On May 23rd, I attended the 2017 Argyle Customer Experience Leadership Forum. The event is on its fifth year and is known for bringing together leading executives to discuss pressing issues that customer experience professionals are facing as they move into 2017.
This year the event had great content especially on creating a seamless experiences across the entire customer journey, including pre-sales, service and technical support interactions. From the event I came up with five steps for creating a seamless experience.
- Don’t Oversell - Although putting your product in the best light is ideal for gaining new customer, if you oversell you risk gaining unhappy customers. By overselling, a customer could be underwhelmed by the product or service later on in their journey. Therefore, it is important to remain consistent with features and branding through the entire journey.
- Make Products/Services Inherently Easy to Use - It is pretty clear that if a product is easy to use, there are going to be less phone calls to support and less irritated customers filling tickets.
- Track Metrics Yourself - Most customer support centers track customer satisfaction through surveys and identify and analyze KPIs such as CSAT. This is great! But, you should also find ways to measure metrics yourself because customers aren’t always telling the truth or may not always understand questions in the survey. For example, find ways to build tracking devices into your product. Instead of asking a customer how much time they spend on the website, find a way to automatically track for this.
- Make it Easy to Get Help - Even when your product is easy to use, there are still going to be customers who need support. Make it easy on your customers to connect with agents. This means providing omnichannel support, so they can use any channel, anywhere, anytime.
- Use Metrics to Create a Plan to Improve Customer Experience - This is the step where a lot of companies fall short. Although they are gathering valuable metrics, they are not properly utilizing them. Always analyze data and make actionable goals and progress based on customer feedback and KPIs.
I think great customer experience isn’t only important in the contact center. It is important to provide seamless end-to-end customer experience through the entire customer journey from the very first interaction to the very last.
