Tag: Customer Relationship

5 Customer Service Experience And CX Predictions For 2018

In this Era-of-the-Customer, all business establishments understand that it is the customers who call the shots. Customers are better informed and smarter nowadays, as they have recognized that they have more options and so are more stringently demanding about the customer service experience they receive, which they expect to be right the first time and every time. The following are 5 predictions that you cannot ignore. For the most part, these are certain customer experience management trends that keep tending, and which, smart companies follow and react accordingly.

In this Era-of-the-Customer, all business establishments understand that it is the customers who call the shots. Customers are better informed and smarter nowadays, as they have recognized that they have more options and so are more stringently demanding about the customer service experience they receive, which they expect to be right the first time and every time. The new age customers expect business houses to take care of their issues in a way that not only keeps them happy but also help restore their faith and confidence in the company.

While many companies see this as a big burden on their shoulders, there are others who view this as a golden window of opportunity to meet their customers, exceed the customer expectations, and so win over new customers by creating loyalty with their existing ones.

If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends. - Jeff Bezos Click To Tweet

The following are 5 predictions that you cannot ignore.
For the most part, these are certain customer experience management trends that keep tending, and which, smart companies follow and react accordingly.

Self-service customer support is growing in popularity

Customers expect companies they do business with to provide them support in a way that is easy and convenient for the customers. It has been noticed in numerous studies that customers visit the company websites not to look for telephone numbers but to look for an answer to their problems or questions in hand. In the recent times, videos have become a powerful means to answer frequently asked questions. These “how-to” type videos not only offer answers to questions but they also show the customers and visitors how to properly use the company’s products or services. Hence, this video-based support also doubles up as a marketing tool, since enhancing customer service experience is the new approach to marketing.

AI continues to be the hottest topic in customer experience management

Computers now effectively handle low-level customer support questions and its capabilities are increasing. Much like, what reminds us of the Moor’s Law, which says that the power and capacity of the microchip (the number of transistors on a chip) will be doubled every passing year. This is exactly what is happening with Artificial Intelligence. The power and capability of Artificial Intelligence is growing at a stellar pace. The good news is, while in the past using AI for enhancing customer support experience, was prohibitively high for most companies, the modern day AI solutions that are now being developed for SMB (Small and Medium Business) can be found at an affordable price.

AI will also support the employee apart from the customers

While the majority of people are focusing on how AI can be used for communicating with their customers, there are some organizations those who are also using Artificial Intelligence to support the agents. In this case, the “machine” listening to the discussion between the customer and the agent, is capable of providing the agent with up-to-date information and data needed to respond to the customer’s questions. According to the words of Ginni Rometty (CEO of IBM) – when you turn around the letter in Artificial Intelligence, ‘AI’ reverses to ‘IA’, which means for ‘Intelligent Assistant’, and over here, the machine “assistant” extends help and support the agents instead of the customers.

Amazon will shift into Brick-and-mortar retail

We have already seen as more and more Brick-and-mortar retailers are gaining grounds online, giants like Amazon has similarly moved into the retail brick-and-mortar store business on grocery items by recognizing the delicate sense of balance between the traditional and the digital retail worlds. And, this is just the start, for this shifting economy fueled by customer service is a convenience that will eventually benefit the customers.

Convenience is the new CX and customer service strategy

The next wave of disruptors to any industry is going to include the concept of convenience in 2018. We all have seen how the conveniences of Uber cabs have disrupted the whole taxicab industry. Moreover, Amazon has also paved the path of convenience and has become one of the most convenient companies on the planet to do business with. Hence, convenience is the newest service weapon to enhance customer service experience, and customer experience management this year.

Conclusion

So make sure that you are keeping up with the trends to follow in 2018, by offering your customers the service and customer experience that are engaging, easy, and convenient, to make this year a great time for both your customers and your company.

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5 Ideas That Will Redefine Customer Experience Management In 2018

Customer Experience Management or CEM is a compilation of processes that a business establishment uses to track, manage, and organize the interactions between the organization and a customer, throughout the customer lifecycle. The objective of Customer Experience Management is to optimize interactions based on the customer’s perspective and to increase customer loyalty. As we live in the age of the customer, to explain this buzz-worthy concept, it is the time that we must know what CEM really means. Precisely stating, CEM is not just collecting or responding to customer feedbacks, or tacking your NPS (Net Promoter Score), but it is a methodology and the complete ideology that makes your business enjoyable to work for customers. So how do you triumph the CX (Customer Experience) race in 2018?

What is Customer Experience Management?

Customer Experience Management or CEM is a compilation of processes that a business establishment uses to track, manage, and organize the interactions between the organization and a customer, throughout the customer lifecycle. The objective of Customer Experience Management is to optimize interactions based on the customer’s perspective and to increase customer loyalty.

As we live in the age of the customer, to explain this buzz-worthy concept, it is the time that we must know what CEM really means. Precisely stating, CEM is not just collecting or responding to customer feedbacks, or tacking your NPS (Net Promoter Score), but it is a methodology and the complete ideology that makes your business enjoyable to work for customers.

How do you triumph the CX (Customer Experience) race in 2018?

  1. Mapping and Studying the Complete Customer Journey
  2. Becoming Truly Omni-Channel
  3. Create Intelligent Loop Closure by Seamless Integrations
  4. Deploy Real-Time CX Systems and Personalized Insights
  5. Use Advanced Analytics to Help Prioritize Investments
Gartner predicts that by 2018, more than 50% of organizations will redirect their investments to customer experience innovations. Click To Tweet

In the race for delighting the customer, here we elaborate on the above-mentioned 5 things that we expect will shape Customer Experience in the coming year:

Mapping and Studying the Complete Customer Journey

The main objective of Customer Experience Management is to convey delight, but for that, you must first get your customer engaged. Engaging the customer can be either ad-hoc or part of a larger plan, but at the end, business establishments should understand the entire customer journey.
It is not just enough to take an individual point on the customer journey to understand or survey your customer, for doing this you will most likely be ineffective, as you will not have enough contexts to understand the needs of your customer.

The customer journey is the only means that is capable of providing context around the buyer’s experience with a brand. It helps you to ask the right questions at the most opportune moment, and so build brand engagement and trust that help guide the customer journey to the point of purchase.

Hence, for a total understanding of the customer journey spending money in advanced analytics to spot the drivers in Customer Experience is going to be vital for customer success in 2018.

Becoming Truly Omni-Channel

In the present times, customer interactions include a wide range of touch points, such as web, mobile, IVR (Interactive Voice Response), social media, in-store, chat-bots and more.  This brings us to the modern-day concept of Omni-Channel. Customers nowadays switch between different channels frequently, that too in the middle of a purchase or even during discovery. Hence, our prediction is that Omni-Channel customer experience management will get bigger with the propagation of channels, and naturally, customer journey mapping has to encompass every touch-points and channels where you can find your customer’s presence.

So having these channels up and running, and to make the work seamlessly as a part of the overall customer journey is another thing that we predict will be critical for CEM in 2018.

Intelligent Loop Closure by Seamless Integrations

Brands are obliged to resolve customer queries. However, according to Esteban Kolsky (CEO of ThinkJar), only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers do actually complain. Hence, creating Omni-Channel strategies and mapping customer journeys, drives customer engagement and aids organizations to proactively engage the customer across multiple touch-points, thereby ensuring that they are listening.

When it comes to business, different brands have different systems for support. CEM ensures that poor feedbacks from the customers become a support ticket automatically, in order to proactively resolve the issue. Hence, regardless of your industry, support ticket management is a priority for all businesses.

The only way to access these insights and precisely prioritize these customer support tickets is to completely integrate your business with systems of records that are capable of providing customer contexts.

These systems of records include CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, Loyalty platforms, Point of Sale systems, and others.

Therefore, seamless flow of information and ease of integration between these various kinds of systems will necessarily be a prior requirement for a Customer Experience Management program to allow smart loop closure in 2018.

Customer Experience Management

Real-Time CX Systems and Personalized Insights

In the year ahead, customer experience strategy will require alignment and coordination between various teams. Customers want holistic, all comprising brand experience, which suggests that your workforce need the right kind of equipment with the correct insights that are required for their roles. For example, while a Chief Executive Officer of a company should be able to view Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), organization-encompassing NPS and other holistic metrics, store managers should only view metrics of their store-NPS and ambiance of the store.

The customer needs are evolving at an unprecedented rate. Hence, by 2018 one of the primary pre-requisites of a great Customer Experience will be the ability to monitor feedbacks and then offer actionable insights in real-time. Therefore, Customer Experience Management platforms will need to be real-time, from driving integrations to making changes to configuring the whole CEM system, which can provide a clearer picture of what your customers are thinking of your business and how to manage their expectations from your brand.

Advanced Analytics to Help Prioritize Investments

Although most organizations are capable of collecting raw data about their customers, extracting the right insights from this cascading information is the real challenge.

As we move into 2018, remember that you make sure your analytic engine is a step ahead than your brand’s competitors.  Therefore, leveraging on AI and deep learning can help in precisely gauging your customer’s sentiments. Powering your CX analytic platforms with cutting-edge techs such as predictive analysis, churn predictor, and path analysis helps in diving deep into customer behavior and their purchasing patterns, that can help drive hands-on improvement strategies.

While path analysis metrics helps in identifying the underlying influences of CX, predictive analysis make use of this data to run ‘what-if’ scenarios.

Therefore, briefly, truly understanding the customers and addressing their pain-points proactively is what that will set your business and brand apart in 2018.

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Why a Scalable CRM Is Most Important For Your Growing Business

Today’s small business is tomorrow’s enterprise. Therefore, it most important that to address the ever-growing need of startup businesses, all successful business owners who have adopted CRM technology must use Customer Relationship Management software that grows with the size of the organization in tandem with its business growth. According to certain sources, it has been found that CRM application can increase sales revenue by 41% per salesperson, decrease sales and marketing cost by 23%, and increase lead conversion rate over 300 % in startup businesses.

The number of small and medium businesses or SMBs has increased by 49% since 1982 in the US. Aspiring entrepreneurs, most of whom want their business to run on their own terms, start new companies every day in the US.

However, running a start-up is an entirely different ball game than managing a growing business, as in a start-up enterprise growth most often leads to obstacles.

While running a startup company there are several owners those who make their business growth harder than it is. They over-think on their company’s growth strategies, complicate their product line, or worry too much about their employees.

Nevertheless, while all these are important issues, they stand pale in comparison to the one area that contributes the most to the success of any organization: Sales.

It has been observed that sales team of startup companies that follow a defined sales process in an average have 33% more production and revenue, than sales team of businesses that do not. Then again, as said even before, with growth comes challenges, hence the remedy for thwarting this downfall is the use of right technology, such as CRM platform which helps in finding the seamless growth of startup organizations.

The Need for Using CRM in Small Businesses

Today’s small business is tomorrow’s enterprise. Therefore, it most important that to address the ever-growing need of startup businesses, all successful business owners who have adopted CRM technology must use Customer Relationship Management software that grows with the size of the organization in tandem with its business growth.

According to certain sources, it has been found that CRM application can increase sales revenue by 41% per salesperson, decrease sales and marketing cost by 23%, and increase lead conversion rate over 300 % in startup businesses.

Therefore, if you are shopping for buying a CRM to help your growing small business, you need to understand CRM is just not software but also a business strategy implementation tool that goes well beyond record keeping needs. You can use CRM to its full potential by automating tasks like marketing, customer service, and billing. Hence, buy a CRM that is capable of managing the ever-growing demands of your organization as your employee numbers grow.

Here are 4 key ways ConvergeHub CRM helps businesses grow:

  1. Improved Decision Making

CRM technology provides visibility into most vital customer data since the most comprehensive is our reports the better we are able to measure sales activities, forecast sales and thereby track our business performances. High performing business organizations most often use sales analytics of CRM to collect ongoing customer interactions and touch-points, which helps in improving their decisions and focus on the big picture solutions of their business firms.

  1. Enhance Productivity

As CRM enables its users to quickly gain access to customer information, understanding your buyer’s journey and when and what your customers prefer can significantly boost business productivity. With a scalable CRM, sales, marketing, production, billing and customer service teams can seamlessly access to all customer records and critical business data that are centrally stored in the CRM database.

  1. Improve Call-Center Service

CRM software aids call centers to not only make outbound and inbound calls, but it also helps in recording calls, creates call-scripts, leaves automated voice-mail and conducts many more key activities. Hence, when you buy a CRM, it is necessary that you must adopt a CRM, which grows with a growing database of customer data and can accommodate automation that employees quickly assign for managing their increasing customer database.

  1. Need For Mobility

Scalable CRM gives your sales and support teams the immediate right of entry to centralized data even on the move, to support sales and customer support activities. Hence, when key customer information is no longer confined to your office, always adopt CRM software that can expand over time and provide necessary mobile support to your employees those who are out in the field.

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Takeaway

Companies grow not only because they have a superior quality product but also because they are even committed to selling better than their competitors do. Hence, if you want your startup business to grow you need to implement the right kind of technology that enables you to work more efficiently and so ConvergeHub CRM may be the right solution for your growing needs.

 

5 Steps to Create an Invincible Customer Success Team

You create a marketing team to find new leads. You hire a sales team to make new customers. And finally, you develop a customer success team to retain those customers whom your marketing and sales team has acquired and keep them happy. When it comes to cracking customer retention problems, there are so many places to get the ball rolling that it is nearly impossible to understand what you should tackle first. Here are 5 actionable steps that your customer success team can carry out to increase customer retention and see success in half the amount of time that you may need otherwise

You create a marketing team to find new leads. You hire a sales team to close new customers. And finally, you develop a customer success team to retain those customers whom your marketing and sales team has acquired and keep them happy.

When it comes to cracking customer retention problems, there are so many places to get the ball rolling that it is nearly impossible to understand what you should tackle first.

Here are 5 actionable steps that your customer success team can carry out to increase customer retention and see success in half the amount of time that you may need otherwise.

1. Customer Success Starts with Talking to Your Customers

This may sound weird, but the number one action that your new customer success team must follow is to figure out your target market.

Make two lists, one consisting of customers who have found success and the second one who have canceled or have given a negative review and feedback of your product. Once you have acquired this list start reaching out to these people. Understand the reason behind their sentiments and highlight the trends for your unhappy and happy customers.

This is the basic step in your persona development. If you fail to bring in the customers you are creating your product for, you will always be fighting an uphill battle. Hence, make sure that you take care of this step right in the beginning.

2. Create Survey at Each Stage of the Customer Lifecycle

As your customer grows you will need to develop a more consistent feedback mechanism to find the level of customer satisfaction.  Deploy regular survey system and prioritize on getting feedback in all areas of your customer experience.

The most common way to survey customer’s satisfaction with your brand is to do a Net Promotion Score (NPS) survey. You can also add in surveys to other parts of the customer lifecycle but remain aware that you are not overdoing the communication with your customers. The best time for sending out a survey is after initial onboarding of a new customer and thereafter at the point of cancellation. The more you can find out about when and why the customer is canceling your products and services, the better you will be able to help and understand your customer and consequently retain more customers in the future.

3. Be the Voice of Your Customer

One of the most important reasons to build up a customer success team is that by working directly with the customers, you become the best person to represent their feelings about your brand and company. Compile your customer’s feedbacks by writing a paragraph every week titled “What is like to be a customer at {Your Company Name}. Doing this you can illustrate the highlights and lowlights of all the feedback that you receive from the customer’s point of view, and thereafter circulate that note wither through email or any other form of internal communication to make it visible to all employees in your company.

If it is required, plan a weekly meeting where your customer success team can meet with your product development representatives to communicate with the product engineering team about your customer’s pain points.

4. Focus on Your Resources

It is necessary that your customers find quick and simple answers to their questions when they are using your product. This is where a Knowledge Base comes into action- like ours in ConvergeHub.

The most simple way to create a Knowledge Base is to write about any question your customers asked more than two times. Hence, once any customer generated question reaches this threshold, you need to include that question in your Knowledge Base and help your customers to solve their common roadblocks.

Never think that your help resource always have to be perfect, for the more you agonize about the quality of your contents the lesser efficient you will remain in creating your Knowledge Base. This is because, as your product changes, the frequency with which you need to update these articles will not be sustainable if you always remain worried about the quality of your contents.

You can also create videos since 4X customers prefer to watch video helps rather than reading the same. Therefore, if you have not created any help videos, get started and create one right away.

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5. Send weekly customer success reports

To keep all your support, development and sales team members on the same page, send them weekly report card tracking KPIs.

The weekly report card should contain metrics such as:

  • Customer narratives
  • Team process updates
  • Relevant product changes
  • NPS and others

This will help all the members of your customer support team to keep a pulse on what is happening to your team on the front lines.

Lastly, empower your team to learn from their past errors, so that you can provide better customer support in the days to come.

The Past, Present, and Future of AI in Customer Experience

It can be debated, for all the good things that technology has provided to businesses over the last few decades, it has also compromised on customer experience, which is a key element, responsible for growth in any businesses. Nevertheless, at present we have just starting to realize the potential of AI and understand the potential implication for Artificial Intelligence applications, to make a more than welcome impact in the field of customer experience.

You can thank IBM’s Watson for creating an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that was integrated into a plethora of businesses and customer facing applications. You can credit Facebook and Skype for their recent buzz about chatbots and the gold rush of venture capitalists and developers creating an onslaught of bot developing companies. You can laud Amazon’s Echo and Apple’s Siri for applying intelligence into mundane everyday devices and bringing to life; voice, as the new user interface.
Nevertheless, the truth remains that we have also at present just starting to realize the potential of AI in customer experience.

The-Past-Present-and-Future-of-AI-in-Customer-Experience-CTA

It can be debated, for all the good things that technology has provided to businesses over the last few decades, it has also compromised on customer experience, which is a key element, responsible for growth in any businesses.

Websites, call-centers, apps, emails and other offspring of modern digital technology have offered companies scopes to scale and automate customer engagements, while also ushering in process efficiency and cost management systems. However, this also came at a price. As over the years, numerous customers have complained that these very processes and systems were the very elements that undermined and hindered satisfaction for the buyer’s community.

Think about it now. When was the last time that you enjoyed calling up and talking to customer service representatives? Or, for that matter, when was the last instance you were transferred between customer support executives, where the next support personal was already plugged-in into your customer account details and had the precise knowledge as to why you were calling?

It is really a matter of grave disappointment even today that many aspects of the customer journey are still disconnected. A symptom of outdated business models, where many important touch-points are independently run, in many businesses. Of which, many of these touch-points do not connect or even talk to each other, the way customers expect them. Pragmatically, in several cases, they even actually compete or conflict with one another, over the course of the customer journey.

The main reason behind this slow growth for improving customer experience is that businesses are most often viewed as cost centers rather than long-term investments.

However, in the recent times with stellar improvement in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology, AI opens up an unforeseen opportunity for introducing more personalized intelligent and scalable engagements with the customers, to help them solve problems and accomplish tasks, which contributes to improved overall satisfaction for the buyer’s community.

However, for AI to break new grounds and introduce new values, customer support and marketing strategists must step into an innovative approach regarding CX and so consider its impact beyond its novelty. Moreover, this growth of AI in CX cannot be hampered or throttled by existing CX perspectives and processes that abound today’s customer experience analogies.

AI applications in CX

Whether you are a CEO (Chief Experience Officer), CIO, CCO (Chief Customer Officers) or CMO in marketing, IT or service industry, Artificial Intelligence represents a blank slate for ushering improvement and innovations in CX. For, with a mix of right vision and intent, customer experience can thrust businesses into an accelerated path of maturity that can guide any organization with a new purpose, which is based on customer centricity.

Here are some of the ways by which you can apply AI to CX:

Chatbots

Chatbots are virtual agents that can perform intelligent conversation, which can be applied to various customer engagement scenarios. Under their hood, chat bots are just sophisticated computer programs that are  developed to simulate conversations with humans online- and they are a long time in the making.

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg the co-founder and Chairman of Facebook, in partnership with 1800FLOWERS, demonstrated a Chabot application at the F8 development conference. In this demonstration, Mark Zuckerberg used Facebook Messenger to show how a consumer can talk to a virtual agent and order flowers of his/her choice, without leaving the window.

What was unique with this demonstration is that the Chabot was capable of picking up conversational cues to suggest floral arrangements that meet the customer’s personal needs and goals.

Although, other Chabot applications that have hit the market have borne witness to some of the challenges, such as poor design and execution, and a universal emphasis on transactions over experience, but in reality, bots can be truly so much more if we allow our imagination to unlock new possibilities.

Virtual concierge

Whether they are docked in hardware devices or messaging platforms, virtual concierges are bots that are designed for providing personalized services. In certain instances, these bots are partnered with human counterparts to perform the task as a ‘digital-butler’ to aid us in booking travels, buy or find gifts and commodities, coordinate with a human on specific experiences and others.

A recent example of using on-demand virtual concierge in the retail business is Operator, which is developed by Garrett Camp, who is also the co-founder of Uber.

Operator aims to build a new front door to eCommerce by using messaging app.

Another example of using virtual concierge in the travel business is Lola, which is developed by Kayak’s founder Paul English. Lola is a new travel app that personalizes engagements with human thoughts along with AI.

Virtual assistants/attendants

While virtual concierges are designed to aid users in achieving simple-to-complicated tasks, virtual assistants and attendants make use of Artificial Intelligence to help users with commands and questions. Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Echo, Google Now, and Apple Siri are some of the examples of virtual assistants/attendants, among others.

Recently, each of these applications is vying each other to become a platform for its implementation in common devices and appliances, collaborating with the developer communities to help extend the functionalities of these applications in horizontal and vertical planes.

Cognitive computing

Cognitive computing is the simulation of human thought process to augment human engagements. One of the most well-known platforms in this space is IBM’s Watson, the AI platform that is famous for beating-down human contestants on the wildly popular American TV show “Jeopardy”.

Cognitive computing involves self-learning systems to recognize patterns, mine data, process natural language and interact with people in a way that is intelligent, value-added and complementary.

One such example is Softbank’s partnership with IBM, for adding emotional and cognitive intelligence to its line of robots, named “Pepper”. These robots are deployed in financial, retail and hospitality settings for proving an enhanced personal form of engagements to the visiting customers.

In the present times, self-service options are limited to ATMs and kiosks, where the abilities of these platforms are limited to nurturing customer relationship up to transactions. With ongoing researches on cognitive assistance, people will soon be able to have a natural conversation with machines, where their words, gestures, and expressions will be understood by these systems.

Initial applications where AI can improve CX

Although AI pilots can be used for, testing and learning everywhere, in a customer journey mapping exercise- here is a list of where AI applications are implemented today.

  • Personalization
  • Questions/answers
  • Customer self-service
  • Pre-emptive routing
  • Product/service innovation
  • Task performance/management
  • Predictive service/sales
  • Augmented engagement
  • Digital concierge/assistant collaboration

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Takeaway

Today’s customers live in an omnichannel world, where AI provides a means to facilitate up to date and precise responses across all platforms, at any and every point in the customer journey.

This represents a new ground for what is referred to as ‘conversational commerce’. Where as an alternative for resolving disjointed touch points and instances, AI will aid the enterprises to stitch together a more natural and complete customer journey to integrate, improve, and re-imagine customer experience.

Customer engagement is not a cost center, but it is an investment in customer relationship. So whether it is integrating back-end CRM, introducing new touch points; predicting trends, behaviors and expectations successfully, AI implementation needs a new blueprint with imagination and ingenuity, which will not only enhance CX but can improve every aspect of any business in the long run.