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Erik Smith: Top Customer Experience Trends to Watch in 2023

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Contact centre leaders who want to improve the way their teams engage with customers this year should keep one critical objective front and centre.

According to RingCentral’s latest State of Customer Experience Technology report, contact centre leaders who want to improve the way their teams engage with customers in the coming year should keep one critical business objective front and centre.

“Customer satisfaction is still the most important objective leaders should focus on,” said Erik Smith, Digital Principal, RingCentral. “If you want to retain customers and attract new ones, you must get this right. It’s easy to get caught up in cost savings and the latest artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, but always look to evolve your contact centre through the lens of providing great customer service.”

RingCentral is a provider of cloud-based communication solutions based in Belmont, California and a sponsor of Simpler Media Group’s virtual Digital Experience Summit (DXS). During the conference, Smith presented the session, “Top Digital CX Technology Trends Heading Into 2023.” Here, he shares with us some of the most important ideas uncovered in the report and how contact centre leaders can use these findings to enhance the support experiences they provide to their customers.

Tech Spend and Channel Preferences in the Contact Centre

CMSWire: During your presentation, you discussed findings from your State of Customer Experience Technology report. Where are contact centre leaders investing their technology spend in the coming year?

Erik Smith: We’re seeing an increasing trend towards conversational AI and other self-service functionality in order to meet changing customer communication preferences, and in some cases, find more economic ways to handle inbound contact centre volume. We’re facing lots of uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment, and that can be worrisome. Choosing your new technology tools wisely and through the lens of enhancing customer service can help alleviate some of that worry.

CMSWire: Which digital channels are people engaging in most for their support needs?

Smith: It largely depends on the industry, but the original three — chat, email and SMS — remain prevalent, followed by direct messaging channels on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We’ve been encouraging companies to look into Apple Business Chat (now Apple Messaging for Business) and WhatsApp, even for domestic use cases, and finding that many don’t yet understand how easy these channels make communication for their own customer base, which should be the goal.

Why Omnichannel Support Is Key

CMSWire: As customers continue to raise their expectations, offering support across channels has become table stakes. How many organizations are still failing to meet these expectations for omnichannel support?

Smith: There’s still a wide spectrum of omnichannel maturity in most industries, with tech leading the way in digital communication options for their customers. Companies that are feeling pressure to improve should seek to understand the benefits of the various digital channels and how to properly deploy them — not just jump into the deep end with no plan. That can backfire quickly.

CMSWire: What are the biggest challenges organizations face when providing support through email, chat, voice and other channels, and how can they overcome them?

Smith: There are a few tricks to perfecting a strong omnichannel approach. The first is ensuring that your agents have the right skills for adding new digital channels. Communicating on Twitter is quite a bit different than answering the phone, with different consequences for making an error.

 

 

The second is providing smart self-service options for easy-to-answer questions so your agents are free to handle the higher priority, and often more challenging, issues. The sooner you can connect a frustrated customer to an agent with the correct answer, the better chance for resolution, and for retaining them as a customer. And finally, provide your agents with the tools necessary to serve your customers competently while providing coaching for continuous improvement.

CMSWire: During your presentation, you discussed how more organizations are investing in AI, yet it hasn’t been consistently implemented in the contact center. How can AI be used most effectively, and what can organizations do to ensure they successfully incorporate these capabilities into their systems and processes?

Smith: As individual customers, we’ve all had frustrating experiences with bots, whether on a website or in an interactive voice response (IVR) system. There are many pitfalls to nailing this strategy. Once you’ve had a bad experience, either as a customer or as someone trying to implement AI, you’re less likely to try again. It’s just human nature.

Fortunately, the tech is improving and there isn’t much you can’t automate these days. We often recommend starting small with the easiest automation options—such as FAQs, password reset, and even appointment scheduling — and really nailing that. Once you have it completely dialed in and you’re comfortable with the technology, then seek to expand to more complex options.

Start and End with Your Customer

CMSWire: What does workforce engagement management (WEM) mean to you, and what are the benefits of implementing this approach?  

Smith: To us, WEM is all about continuous improvement, both in the tools we give our agents and teams to self-improve, as well as the management tools to analyse, diagnose, and coach those agents and teams. You should be asking questions like: How do we optimize? How do we improve at the individual level so our entire organization gets better? What can we learn from our customer feedback that we can scale to improve our company? There’s so much valuable data that comes through the contact center, and we want to capitalize on those insights.

CMSWire: What are the top recommendations contact center leaders should take away from this report to help them more effectively engage with customers across channels?

Smith: I’m going to end where I started — with the customer. Isn’t that why we’re all here? How do we get customers, keep them happy, and retain them for life? Same thing we’ve been doing forever, just now through different mediums. The more you spend time learning the nuances of each channel or technology, the more comfortable you’ll be applying the same timeless best practices of customer service.

 

By CMSWIRE STUDIO

The CMSWire STUDIO team transforms clients’ data, concepts and thought leadership into accessible and engaging articles that appeal to the broader CMSWire audience and are optimized for findability. These works are created independently of CMSWire’s editorial operations.

Sourced from CMSWIRE

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Where is Your CX Leaking Loyalty?

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By Greg Tucker.

Surprisingly few companies track the brand loyalty leakage throughout their customer’s experience to learn where loyalty is “won and lost”.

With over $600 Billion spent on advertising to create brand awareness, drive prospect conversion and build customer loyalty, surprisingly few companies track the brand loyalty leakage throughout their customer’s experience with them to learn where loyalty is “won and lost”.

Our customer journey research efforts with global brands covers four key aspects of the “Path to Purchase”:

  1. Marketing / Prospect Leakage – Turning unaware prospects into buyers and minimizing the “leakage” of prospects from the “Awareness-to-purchase” stage
  2. Sales / Revenue Leakage – Ensuring that customers can spend the full amount of their purchase intention during the sales & renewal journey, and that “Revenue leakage” throughout the customer lifecycle is minimized
  3. Customer Retention / Customer Leakage – Ensuring that customers receive the positive experience that will keep them coming back year after year and renewing their purchases with the company and brand. Especially important in B2B contractual customer relationships.
  4. Customer Satisfaction / Loyalty Leakage – Ensuring that customers receive the “on-brand” experience that results in high satisfaction/NPS scores that drives and sustains positive word-of-mouth” marketing.

Customer Satisfaction / Loyalty Leakage

Our customer journey research for existing customers is designed to answer these questions:
• For a customer starting their relationship with us, what is the “typical experience” they receive from start to finish? What is an “on-brand customer experience”?
• What differentiates the “on-brand experience” and the “typical experience” (or the “off-brand experience”)? What differentiates our experience with the leading competitor’s experience?
• What is the impact of our experience on our customer loyalty metric? What could our full potential of brand loyalty look like if we delivered the “most impactful, on-brand experience”?
• What can be done to improve the customer’s experience, the impact on loyalty and on business results? What improvements have the highest impact?

A popular restaurant company asked us these questions and asked us to identify the “Existing Customer Experience” and where it didn’t meet their expectations. Over 25 factors needed to be assessed as part of the experience – food, service, wait times, price, cleanliness, power & Wi-Fi, rewards programs, specials, etc. Several customer segments needed to be engaged across different restaurant formats and across multiple day-parts (breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner and late-night snack).

Through qualitative, quantitative, ethnographic, biometric and eye-tracking research, it became clear that the current customer experience was solid, but not stellar. And customer loyalty scores trailed the leading competitor by a wide margin.

The insights that emerged included:
• There were 8 stages of the customer experience journey – and 20 friction points were encountered along the journey – well-known to the restaurant employees – but not prioritized or proactively managed on a systematic basis
• Many of the 25+ factors that were studied had little impact on the customer experience. They weren’t relevant to being “on-brand”.
• There were 4 “moments of truth” along the journey that defined the overall experience. Getting these 4 things right resulted in an outstanding “on-brand experience” – getting them wrong resulted in an “off-brand experience”. 90 points of customer loyalty (NPS) were “leaking” out of the customer journey through a failure to proactively manage these 4 moments of truth.

Linking these insights to business results allowed us to model and quantify the following:
• Focusing on delivering an “on-brand experience” in the 4 key areas (out of 25+ potential areas) of the customer experience results in an industry-leading customer loyalty result, with a measurable and immediate NPS improvement.
• This impact had a 30% improvement in customer lifecycle revenue, based on visit frequency, increased spending per visit.
• Improving the experience would allow the company to expand its customer base within the family members and their friends, making new customer growth faster and less expensive.

By Greg Tucker

Greg Tucker is a Who’s who of Customer Experience and award-winning CX practitioner, advisor and leader for more than 15 years. As CEO of Tucker & Company he consults to Fortune 1000 enterprises and emerging companies on Customer Experience strategies and programs, delivering transformational business results. As a CX Officer and CMO at Copart Auto Auctions, he implemented an end-to-end CX program across all channels that delivered a 20% improvement in Enterprise profitability and received the 2012 CX Innovation Award for delivering a powerful ROI from the CX Program.

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When Your Startup Should Pivot (and When it Shouldn’t)

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“Pivot” may be the one word that entrepreneurs and the television show “Friends” have in common. In either case, you hear it all the time. But a pivot isn’t always the best choice for your startup. How can you tell?

pivot

I’m going to share with you how to know when your startup should pivot. I’ll touch on the battles I went through with my own company when deciding whether or not to pivot, and cover:

  • What is a pivot?
  • What are signs telling you to pivot?
  • What other options do you have instead of a pivot?

What is a pivot?

A “pivot” is a massive change in what you do as a business

Instagram is a great example.

The company started off as Burbn, a social check-in app. Over time, its founders saw that their users didn’t care much about telling friends where they went – but they did constantly share photos of those places and what they did there. So Burbn pivoted to focus on that one feature (social image sharing) and rebranded as Instagram.

But you don’t have to rebrand to pivot. Take Text Request, for example.

We’re an online business text messaging software (SaaS). We started as a customer service tool for the hospitality industry. We thought, “If I’m a customer, I’d much rather text your business than call for help.”

But texting for customer service was not a big need for these particular businesses at the time, so the sales process was difficult and lengthy. What we found, though, was that other types of businesses really needed a texting solution to make sales and schedule appointments.

So we made a pivot. We went from a customer service tool for hospitality to a sales and marketing tool for home service businesses. We changed our product to meet the needs of home service businesses. We changed our messaging, and our sales and marketing strategies.

That’s the only pivot we’ve made, but we’ve since done a lot of refining.

“Refining” is changing how you do something as a business

You can refine your sales strategy, your product design or feature offerings, how you target your market, and more, but it doesn’t change the direction of your business.

A pivot changes direction, while a refinement improves how you get there.Is a pivot right for your startup?

Your startup is constantly looking for traction. You’re looking for a target market, product, channel, etc. to start performing well.

An indicator of if and when your startup should pivot is when you’ve given the above segments time and effort to work, and you’re seeing no traction from any of them. That can tell you:

  • You have a product people don’t want
  • You’re targeting the wrong people
  • Or that you’re using the wrong avenue to find customers

Myth #1

Slow growth does not mean you should pivot. We often hear new startups saying they’ll get to a half million in sales and be profitable in year one, or something similarly bold. That’s probably not going to happen.

The average successful startup begins seeing exponential growth around year four. Until then, most are stair-stepping their way to growth. And in most cases, this is also a good and sustainable path.

If you know you can reliably get customers doing XYZ, you probably do not need to pivot. You should keep doing what you’re doing, and work toward more effective ways of doing XYZ. In that case, you’re in a good place to refine.

Myth #2

I often hear new entrepreneurs say something to the effect of, “I just need to get this product in front of more people for them to see how great it is.”

There’s a lot wrong with this mentality, but the main issue is that it normally leads founders to think a pivot is necessary. They’ll spend a ton of money on trade shows, press releases, or advertising, get nothing in return, and then decide they have to pivot to survive.

But that’s not necessary. What is necessary is working slowly with one customer to give them the product and experience they need to make their life better. Then, do that with another customer in the same market. Then again.

It’s a slow process in the beginning, but it consistently builds startups into sustainable and profitable businesses.What should my startup do instead of pivoting?

“Pivot” is not a bad word. It can be a helpful choice that leads to a very successful business. But too many startups are often pivot-happy. They try something for a few months, see no results, change everything, and repeat.

In any case, these massive and constant changes can be bad for business. If this sounds like you, take a step back and hone in on the goal of your business, as well as your target audience. Who do you serve? Why and how do you serve them?

Instead of pivoting multiple times, look to refine. Startups often know who their target customer is, they just don’t know how to sell to them. So try different methods, such as:

  • If email blast marketing isn’t working, try emailing individual targets
  • If networking events aren’t yielding, try one-on-one meetings
  • If your website isn’t bringing in targeted traffic, change up your message and content approach
  • If there’s interest but nobody’s buying, target different positions within an organization
  • If customers don’t use some of your features, ask them what would be most helpful

Examples like these are limitless. The main point underscoring all of them is that something in your business has to remain constant for you find footing and grow.

Multiple pivots keep you from grounding who you are and what you do. Once you find your base (i.e. your target market, ideal use case, etc.), you should no longer consider pivoting at all. Any change thereafter should be refining a process or strategy.

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Sourced from StartupNatNation

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Could Social Media Be The Ultimate Customer Service Channel?

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Could social media be realising its true calling as the ultimate customer service channel?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

According to a new study released today, overall satisfaction is highest when customers ask questions or make requests via social media.

The study was conducted by J.D. Power, surveying people who were customers of mobile network operators. Said Peter Cunningham at J.D. Power, “Personalised feedback, rapid-fire response time and interaction with live humans are some of the primary factors driving the highest levels of customer satisfaction with customer service. And, increasingly, customers appear to be finding that formula through alternative channels such as social media. That doesn’t mean call centres and brick-and-mortar stores are no longer relevant; in fact, personalised assistance via phone, app and face-to-face are still critical to customer satisfaction.”

Following are key findings of the 2018 studies:

• Social channels will become front line for customer service

Among customers who ask a question or make a request, overall satisfaction is highest in the social media channel (838 on a 1,000-point scale) and the app channel (835). By contrast, overall satisfaction scores average just 797 among customers who handle these requests on the phone with a representative.

• The human touch still matters

Satisfaction tends to be much higher when customers use a channel that provides personalised feedback. For example, assisted care satisfaction is 26 points higher than unassisted care satisfaction (819 vs. 793, respectively), and satisfaction is 824 among customers who ask their question in the store channel vs. 797 among those who speak with a rep over the phone. Additionally, among customers who ask a question or make a request through their carrier’s app, overall satisfaction is 845 when they think they are interacting with an actual person vs. 800 when they think the system is automated.

• Video plays a key role

The channels with the highest first-contact resolution incidences are online videos (92%) and mobile app to research information (90%). Among customers who view an online video from their service provider, 34% say they “definitely will not” switch to a new carrier in the next 12 months vs. 21% among those who use the phone automated response system.

• Not-so-immediate gratification via email

While social, app-based and face-to-face customer support are prized by consumers for their personalised, rapid response, the average customer service response time via email is 32 hours.

Could Social Media Be The Ultimate Customer Service Channel? Soon, perhaps, it may be the ONLY service channel.

 

 

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Can Apps Made Specifically for Your Company Increase Customer Satisfaction?

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They sure can, and customers will be more willing to share their positive experiences on social media.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers.

Mobile apps are becoming as important to customers as the product itself. A study of apps developed specifically for separate and competing hotels has shown just how much customer satisfaction increases when they are used… as long as you can convince the customers to download the app in the first place. In fact, mobile apps for hotels are becoming as central to the hotel guest experience as soft pillows, extra towels and a competitive price.

So what do hotels have a problem with? Guests booking rooms online using an external online travel agency. Why? Because securing a room with an online travel agency is associated with lower satisfaction. The industry is currently emphasising direct booking, where a hotel guest rents a room directly through the hotel rather than another way. Pushing for more guests to become rewards members will likely enhance this effort. While external agencies remain popular among many guests, there are some disadvantages to their use, such as the need to deal with a third party if problems arise with a reservation.

“As mobile usage becomes increasingly ubiquitous for guests, the challenge for hotels becomes twofold: First, they must persuade guests to book directly with them, and second, they must encourage easy utilisation of this technology,” said Rick Garlick at J.D. Power, the data analytics company that published the study. “By forging direct relationships, hotels can become guardians of the guest experience, but at the centre of these relationships is an establishment’s mobile strategy.”

The study, now in its 21st year, measures overall guest satisfaction across eight hotel segments: luxury; upper upscale; upscale; upper midscale; midscale; economy; upper extended stay; and extended stay.

Following are key findings of the 2017 study:

• Direct booking: When guests book through an independent travel website or mobile app (e.g., Expedia, Travelocity) instead of directly with the hotel, they are more likely to experience a problem and to be less satisfied with their stay.
• Membership matters: Hotel rewards members are far more likely to book directly with a hotel or on a loyalty member site than those who are not members (75% vs. 47%, respectively), and their satisfaction is higher. The number of those who book through OTAs is increasing (19% in 2017 vs. 16% in 2013), despite the concerns some guests have ranging from earning hotel rewards to strict cancellation policies.
• Mobile mania: In 2014, 14% of online reservations were made using mobile means (smartphone or tablet), and now that percentage is 25%. Those utilising mobile reservations are more likely to be younger or business travellers.
• Not so mobile mania: Among guests who have a hotel’s app on their mobile device, 38% don’t use it during their stay. Only a tiny percentage of check-ins (4%) and check-outs (1%) occurs through mobile apps, but when it is used, it is associated with higher guest satisfaction.
• Get ’em to try the app: Guests who download and use a hotel’s mobile app are more satisfied and have greater loyalty to that brand. While only 19% of all guests have downloaded a hotel app, 70% of rewards members have done so.
• Social media surprise: Despite the perception that people posting to social media only do so to complain, guests describing their experience via these channels appear to be more satisfied overall. At the same time, those who do experience a problem are extremely likely to post to social media (86%).
• Reading is fundamental: Slightly more than half (52%) of guests have read a review of a hotel, industry news or an online forum in the past month, and 46% of those guests wrote a review in the past six months. Review readers and writers are also more likely to have higher guest satisfaction.

While this study applies to the hotel industry, there are general ideas that can be adapted to any industry. The point is that if you maintain control your customer experence, and use a bespoke app to do that, it can be hugely advantageous. Is it time that you developed an app for your own customers?

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