Despite its name, traditional customer service is company-focused rather than customer-focused. Over the course of history, customer service has often been viewed as a necessary cost of doing business with little regard for how long a customer had to wait on the phone for assistance (while listening to an endless loop of recorded messages or mind-numbingly bad elevator music) than how much each interaction cost the firm.
Progressive companies embrace customer experience over customer service. They want each customer’s interaction with their organization to be a positive one that keeps them coming back for more and sharing their delight with friends and family.
Here are five ways your company can transition from customer service and deliver customer experience:
1. Understand the current experience
To change your focus and deliver customer experience, start by examining every touchpoint your customers have with your company. What is it really like for them to interact with your company today? Make it easy for customers to provide honest feedback.
2. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes
When designing the updated experience, understand what your customer needs. What are they trying to accomplish? What’s currently more difficult than it should be? Let obvious pain points, empathy, and a deep understanding of the current experience guide the identification and prioritization of improvements that let you deliver customer experience.
3. Be consistent
Ensure that every interaction your customers have with your company fully aligns with your brand promise and is as painless as possible for them. Companies who design the buyer’s journey with reliable high-quality consistency deliver customer experience.
4. Leverage technology
Customers increasingly expect to receive outstanding support across multiple channels, like phone, chat, SMS, social media, and other channels of communication. So one important way to deliver customer experience is by offering omnichannel customer service. This allows customers to get assistance from your business across multiple channels, receive a consistent experience in each channel, and be able to move seamlessly across channels during their customer journey.
5. Never stop improving
To continue to deliver customer experience, your company must regularly review, refine, and improve it going forward. One way to do this is by establishing a customer experience management (CEM) program. Savvy businesses recognize the value of delivering an exceptional customer experience, which can lead to higher revenue and loyalty, and lower churn.
How NICE can help you deliver customer experience.
As customers continue to embrace digital channels, establishing an outstanding omnichannel customer experience can be a competitive differentiator. NICE My Agent eXperience - MAX is a digital-first, omnichannel agent interface designed for the streamlined handling of contact center interactions. Learn more about how NICE can help you deliver world-class customer experience at your organization and drive differentiation in the marketplace.
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Any digital channel
Your customers are trying to reach you for service on digital channels – even if you’re not there yet. How many SMS text messages go to your call center phone number with no response? Who’s trying to find you on Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp and not finding you? Now with CXone it is easy to provide digital-first omnichannel service in all the channels your customers expect.
Personalized digital interactions: deliver native experiences in each of 30+ messaging channels, such as rich media, emojis, and other collaboration tools.
Simple to Activate: pre-integrated channels make it easy to offer to customers and agents.
Easy to Say “Yes”: simple packaging removes barriers to offering all channels to customers and agents.
Empowered agents
CXone empowers all your agents to deliver a true digital-first omnichannel customer experience by simultaneously combining all customer interactions in one intelligent inbox across multiple digital channels and voice for agents to select ("pull"), while dynamically prioritizing the most time-sensitive or real-time interactions according to service levels ("push"). All delivered in a single application – complete with full customer context, journey history, and sentiment.
Single Interface: one inbox for all digital messaging and real-time (voice/chat) channels – retaining native experience of each messaging platform.
Agents in Control: ‘pulling’ work in natural flow, while dynamic prioritization maintains SLAs – and prevents ‘cherry picking’.
Customer Card: full customer context, journey and conversation history, plus sentiment.
Holistic management
With CXone, omnichannel interactions are managed holistically, from agents to supervisors and beyond. Integrated workforce optimization, analytics, automation and artificial intelligence across digital and voice interactions ensure complete management across contact center operations.
