Customer Experience 
Why is customer interaction management important? Because every customer interaction can impact your company, no matter how large or small.
Each good interaction is a net positive, and every poor customer experience is a net negative, whether answering a simple question or guiding a customer through complex processes. There’s no neutral ground.
Additionally, customer interaction is a team sport. While support agents and sales reps may be the ones taking center field, everyone from the IT team that keeps your contact center up and running to the supervisors who keep an eye on agents plays a role in the overall experience.
This is why customer experience management is so vital to businesses. Managing your customer interactions helps ensure that you deliver the best experience possible to your customers, meet their needs, and build brand loyalty to retain their business.
Strategies to Monitor and Improve Customer Interactions
Given the importance of customer interaction management, we must first ask: How can we improve the customer journey and customer support across every touchpoint?
Today, brand loyalty is at an all-time low, while customer service expectations are at an all-time high. People are wary of large corporations and marketing and are more than willing to shop around with different brands until they find a high-quality service that meets their needs. Yet, paradoxically, organizations often cut corners on the customer experience, making it even harder to retain customers.
Neglecting the customer experience, even if it’s just once, can impact a consumer’s entire perception of your brand. Bringing a dissatisfied customer back can be even more difficult than finding new customers from the ground up, so companies try to avoid that as much as possible.
To improve the customer experience, we need to be able to monitor and analyze customer interactions. These are some proven strategies for monitoring and improving your customer support:
Implement omnichannel monitoring
Customers use a wide array of channels and touchpoints to receive support, from calling contact centers to messaging brands on social media. It’s essential to monitor each of them.
Omnichannel monitoring aggregates interaction data from all channels — phone, email, chat, social media, and more — to provide a complete view of the customer experience. This allows organizations to monitor interactions and immediately address any issues regardless of the channels.
Additionally, AI-powered monitoring tools, such as Nextiva Unified CXM, can assess customer emotions and detect dissatisfaction before it becomes problematic. This allows contact center supervisors to assist customers proactively, keeping satisfaction high.
Leverage customer feedback
No one knows how a customer feels better than the customers themselves. Customer feedback is an important data source that should not be overlooked, whether through post-call surveys, sentiment analysis tools, or social media buzz.
It’s essential to capture immediate feedback to understand customer sentiment and then use that feedback to measure overall satisfaction. This can help you gauge customer loyalty and identify areas for improvement.
Additionally, keep an eye on social media chatter. This is where you’ll find unfiltered customer opinions, whether they’re ranting about a poor experience or raving about your services. Social media engagement is an essential tool for customer support, but it’s also a great source of feedback.
Provide continuous training
No matter how good your customer support may be, there’s always room for improvement. Agents should receive regular training to address any weaknesses and practice and improve their response strategies.
This training should include regular simulations of complex customer interactions so that agents are prepared for even the most frustrated customers and have strategies for complicated inquiries. Customer support agents also need to be able to understand and empathize with customers, so make sure that’s part of their training.
Additionally, agents need to stay current on the latest changes in products and services. Be sure to provide regular updates and training so they can provide informed, accurate support, especially when a new product, feature, or service is rolling out.
Foster a culture of accountability
Customer support is a team effort – every team member must do their part. It’s vital to ensure that all team members remain aligned and informed through shared CRM systems, the contact center platform, and any other communication platforms you use.
Regularly sharing customer insights across departments can help drive improvements by keeping all teams informed and able to contribute to the customer experience. If, for instance, a customer is complaining about technical issues, then sharing that information with the IT team can help them make improvements for future calls.
Teams and employees should also be incentivized to provide a great customer experience. Find ways to reward teams for creating positive experiences and exceptional customer interactions. This will improve morale and encourage teams to strive to provide exceptional customer service.
Use customer journey mapping
To improve the customer experience, you need to understand the customer journey. As such, customer journey mapping should identify and understand all touch points customers reach and ensure that each one can create a high-quality experience.
Look for areas where customers are experiencing friction or difficulties and prioritize making improvements there. It’s also recommended to identify key touch points and implement personalized communication strategies. AI-powered tools are particularly useful for improving personalization, as they can generate responses tailored to each customer.
Review and act on interaction data
Every interaction is a source of valuable data. Be sure to regularly review customer interaction data to identify trends or recurring issues. Then, use that data to guide improvements to your support processes and find new areas for agent training.
If, for instance, your current call flows lead to a bottleneck, it’s important to be able to identify and address this issue. Otherwise, you’ll risk losing customers as they constantly hit the same snag.
It’s essential to regularly analyze, enhance, and re-evaluate customer interaction strategies. There’s always room for improvement, and each new iteration can help make your CX even better.
Empower customers with self-service
Sometimes, the best way to help customers is to empower them to help themselves. Self-service is a critical aspect of any contact center or customer service environment, as it enables customers to get the help they need without waiting.
You’ll want to create comprehensive, user-friendly knowledge bases to guide customers through the self-help process and chatbots to assist customers in real time. A proper chatbot can help customers diagnose issues, check their accounts, find information, and walk through troubleshooting processes without needing an agent.
It’s also important to engage with your community. Allowing customers to share solutions and feedback not only provides more resources for customers but also makes them feel invested as they help their fellow customers.
Nextiva’s Customer Interaction Management Solution
Managing customers is not an afterthought.
Customer loyalty is not guaranteed, especially as more customers become more critical of and less loyal to individual brands. If you don’t take CX seriously, your customers will move on to another brand that doesn’t cut corners or take them for granted.
However, with effective customer retention strategies, you can furnish a strong CX that will keep your customers satisfied and loyal. This requires constant review and maintenance, investing in technology such as omnichannel communications and self-service solutions, and creating a culture of accountability and growth — but the result is more than worth the effort.
If you’re looking for a solution with all the tools and tech you need to create significant customer interactions, then you’ll want Nextiva. Nextiva is a unified CXM platform that’s easy to use and scales for organizations of all sizes.
Some of the unique features include:
- A holistic view of your customer data and interactions
- Real-time interaction management
- AI-powered analytics and metrics with actionable insights
- Omnichannel functionality in one platform
All this has been shown to enhance the customer experience, improve customer retention, build a strong reputation, and increase revenue.
Nextiva empowers agents to proactively address customer concerns. It helps managers see gaps in their CX and provides a full overview of your customer interactions, helping you ensure that your customers end their calls satisfied.
Create an amazing customer experience.
Say goodbye to siloed conversations and hello to a unified experience. Engage on every channel with Nextiva’s platform for the best customer experience.
