, the abundant products and options, and the culture of instant reviews has made it harder to retain customers and generate brand loyalty. It’s not impossible though.

Research suggests that today’s clients are looking for more than just good pricing, quality or brand value. Today’s customer is looking for something more wholesome and difficult to quantify, they’re looking for an experience.

The customer experience (CX) can be loosely defined as what the respective client goes through in their interaction with a brand throughout the customer lifecycle. This includes everything from the initial awareness of said brand or product, entering the virtual or brick and mortar store, to the purchasing experience, right until receiving the product and invoice. CX also includes post-purchase customer service or maintenance related interactions with the brand representatives.

There are multiple channels through which customers interact with the brand representatives and employees. This makes creating a wholesome CX all the more intense and complicated.

Businesses need to take all these factors into consideration and fill all gaps across most channels so as to ensure that clients have an above-average experience. Customer service is a crucial part of CX.

While CX involves the entire range of steps in the life cycle of a customer’s journey with your brand or product, customer service refers to how your staff treat and deal with customers along this journey.

Customer service is, therefore, an extremely crucial step in this journey. This is primarily because interpersonal experiences trump digital experiences and are registered more quickly within the human mind.

Snags in the digital experience can be rectified through various logical steps by reaching out to technical support teams.

However, a misdemeanour in the experience that people have with the staff has a more lasting impression on a more personal level.

Therefore, this step in the overall CX needs to be dealt with with a lot more caution and detail. This is where the role of Deskless workers comes into play!

Role of Deskless Workers in Customer Experience

Deskless workers and frontline workers are the faces of a business. As a result, they are the deciding factor in how customers perceive your brand. This stage of customer service is crucial in establishing a high quality of CX at your business.

Therefore, it’s important that Deskless and frontline workers are well informed about the product or service and extremely cordial and responsive to customer needs.

Deskless workers need to deliver service that is not only top-notch but also gives customers a sense of importance and is personalized to match each one’s unique tastes. This is a rather tough nut to crack.

The lifecycle of a customer experience loosely depends on factors such as digital experience, speed of booking/purchase, etc; feedback; communication with staff; and most importantly, personalization.

Owing to the events transpiring the world over, digitalization has become a top priority for ALL businesses. No touch and no contact interactions are here to stay even in a post-COVID scenario. Therefore, it’s highly essential to equip your business with all the digital tools needed to carry out operations from start to finish.

In this context, customer experience is closely tied with the employee experience. Equipping frontline workers with the digital tools needed to accomplish their day to day tasks goes a long way in giving workers the leverage and sufficient time to interact with customers. Employee experience platforms that simplify routine tasks and approvals result in humungous savings in terms of costs, time and productivity.

Additionally, intangible benefits of EX include better employee morale since workers are freed from spending inordinate quantities of time on mundane tasks that also sap the vital focus and energy of your staff.

Generating smooth digital experiences for frontline workers and customers alike is the way forward in creating positive CX. Automation is not sufficient, however, in creating a seamless digital experience for your customers. Automation is incomplete without the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Including conversational AI is essential to ease a customer’s journey through your brand or product.

With all this talk of intelligence being artificial comes the real clincher with respect to CX, and that is personalization. This means more than just calling customers by name and greeting them with a smile.

This is where the role of frontline staff becomes crucial. However, interactions between your non-desk workers and clients should be authentic and not contrived. Ensure that the employees chosen for customer interactions are genuine and interested in human interaction.

Forced smiles, being overtly polite and people-pleasing behaviours don’t bode well with people in this day and age. Most importantly, it’s crucial to keep your customer-facing employees happy. Happy customers translate their state of being to their interactions, making the whole process a done deal.

Digital Tools for Deskless Workers

Your Deskless workers are your most valuable resource when it comes to creating a positive customer experience. Most customer interactions at your business occur with frontline workers.

Therefore, equipping your organization with contemporary workforce management software is crucial. Ensure that this software is mobile-first, secure and user-friendly with a consumer-like user experience.

Once your Deskless workers are well equipped digitally they will mete out quality service to your customers resulting in high-end CX overall.

Customer experience in the new age post-COVID is more crucial than ever before. People are well informed and more vigilant than ever. Awareness has skyrocketed be it financially, healthcare-wise or technologically.

The millennials and Gen Z are the decision-makers in their households when it comes to purchases at all levels. Therefore, it’s important to up your game as a business to plug all gaps in the flow of how you manage your customer journeys.

These natives are also more digitally literate and aware of the world around them than their preceding generations. Their buying power has increased and their purchasing behaviours are also very different as compared to boomers or Gen X natives.

Therefore, today more than ever before, your CX will depend on two crucial factors – digital platforms and frontline workers!

Hassan Mansoor
Hassan Mansoor is the Founder and Director at Technical Minds Web. After completing Masters in Business Administration, he established a small digital marketing agency with the primary focus to help the small business owners to grow their online businesses. Being a small entrepreneur, he has learned from project management, and day to day staff management and staff productivity. He's a regular contributor on Business.com.

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here