How to Improve Customer Satisfaction

Knowledge is at the root of great customer experience, and you've had this in your own experience as a consumer. You have called a company. You've gotten a very pleasant person on the phone, and yet they're unable to answer your questions. That frustration comes from a lack of knowledge at the front lines of the business.

This knowledge foundation is a repository of all the information your customers are seeking and your frontline employees require. It includes static information about company policy. It includes inventory data order, history, information that's one click away, either on the Web, through email or in the context center.

You do this by implementing methodologies like web self service and voice self service forums that help people get answers from other customers and have actually helped create your own experience.

Web self service and these forms of self service can often eliminate 50 to 70% of the manual enquiries that need to be responded to by your context center. So not only does it improve customer experience by providing immediate answers to your consumers, it also significantly reduces your operating costs.

They need single click access to your contact center for all of the multi channel service they're delivering to immediately answer customers questions. This not only improves the customer experience but reduces your costs as well because there's fewer transfers around the organization.

The reality is offering consumers one choice is no longer sufficient. Just operate your contact center during business hours. Consumers want to chat with you. They want to send an email, they want to call on the phone, and you need to provide these options in a consistent way. So, you need to improve your accounts receivable process.

One of the challenges many organizations face is that they've implemented multiple channels as separate silos. In a coordinated effort, you can deliver service in a consistent way across these channels.

The reality is, there's no way to deliver exceptional customer experience if you don't know what your customers are thinking. You can do this with feedback management capabilities so that you could actually survey customers at the moment of truth and then provide real time intervention.

Studies have shown that typically a customer who has had a problem and then you've corrected is happier and more loyal than a customer who has never had a problem in the first place.

So, implement a real time feedback mechanism at the conclusion of each significant interaction that could be at the end of a call or the end of an email interaction.

And then, if customers are not happy with the outcome, the workflow embedded in the system can quickly escalate that issue, and a supervisor or a manager could intervene to correct it rather than letting that customer become bitter and go off to the competition.

You've had the experience when you've dealt with a company. You may have called sales department and then spoken to the service department, and the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.

You should have a capability called the customer experience designer that allows you to define customer interactions across departments so they're seamless, and you avoid that confusion and frustration that your customers see.

Everything you've done up until now has dealt with inbound communications. But it's very important in serving your constituents to understand, based on where they are in the life cycle cycle, to proactively communicate so that you can provide more services to them or actually shift to more of a preventative service model.

It's more and more difficult today to compete based on product features. It's impossible to compete on price and be profitable. The only lasting differentiation and sustainable differentiator for any business in any industry is the quality of the customer experience.