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Understanding that a business is all about commitment, trust and quality is essential. A brand is a promise, it is a promise to your customer, to meet or exceed their expectations, across their journey with you.
See even if you are a brand, a product or a service, the experience that you deliver to your customers, defines your longevity.
Service at any point in the customer journey with you is where brands are born or where they can die. According to research, 78% of customers have backed out of purchase due to poor customer experience. This is a huge number and one that can have a deep impact on your business if not taken seriously.
The Customer Conundrum
The most important asset of any organization is its customers. They are the lifeblood of your organization, who pay the bills, so to keep them hooked, you have to keep them satisfied. With respect to customer service experience, the point we need to understand is that it is multifaceted, it is spread across multiple engagements and across multiple channels (touchpoints).
The customer now rules to roost, with them defining what works and what doesn’t – we have massive examples like the recent Pepsi ad that made headlines for all the wrong reasons.
So, the point to understand here is, with customer service being spread across so many touchpoints, how can you actually build a solid customer service experience?
Customers at the helm
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While we have talked about this earlier as well, an elaboration is essential to build further ground. This is what the new organization looks like, where the flow of information, from the customer, goes directly through your front-line staff. According to research, around 90% of consumers consider customer service experience to be a major factor in determining whether or not to do business with someone.
So, with respect to building a winning brand, product, service your brand narrative and the vision has to start from the bottom up. To be in the service of your customers, you have to demonstrate it right on the front lines.
An example of this would be a brand that has recently gone through a complete overhaul and is positioning itself as let’s assume ‘A digital (app) led bank’. There are multiple touch-points where that narrative can fail because your journey with that customer is not just bound to that specific app:
• It would be bound to your branch (where misinformation/lack of onboarding resources on-premises, can break the digital journey)
• It would be bound to your website (where a missing call to action to download the app etc. could break the digital journey)
• It would be bound to your social media (where a lack of information and customer handling options could lead to a break in the digital journey as well)
A clearly defined strategy that resonates across all your channels ensures that your customers are treated equally across all your channels (touchpoints)
Tech to the rescue
Enough about the problem lets talk about the solution. You want your message of being in the service of your customer to resonate with your brand, build such a culture top-down and build its education from the bottom up (everyone in the organization should know that you are a customer-led brand, product, service – if they can’t respect that, the doors always open)
Next to have to enable these people, with the right technology so that they can evolve past their current state and into a future state of serviceability. Your clients are looking for responsiveness, use scheduling apps to keep track of customer needs, employ CRMs that enable your people to unify customer records and provide them with client alerts, upselling, cross-selling opportunities, use marketing automation platforms to enable better reach and response time.
Tech has the power to effectively take care of a lot of the grunt work in modern organizations. Get your best people on it and build better serviceability.
Conclusion
It’s simple, customers want to be looked after, to know that they matter. Through technology and better business acumen, we have the capacity to create much better experiences, that eventually help your business grow. Happy selling.
