10 Smart Ways to Improve Customer Experience by Leveraging Technology

Customer experience is everything. So, every business must get it right. Generally, two customer experience paradigms exist for any business – inside-out and outside-in. The inside-out approach where the decisions pertained to the company’s best interest and shareholder value prevailed for a longer time. Here, the focus was not entirely on offering the best to the customer.

With the invasion of social media and digital channels, customers now have ample opportunities to express their opinion and voice their concerns about a product or service. As this impacts the reputation, brands now favor the outside-in approach to view their business through customers’ eyes. Most importantly, in this approach, the focus is not just on the product or service but on the overall customer journey. Organizations that focus on customer experience witness better value creation and shareholder value.

Why do you need to Focus on Customer Experience?

A moderate increase in customer experience (CX) can increase the revenue by $823mn over three years for a company with $1bn revenue, research from Temkin Group says. As per Forbes, 86% of customers pay more for a better customer experience.

Companies implementing a better customer experience strategy reduce customer churn and increase revenues. It looks like a win-win scenario.

Even though customer experience is considered a high priority, organizations often fail to improve customer experience. Customer expectations change rapidly in this digital era. They expect every interaction to be personalized and meet their needs at all touchpoints.

Understanding the customer has become a daunting task for businesses, translating to poor customer experience for many companies. Most customers always prefer that extra mile from the businesses to delight them at multiple touchpoints. The best way to do this is to leverage technology to improve customer experience.

A few Best Ways to Improve Customer Experience

Embrace Communication

The best way to make meaningful conversations with the customers is always to keep them in the loop. Usually, businesses communicate with their customers at the end of the sale or service. So, if a service request gets initiated, the customer always prefers to know the status. They would like to receive alerts at each stage of their service request. If businesses try to leverage automation and improve their communication with customers, it will enhance the customer experience. Automated messages, SMS, and alerts/notifications to improve effective communications with businesses.

Collaboration and Coordination

It is always frustrating to deal with businesses that may not coordinate the information flow between their departments and functions. Technology can improve coordination and collaboration in many ways. Imagine a customer speaking to the service desk for some inquiry and asking about any discount plans if the service rep must go back and get some approvals from his manager or other stakeholders. It would be great if the business enabled seamless coordination with the stakeholders on the go. In other cases, the customer leaves the call clueless and may not return to you for future needs. Enabling internal apps for communications is vital in customer service. Businesses can leverage Power Apps to build internal communication tools in no time and with the needed customization.

Analyze Data for a Positive Customer Experience

Now that the transactions have moved online analyzing customer experience is even more cumbersome. But the technology has moved ahead too. Suppose businesses can gather data at all the touchpoints and multiple interactions. In that case, it gets easier to understand the consumer behavior, needs, and what excites them—analyzing the feedback with NLP and text analytics gives businesses more insights into their interface with customers.

Businesses can capture the experience online too. With AI embedded in the UX, companies can understand what their customers do and how they do it. Though this approach looks costly, it effectively understands the bottlenecks in the customer journey.

Enable Self-service for customers

Businesses must address customer requests in a fast-paced environment in this vast information world. Customers may not prefer to wait to seek information related to the product or service. Enabling self-service for all information requests not only reduces the costs but also improves customer experience. You can allow self-service in many ways – leverage Power Apps for internal communication portals, conversational AI to answer queries, and advanced text analytics tools to automatically redirect the customer when needed. Customers can access the information at any time according to their convenience.

24/7 Customer Support

Helpdesk for limited hours is outdated. But with the pandemic, customers prefer to seek customer support anytime. Businesses may not have an option to leverage conversational AI and automation to address the queries. Do you think companies have an opportunity to stay offline? No. Managing the customer needs and staying vigilant is vital for improving the customer experience.

Personalization

Customer 360-degree analysis, customer lifetime value analysis, and customer persona help businesses to dive deep into more details about the customer. Why do companies need this? Amazon improves its revenue significantly by providing personalized product recommendations to shoppers. 81% of customers now prefer that the brand understand them better and know when to contact them. Customers do not want to be overwhelmed with marketing promotions. Customers in the digital era prefer customized interactions.

Break down silos

Organizations need to break their data silos not only to understand the customer but to reapply the knowledge when the need arises. Companies should focus on relooking the existing information data before analyzing new data for a more impactful customer experience. Breaking down the internal silos with centralized data lake architecture adds an advantage.

Omni present in all channels

As customers now prefer to interact online, via social media, email, phone, and in-person for multiple needs, businesses need to capture the customer journey through all these channels. It will only help to improve customer experience if companies gather all the information through these channels.

Transform to ‘Customer Intelligent’

Technology is evolving rapidly, and so are business needs. Organizations are reshaping themselves to become customer-centric rather than product-centric. Technology, especially from a user-data perspective, enables businesses to become ‘customer intelligent’ to improve customer experience.

Empower Employee Experience

Why do you need to empower employees? Employees are always the frontliners to address inquiries or serve the customers better. They play an essential role in communicating customer expectations through your business functions. Only valued employees provide better customer service and cross that extra mile to cater to customer needs. A disengaged employee impacts the customer experience too. Hence, it is critical to utilize internal employee engagement tools to improve their communications and experience.

Are you looking to enhance customer experience? Our experts can help you with multiple needs like conversational AI, NLP, low-code development, and data management. Contact us for more information.