10 New Year Resolutions to Improve Customer Experience in 2023

7 min

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Darshan Shah

December 22, 2022

86% of consumers and 91% of corporate buyers agreed that a company's experience matters just as much as its goods and services. It is great to strive for excellence in customer experience (CX), but merely wanting it is insufficient. You must commit to a well-planned course of action to accomplish your CX objectives. If you desire to achieve big CX goals, New Year's resolutions can be helpful.

Let's make CX-related New Year's resolutions as 2023 begins. These might serve as conversation starters as you create CX objectives for your company for 2023.

1. Develop Empathy

According to Salesforce, 73% of customers hope businesses understand their unique needs and expectations.

To be empathetic towards your customers in 2023, you must gain a profound and thorough grasp of your customers' needs and wants. For that, your CX team should take the following measures:

Utilizing AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics, delve deeper into customer insights.
Be aware of conducting surveys and asking for customer feedback.
Use observational research techniques, semantic analysis, and fast prototyping to discover unspoken or unfelt attitudes and feelings.

Customers often need to learn what they need, and they might not always express what they mean when they say it. So, you must proactively comprehend them and foresee their needs — before they even realize them.

2. Personalize. Personalize. Personalize

Companies that successfully implement personalization can boost their earnings by 40%. After all, 78% of customers assert they are more likely to make repeat purchases from brands that personalize their experiences.

These days, we are surrounded by tremendous personalization, from Spotify to Netflix and Amazon. Customers now anticipate the same amount of personalization from firms of all sizes. Therefore, investing in personalization CX initiatives in 2023 to foster relationships and produce better experiences can pay off brands with significant benefits.

Your CX initiatives can be directly observed through in-store and online performance. You can consider the following actions to deliver a personalized experience to your customers:

Check point-of-sale (POS) data for discount codes and other information.
Your store employees should be made aware of recurring consumers to enable stores to understand their needs better.
Create deals or promotions depending on the buyer's past purchases.
Identify consumer preferences and buying trends across the retail spectrum, as well as in particular departments and categories.

A key component of personalizing CX is making your customers feel like you know them. For example, using a person's name is fundamental to fostering a personal connection in a transactional world. However, customer service representatives only ask for a consumer's name 21% of the time.

It's helpful in many ways to understand the tastes and backgrounds of your customers. The consumer won't have to repeat themselves to escalating teams; your teams will appear structured and knowledgeable, and eventually, the customer will feel appreciated.

3. Engage and Reward Employees

Firms that actively engage employees have customer loyalty rates 233% more than those that don't.

Employee Experience (EX) significantly impacts your customer experience. How can you expect your workforce to provide wonderful CX if their own EX is subpar? So, your employees must be given the tools and authority they need to design and deliver excellent CX. This can be done in the following ways:

Use design modeling and experience design in EX together with segmentation and needs analysis, touchpoint management, and journey mapping.
Create opportunities for employees to learn about your customers, brand, and CX strategies and to build the skills to operationalize them by working with human resources personnel and other areas within your company.
Work with your IT colleagues to provide your CX staff with real-time data and feedback and with those in operations to provide them access to tools that will allow them to use that data to anticipate and address customer needs.
Consider formalizing perks for delivering an exceptional CX or motivating teamwork among colleagues.

In short, your objective should be to establish a solid and ubiquitous collaborative culture that supports customer-centric initiatives across all departments and organizational levels.

Moreover, to maintain talent, most organizations rely on a combination of great work and competitive remuneration as holding each employee counts. Building the proper community and having a distinct CX goal can prevent your employees from inclining toward other recruiters.

4. Align Your Frontline Staff

While 73% of customers adore a brand due to friendly customer service agents, more than 70% of customers believe that businesses should cooperate on their behalf so they don't have to repeat information to different agents.

Your frontline employees are your first line of defense and usually the public face of your brand. Therefore, your goal from a CX perspective might be to align better and equalize your frontline workforce. For that, you must take the following actions:

Value your frontline with improved pay or better career growth chances.
Give them more effective training and development that aligns with the brand promise.
Ensure they are unrestricted by stringent procedures that make customers jump through unneeded hoops.

Note that 35% of customers have become furious when talking to a customer service rep. Given that, the best practices, training programs, scripts, and standards would cover every conceivable customer scenario.

5. Listen Closely to Customers

According to a Microsoft report, 53% of buyers think their feedback only goes to people who can really work on it.

It would be best to commit to listening to and respecting your consumers' opinions, even when they are not flattering. The only way to succeed and develop a product that customers will adore is to comprehend how they feel and think.

Reviews, emails, and direct calls are common ways to provide feedback. The customer feedback loop incorporates all these consumer contact channels. Therefore, it is essential to listen to your customers.

Collecting consumer feedback and acting on it should become a regular activity if you want to enhance your product.
Take several valuable actions, such as surveys, requesting feedback forms, and answering customers frequently.
Informing your customers of changes will show that you value their comments.

You can gather customer data, mine it for the most significant improvements, and incorporate those improvements into your service or product by requesting feedback on brand experience through real-time surveys.

6. Leverage Social Listening

More than one-third of customers will share their customer service experience through posting on Facebook and Instagram.

Social media is no longer optional. Supporting your customers through social media means allowing them to interact, whether you're answering a question, addressing a grievance, or appreciating their opinion.

To listen to your customers through social media, you can carry out the following tasks:

Know where your customers hang out, such as whether they frequent Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
Keep an eye out for remarks on your service on social media.
Create a systematic strategy for your answer.
Respond swiftly and consistently to your customer's questions to establish great rapport.
Create guidelines to maintain a consistent tone across interactions.

Remember that social media measurements also include rich data. Utilize reports to strengthen your customer service initiatives and improve the exceptional CX delivery process.

7. Embrace Automation

By 2024, 69% of all managerial tasks will be automated. In fact, by 2023, 40% of all customer interactions are predicted to be automated through AI and machine learning.

As CX teams are adept at identifying customer pain points and empowering the appropriate representative or teams to address them, they are most positioned to advance with new technology.

It is crucial to implement advanced automated solutions in 2023. To determine an appropriate tool, take the following measures:

Take into account what your team members think of adapting automated solutions.
Identify the friction that prevents innovation by having regular interactions.
Consider carefully which technology will best meet the unique needs of your team.

For example, 69% of consumers say they're ready to interact with a bot on simple problems. You may use chatbot technology for quick resolutions or redirections.

8. Reply Instantly

90% of customers rate an "immediate" reply as essential or very important when they have a customer service query. 60% define "immediate" as 10 minutes or less. In fact, nearly 60% of customers say that long holds and wait times are the most annoying aspects of a customer service experience.

Customers demand what they want right away. They value speed and convenience more than ever, and brands that offer quick query resolution and product or service delivery have a significant competitive edge.

Across all industries, instant gratification can be found in many different forms. For example, urban grocers may offer 15-minute delivery while real estate websites may use artificial intelligence to list properties almost immediately, and banking apps may transfer money between users and accounts in a matter of seconds.

Even tiny instant satisfaction moments enhance the CX by promptly responding to inquiries, providing quick service, and delivering value without compromising quality.

Your customer assistance response times need to be updated now. You are not conducting business in a way that is appropriate for meeting consumer expectations in 2023 if you still make standard response pledges like, "We will get back to you within 24 hours."

9. Offer Exclusivity

75% of customers expect businesses to employ new technologies to develop better experiences.

Delivering a seamless, easy, and personable customer experience across channels and touchpoints satisfies fundamental customer expectations. But, best-in-class businesses have been raising the standards for an outstanding customer experience.

So, it would be best if aimed aim for unique, distinct, and original experiences in 2023 in the following ways:

Examine how new experiences that express your distinct brand identity can be produced by utilizing advanced technologies such as voice enablement, automation, and VR/AR.
Through innovative approaches to relationships, community, and communication, create exclusive goods, content, and services.

Moreover, if you offer the same product as your competitors at the same price, you must create competitive advantages to persuade customers to choose you over others.

Offerings like a white-glove shopping experience may be sufficient to persuade a price-conscious customer who is weighing their options. Once the customer makes a purchase, the strength of your brand and the execution of the order will help promote repeat business.

10. Upskill Yourself and Your Teams

88% of high-performing service decision-makers support representative training. Nonetheless, 59% of customers say most companies need to enhance the training of their customer service representatives.

The CX professional skill bar is growing in tandem with the CX customer bar. In fact, Oracle was reported to have cut thousands of jobs in its CX division in 2022.

Therefore, invest in the best certifications, practices programs, educational conferences, and online courses to upskill yourself and your CX team:

Teach your teams about data analysis, data science, and specialized technologies such as Python programming or MongoDB on AWS.
Provide organizational change management professionals with appropriate training to enable organizational transformation management that CX demands.
Develop the specialized expertise appropriate for the CX initiatives programs and organizational CX maturity stage.

While CX executives may still be CX generalists, more experts in the particular CX disciplines are required to carry out the strategic direction and overarching vision that top CX leaders and entrepreneurs create.

The Bottomline

A customer is a human utilizing your product or service, not just a statistic. So, it's critical to pay attention to and comprehend your customers. They must receive an exceptional CX tailored to their needs through distinct, personalized offerings.

All employees, especially customer service representatives, who embrace employee empowerment can take the necessary action to address the frequently unanticipated problems and challenges that arise for and with consumers.

Your CX team can quickly unlock innovation using the automated solutions available today rather than out-of-date techniques and tools, eventually delivering excellent CX.

Increase your efforts to train your workforce on the most recent CX techniques. Employees with extensive experience bring a strong aptitude for the customer experience, but with the proper CX upskilling, that aptitude may become a reality.

10 New Year Resolutions to Improve Customer Experience in 2023

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