Ask yourself if you have built a culture where your agents are able to provide a personalized customer experience and listen to your Customers with empathy? If the answer is not a clear, ‘Yes’ then it’s high time that you as a Customer Experience specialist build that culture and bring a ‘Wow’ experience to your customers.
At the recently concluded CX Strategy Summit 2017 in Mumbai, our Customer Journey Evangelist discussed how the Customer Experience leaders of today should move beyond KPIs and goals to create ‘Wow CX Memories’. The event comprised a mix of customer experience specialists, people from operations and thought leaders who discussed more on the lines of building empathy for the customers and actively listening to them.
Ameyo chose to present a view from the point of customer, and cited real life examples where brands have successfully been able to provide their customers with Wow experiences. With the advancement in technology and digital platforms successfully able to touch each and every individual, it becomes imperative that we give each customer a personalized touch.
When we asked for some examples where companies have been able to build CX memories, we got names such as American Express, where the agent was able to provide a personalized experience in a very short span of time.
Another example we received was about Fevicol, in which an empowered agent was able to guide the customer to fix furniture, suitably explaining what the product can do.
The Moment of Truth
We as customer experience leaders must realize that great CX memories comes from stories which customers are able to recall for a long time, and stories that get etched in their memory. We shouldn’t forget that at the end of the day, it’s a human at the other end of the interaction and he/she expects that the agent cares about the issues at hand. It is only when someone goes beyond the predefined KPI’s and goals to help customers and thereby, create great CX Memories! Customer experience leaders should focus more on developing such memories rather than just focussing on SLAs.
The primary difference between the current crop of analysts and customer experience leaders are that analysts are hell bent on having a textbook definition for CX memoires. However, if you ask customers to give a definition of a CX memory, everyone will have a different answer. It is only when you proactively act and look for a ‘moment of truth’, that you realize there is no concrete definition for CX memories. Instead, if you can empower your agents and build a culture that will ensure your customers are loyal because of that experience.
No such thing as Siloed
We also met Atamjot Grewal, Chief Patient & Experience Office, Fortis Healthcare, who stressed on why there is an active need to listen to customers actively in the industry. This includes mindful hearing and comprehending the meaning of words spoken by customers in order to capture their expectations, preferences and aversions. To deliver proactive and consistent enhanced customer experience, it is essential that you start with your in-house team. Fortis has ensured that they deliver the same by actively building on the infrastructure for the partiers as well as, for the staff.
The key highlight here is that until you listen to your customers and build on the available pool of data to identify the key project areas, you’ll not be able to enhance customer experience. Another insight is that unless companies can create a culture of listening and proactively reaching out to customers, it will be very difficult for companies to sustain in the business.
Track, Collate & Analyze
Delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort – the work they must do to get their problem solved – does. Stop trying to delight your customers. – Harvard Business Review
The challenge here is not the tracking or measuring but continuously predicting the behaviour of your customer. The best way you can analyze this is by using a Net Promoter Score tool. Satisfaction and loyalty are two different components and companies today need to understand customers’ real reason for staying with the brand. For example, 90% of the satisfied customers are in the car industry, yet only 40% purchase the same brand of car.
Thus, the effort of perfecting the most important journeys for customers can be hard, but companies can give them experiences that make them want to come back by focusing on the task. By building up this process, companies will reap awards in terms of more satisfied customers and employees, higher revenues, lower costs and improved organizational collaboration.
