20 quick wins to enhance your customer experience
Customer experience (CX) remains the biggest differentiator in business in 2020. The good news is that there are many quick wins to make your customers’ experience “juicier” and more satisfying than ever before. Some of our tips are so simple and obvious you’ll be kicking yourself you’re not doing them already.
- Ask customers for feedback, listen to it and action it.
- Thank customers for feedback.
- Apologise for “stuff-ups” – sorry is one of the most powerful words in the English language.
- Respond to complaints quickly. When a customer is angry, bear in mind that if they don’t receive a quick response to their complaint via one channel, they’ll hop to the next channel, and the next and the next, creating multiple contacts for what could have been a single interaction.
- Avoid jargon and use “plain English” in your customer communications.
- Treat your customers as human beings and individuals.
- Give your frontline access to a knowledge management system to they can provide efficient customer service.
- Learn best practices from your peers – get involved in industry associations (such as NORA for the retail industry, or Auscontact for the contact centre industry,).
- Offer your customers round-the-clock service by cost-effectively routing calls to an outsourcer after-hours. Find an after-hours contact centre outsourcing company, with experience in your industry or category.
- Include bilingual skills in your recruitment strategy – around 30% of people in Sydney and Melbourne speak a language other than English at home.
- Upskill your sales & service teams to manage customer conversations via web chat and social media.
- Conduct an annual health check of your contact centre by engaging an independent consultant for 2-3 weeks.
- Manage your workforce efficiently with workforce management software.
- Plan for the unplanned: have a Business Continuity Plan in place to minimise impact to customers in case of a disaster, such as a fire, pandemic or bomb scare. The Coronavirus shows just how unprepared even the biggest companies and government agencies are.
- Make sure your employees are engaged, as frontline employee engagement directly correlates to customer engagement.
- Don’t be afraid to change third party suppliers if their performance is negatively impacting your customer experience.
- Show call centre wait times on your website to set customer expectations and offer alternatives for faster service.
- Regularly review your IVR menus and update to optimise the customer experience. And if you need a fresh pair of eyes or don’t have the internal resources for it, source an expert IVR design consultant.
- Make your on-hold announcements engaging and timely. Don’t send callers to sleep with automaton messages.
- Embrace the power of personalised videos to bring to life boring bills, statements, onboarding or email campaigns.
Last updated on: February 15, 2023