To achieve a customer experience transformation, your organization’s customer experience (CX) should be something you can be truly proud of. Not just something you do to meet standards.
The main problem is that modest changes are rarely enough to have a real impact, especially if you’re already playing catch-up with leading competitors. You need to overhaul your CX strategy to drive results and improve your bottom line.
Here, we’ll guide you through the step-by-step process of transforming your CX. Discover how you can implement and sustain your new strategy with the help of contact center software.
How to Undergo a Customer Experience Transformation
Here are all the steps to a successful CX transformation process. You can treat each point as a checklist as you implement your strategy.
1. Get customer-obsessed
This means always putting your customers first and making sure every decision contributes to providing them with a better experience.
Shift focus
Prioritize customer-centric goals over internal metrics that only measure efficiency. If you set the right objectives and track progress toward them, you ensure all initiatives contribute to improving CX (and your internal metrics will reflect this, too).
For example, instead of just looking at metrics like sales targets and time to handle, focus on:
- Churn rate: Percentage of people who stop using your service
- Effort score: Measure of how easy it is to interact with your business
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT): Metric reflecting how happy customers are with products and services
- Customer lifetime value: Total amount each person spends on your business
- Net promoter score (NPS): How likely customers are to recommend your service to others
| Pro tip: NPS vary between industries. Bain, the global consultancy management group, developed the measurement system and provides benchmarking reports giving the ideal range for your sector. |
Implement voice of the customer programs
Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs involve collecting and analyzing feedback from a variety of sources to uncover deeper insights about customer expectations and needs. You can use the programs to get a more comprehensive and deeper idea of what your target market wants, and these customer insights can feed your obsession and inform all your decisions.
Start by collecting feedback from various sources including surveys, reviews, and social media.
Once you’ve gathered sufficient data, analyze it to look for trends and patterns.
Let’s say you’re a supplier and introduce next-day delivery, but then your customers suddenly start complaining about the quality of your other services. That could mean your new service is drawing resources and support away from other areas of the business.
Map the customer journey
Mapping out your customer journey allows you to get a holistic view of how people interact with your company. This process can aid with overall CX management as you can develop more consistency and cohesion across your services. You can see how one interaction leads to another and ensure each move is seamless.
Start by identifying all customer interactions at different stages in the journey, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. Include both online touchpoints (websites, apps) and offline ones (phone calls, in-store visits). Once you’ve got a detailed map, you can define the ideal CX for every touchpoint.
2. Use data to back decision-making
Acting without all the information means you’ll miss opportunities to please customers and solve their problems. Data helps you avoid wasting resources and ensures you align every decision with your overall strategy and goals.
Consolidate your data
Centralizing all your data helps you break down silos in your business. Your team has one place where they can access up-to-date and relevant information, so they never need to hunt for missing details. If even one team uses a separate system, you can’t provide a consistent experience that meets customer needs.
CX platforms help you consolidate data analytics across divisions and locations. Look for software like Nextiva with both robust data management capabilities and global availability.
Use analytics tools
Analytics can help you interpret all this raw data to generate insights into how to improve customer engagement. You can use this tool to learn more about your audience in three main ways:
- Segmenting: Identifies types of customer and builds profiles of their distinct characteristics. These profiles allow you to tailor marketing and support strategies to multiple groups.
- Predictive analytics: Analyzes historical trends in purchasing behavior and service interactions to anticipate churn. You can develop strategies to address any underlying issues and maintain customer loyalty.
- Personalization: Collects details about each customer so you can personalize experiences. A basic example is how brands send email offers based on previous customer purchases.
Get real-time insights
Sometimes teams need extra information while in the middle of phone calls or live chats. Introduce tools that give you real-time insights to help your team stay agile and responsive to customer needs.
Customer journey platforms like Nextiva record all your contact history in one place, including reviews and support requests. This information can guide future interactions with customers.
Say someone calls to report a missed delivery. Agents can see whether the customer has already reported the issue and move straight to the solution instead of making them repeat themselves.
3. Empower your support agents
Employees are your main touchpoint with customers. Giving them the tools and resources they need to perform their jobs well can help guarantee a better experience.
Train support agents to provide omnichannel support
Research shows consumers use a variety of contact methods to communicate with companies. So by letting customers reach you using whatever channel they’re most comfortable with, you make it easier for your agents to provide a satisfactory contact center experience.
Set your team up for success by adopting an omnichannel support platform that integrates channels like phone, email, and chat. This ensures your agents can solve customer problems without switching systems.
But don’t forget to train agents regularly on how best to use the platform. Ensure they get fully onboarded onto the software and know how to use all its different features effectively.
Add more self-service features
Give customers more autonomy by cultivating a range of self-service options.
Here are some of the main features you can consider:
- FAQs on relevant web pages
- Help guides and tutorials
- Product demos and trials
- Community forums
- AI-powered chatbots
- User portals
Ensure these features are visible and accessible, or nobody will use them. The more people you direct to the self-service options, the more you can free up agents to focus on other issues.
Just be sure to regularly update all the materials to reflect new and changing features. One incorrect or outdated detail may frustrate customers and drive them to look for solutions elsewhere.
Monitor agent performance
Teams may have all the right tools and resources and still require extra support to provide great CX. Examine their performance to look for areas of improvement, and give them detailed feedback.
Looking at each agent’s interaction history can tell you about possible strengths and weaknesses. You can see details like how long calls lasted and how customers rated. Sometimes, you may get explicit customer feedback, like the agent seeming unfriendly or confused.
Call center monitoring also lets you witness agents in action. You can listen to their calls either in real-time or as a recording. Later, use sections of the transcript or audio to explain which skills they need to maintain or improve upon.
4. Foster a collaborative culture
When you help employees work together effectively, they’re more likely to achieve common goals. In this case, that’s meeting customer needs and offering the best possible service.
Cross-functional teams
Cross-functional teams are made up of people from different departments. You can put these teams together before you launch new processes and get their input on decisions.
A mix of departments can address every aspect of the customer experience transformation. You’re also less likely to experience critical skills gaps that can delay progress.
Here’s what a cross-functional team might look like:
- Marketing: Provides insights about customer behavior and preferences
- Sales: Gives examples of strategies that have driven the most engagement
- Customer service and retention: Shares typical requests and complaints, indicating your service’s strengths and weaknesses
- Finance: Explains any budgetary constraints on potential CX initiatives
- IT: Suggests the tools required to launch and manage any initiatives
- Legal: Advises on any policies that may support or hinder progress
Define all roles and responsibilities within the group so they’re empowered to make decisions. What are the expected outcomes? How often should they meet? If your employees are new to cross-functional collaboration, provide training to ensure effective teamwork and communication.
Share goals and objectives
Define clear, measurable goals for your transformation journey. You can use metrics such as the CSAT, effort score, etc., to determine key performance indicators.
For instance, your objective could be to boost customer confidence in your brand. You might seek to raise your NPS score by five points before the end of the year.
Communicate these objectives throughout the company to ensure everyone is aware of them. Each department should understand both the expected outcomes and how to measure progress toward them. Sales, marketing, and support are likely to share goals, so they need to understand their individual roles and responsibilities to collaborate effectively.
Encourage open communication
A culture of open communication means everyone can talk freely and share their ideas. You can hear every perspective on your CX and explore different strategies.
Foster open communication by introducing the following initiatives:
- Use a centralized platform for communication so everybody knows where to go to share or get information.
- Store all your business processes and policies on the platform for agents to refer to.
- Guarantee psychological safety by ensuring there’s no retaliation for staff giving their opinions.
- Arrange open forums where everyone can share ideas, raise concerns, or give updates.
- Open a dedicated Slack channel for feedback and suggestions.
Encourage transparency and information sharing across all levels of the organization so you never miss an important detail.
How Contact Centers Simplify Customer Experience Transformation
Contact center software optimizes processes and helps you allocate resources more effectively. It also lets you consolidate all your information and other tools in one place, so your team can work more efficiently and provide the best service.
Let’s look in more detail at how contact center features can provide the building blocks for your CX digital transformation.
Omnichannel routing
Support becomes more complex when you offer diverse contact options.
Omnichannel routing lets you direct customers to the most suitable channel and agent for their issues. This helps you streamline support operations, and it prevents people from having to repeat themselves or navigate multiple channels, thereby avoiding delays and a frustrating experience.
Leading solutions like Nextiva have an AI-powered algorithm that matches agents to customers based on skills, experience, and historical performance. If someone has an especially challenging issue, the tool will direct them toward a veteran employee who’s more likely to have encountered it before.
Unified agent workspace
As your customer support grows and evolves, it becomes more challenging to maintain consistency in your service. Teams can end up following different processes and protocols across your disparate channels.
A consolidated contact center solution like Nextiva makes it easier for agents to follow one set of protocols. That’s because they handle every task in the same place and with the same software. They also have access to the customer’s entire interaction history, so they can maintain the same approach as previous agents, leading to a more unified CX.
Data and analytics integration
The best contact center solutions integrate with your existing software, so you can automatically sync data between them. Your team can save time switching between systems and reduce the risk of mistakes due to manual file transfers.
Ideally, your contact center should connect with the following tools:
- CRMs like Zoho and HubSpot
- Helpdesks such as Zendesk
- Ecommerce tools like Shopify and Magento
- ERPs like Microsoft NetSuite
These integrations allow for a holistic overview of all your customer data, so when you’re making decisions about your transformation strategy, you have all the information you need right in front of you.
Automation and AI-powered tools
Automation and artificial intelligence let you offer a more efficient and personalized user experience. You can meet modern customer expectations and maintain a competitive edge. For example, AI-powered chatbots can take simple inquiries (like checking for order status) off your agents’ hands, so they can focus on more complex tasks.
You can also set up automations to trigger specific actions, like sending out follow-up emails or satisfaction surveys after a customer interaction.
Plus, thanks to machine learning, AI can take cues from interactions to understand people’s intentions and sentiments to deliver intelligent customer service. So, instead of just offering preset replies, it can provide more targeted solutions that truly address concerns and issues.
Improved reporting and forecasting
The success of your customer experience transformation strategy hinges on what you do with your data.
Robust reporting tools allow you to look at the information from multiple perspectives. For example, you can take a deep dive into a product’s reviews but also get a bird’s-eye view of business performance for when you need to communicate with stakeholders.
Here are the features you should look for in reporting tools:
- Real-time dashboards: Essential information is all in one centralized location.
- Custom reports: Granular filters empower you to analyze large amounts of data and generate custom reports. For example, Nextiva lets you filter by agent, team, or whole campaigns.
- Customizable widgets: Agents have individual profiles that display metrics relevant to them. Meanwhile, team leads can access a main dashboard or look at individual employees.
Level Up Your CX With Nextiva
Leveraging the right CX platform, you can reveal what your audience wants, empower teams to meet these needs, and measure your progress.
Nextiva’s unified CX platform guides you from the initial planning and decision-making stages to full implementation and continuous improvement. For example, you can leverage the platform to make data-driven decisions as you strategize and use the complete suite of AI, automation, and omnichannel tools to deliver an exceptional service.
Try out Nextiva for yourself today!
