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July 6, 2023
Nowadays, it’s all about customer experience. It is that final piece of the jigsaw puzzle that drives people to make buying decisions. For 32% of customers, even a single case of poor experience is enough to abandon a business.
If you have the same product as your competitors – or even slightly better – but fail to create outstanding experiences, that may tip the scales, and not in your favor. This is why everyone is now after ways of building unique and amazing CX to attract and retain customers through various customer experience programs that, unfortunately, do not work in 100% of cases.
The evolution of technology is opening new customer communication channels and creating new touchpoints between businesses and their audiences. With all their obvious benefits, multiple channels need coordination and synchronization, otherwise, they might turn into chaos. This is what connected customer experience is about.
Today’s customers seek omnichannel experiences and expect businesses to offer them. They no longer shop through a single contact with a business – in fact, on average, it takes as many as eight touchpoints to close a sale. This journey includes both online and offline contacts – ads, marketing emails, demos, presentations, customer reviews, and other channels where customers can research a product. Over 60% of people shop this way, and this trend is ascending.
In a connected customer experience, all touch points are synchronized and coordinated, thus forming a unified environment that allows sharing data between channels and departments and prevents silos. As a result, customers view the business as a single ecosystem with a common mission and a single voice. By creating a connected CX, a company increases trust and loyalty and maintains high customer service standards.
With a connected CX, companies can expect multiple benefits, both short- and long-term.
When dealing with a business, customers want their experience to be consistent. They don’t want to communicate with half a dozen different departments and teams in different ways. Rather, they expect a unified approach from everyone they meet on their journey.
By connecting all customer-facing departments and services in a single “organism”, a business gives them a common voice and a set of common values. This way, customers never receive conflicting or confusing information and are not forced to start from the beginning whenever they meet a new representative or land on a different resource. As a result, customers engage with your company and therefore consider your products as an option.
Connected infrastructures offer virtually endless personalization options. Whenever customers interact with a business, they share their personal information in a certain way.
However, the information they share in a personal conversation, through a click on an ad, and in a social network may be different. When stitched together, these pieces of customer data form a bigger picture of what they are and what they need from the brand.
Using such deep and comprehensive data, the company can design detailed user personas and apply more precise targeting in its activities. Of course, this requires full data sharing and integration between all services and departments, so that everyone has access to the most up-to-date information and can contribute to common databases.
Trust is gaining weight in the relations between businesses and customers. 88% of them find trust an important component, which means it can become a pivotal factor in a shopping decision.
Connected experiences play a significant role in building customer trust. They help to create the authenticity and transparency that people seek in their interactions with brands. When all communication channels represent a single source of truth and speak in a unified voice, the customer is assured that they will be treated the same way upon every contact.
However, to build and maintain trust, it is important not only to deliver the same message across all channels but also to show that customers’ data is protected and respected at every touch point. When you protect their right to digital privacy, people will be more willing to share their information and engage in transactions with the business.
Building a connected customer experience means creating a smart infrastructure for all service channels and customer touchpoints. Wherever a contact occurs – in a live chat, via a support ticket, through a call to the hotline, or in social media – the responding agent has access to the same business and customer data and can deliver seamless service with minimum friction. Of course, it requires introducing aligned rules of customer service etiquette for all communication channels to make sure the company’s distinct identity is always maintained.
Moreover, when the connected CX includes self-service resources – as it certainly should in the SaaS environment – customers receive the same level of support quality when browsing your FAQs or knowledge base, too. A professionally built help center containing useful up-to-date information becomes a valuable contribution to the creation of superb SaaS experiences.
A siloed infrastructure always loses to an integrated one. When the sales, marketing, production, and support teams use a common platform with a shared database and knowledge base, all of them have the maximum information they require to do their everyday tasks.
In this context, focusing on a connected customer experience can have a rather positive “side-effect” in the form of raising the productivity of your teams. All the relevant details and updates get into the system within the shortest time possible with all colleagues having immediate access to them. Cases and requests can be reassigned and escalated seamlessly without sending customers between teams. When you automate business communication, you help your support teams become more productive. As a result, cases can be resolved quicker with fewer interactions, thus improving overall productivity.
Connected experiences reduce friction and shorten the customer’s journey to the absolutely necessary minimum. This allows using the company’s resources – both human and material – in the most efficient way, thus lowering service costs.
With an integrated customer service infrastructure, you can, for example, reduce the number and duration of phone calls, which is a direct cost-saving measure. Quicker case resolutions mean that an agent can handle more cases in a shift, which may allow for decreasing the size of your support team or minimizing overtime. While it may seem trifling, on a company scale, such savings can be significant at the end of the day.
Each customer touchpoint yields data that can turn into valuable insights for the business. In a system focused on connected CX, the sum of such data is often greater than its parts, as it allows understanding the customer better and aligning the business processes for the best results.
Connected experiences enable much deeper insights, as they are based on the data gathered from the entire company rather than individual teams or subdivisions that produce data of a much narrower scope. The collected information can be consolidated and analyzed together to empower customer-facing teams with knowledge that allows them to make informed decisions.
Now that we’ve seen how connected customer experiences can enhance and improve the performance of your business, the logical question is “How to achieve them?”
Before building a connected CX, you need to understand what it is going to be like. For that, you need to take a closer look at both your company and your target audience. Pay attention to the following:
Answers to these questions will become a foundation on which you will build connected experiences. During this analysis, you will be able to shape your unique offering, evaluate your targeting, and even find gaps in your marketing strategies, if any.
In building a connected CX, the biggest challenge is to unify and interpret the data that you obtain. When isolated and raw, data does not paint a complete picture of the existing customer experience and provides limited help in improving it.
However, when data is consolidated and analyzed, it turns into customer intelligence and contributes to optimizing business flows and delivering truly connected experiences. For that purpose, data experts should participate in the CX design to help tailor it to the needs of both the business and its audience.
Integrated information is based on integrated tools and technologies. Many businesses still use legacy systems that consist of individual tools that integrate poorly. As a result, the company accumulates huge masses of data that cannot be properly unified and interpreted.
Instead, try to implement advanced multi-functional CRM systems that join different features on a single platform. Such systems host customer databases, support omni-channel communication and marketing activities, and provide powerful analytical options to sort out the data gathered in the process.
Of course, nobody takes all these pains of consolidating data and creating connected experiences just for the sake of it. The results of your research and analysis give enormous learning and improvement opportunities, so use them.
Your customer service data can help you pinpoint where the experiences you deliver are not exactly top-notch and the cohesion is still not complete. Use this knowledge to tweak your business flows to create truly connected customer experiences.
On the other hand, you may find not only flaws in your processes but also your strongest points. Enhance them and try to make them your competitive advantage.
Through integrating customer connection channels, you not only bring your audience what they want but also make the life of your business much easier. The end result? Customers are happy, your teams are happy and, most importantly, your revenue accounts might be happy, too!
Read More: Connected Experiences: Executive's Guide to Delivering Business Results With Data and Technology
Blog Author
Evelina Carillo, writer and blogger, has more than 10 years of experience in creating various content assets in the marketing and business field, as well as 5 years of experience at EdTech.
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