Today, customers wield the power that allows our businesses to succeed. Because of this, customers must be at the centre of every organisation’s business strategy.
According to ‘The state of customer care in 2022’ report by McKinsey, improving customer experience is the fastest growing priority area for customer care leaders. Improving customer experience (CX) plays a critical role in customer retention, increasing your client base and effectively delivering on the services your organisation has promised to provide them. In this guide by ActionPoint, we delve into why CX is important, the challenges facing businesses in the pursuit of delivering premium CX to their customers and how your organisation can deliver it.
Challenges to Customer Experience
In the past few years, the landscape of CX has changed along with demands and expectations from customers. While every business will face different challenges, the juggling act of maintaining and retaining clients has become increasingly difficult for all industries.
New research from leading CRM provider Kustomer reveals the most prevalent challenges CX professionals want to overcome before 2025. Having surveyed over 100 industry specialists for its “What the Future Holds for CX Organisations” report, Kustomer uncovered the following issues as the most widespread:
- Customers need to repeat information (46%)
- Lack of personalisation in customer interactions (34%)
- Customers’ perception that their time is not valued (34%)
- Agents lack context about customers (30%)
- Customer service being siloed from other departments (30%)
Reimagine your Customer Experience capability with these three steps:
1. Review & redefine current operational processes & business goals
With the need to repeat information, lack of context about customers among agents and customers being siloed from other departments flagged as three key concerns, it’s clear that processes play a huge role in customer satisfaction. By assessing your current processes that involve customer touchpoints, you and your team can discover where there may be challenges, how they can be remediated and what steps you can take going forward to improve your processes. Establishing a culture of ‘customer obsession’
and making CX core to the business strategy has to become a priority for businesses who aspire to take their organisational goals to the next level. In turn, this will create a more seamless experience for your customers.
2. Examine how centralising your systems can improve CX 
Customers want to feel seen, heard and valued but most of all, want to ensure that your team has easily accessible information that can resolve their issue or facilitate their query or request. To ensure that your teams can provide this for your customers, looking at creating a centralised system that can house your customer data effectively and securely can have a positive impact on your customer experience. Particularly relevant for those providing customer support services, systems such as Power BI, Microsoft
Teams and a relevant CRM can elevate your offering.
3. Implement a digital skills plan
While addressing systems is a critical step in delivering excellent CX to your customers, establishing a team that will implement strategies and make use of the technology available to them in tandem with the systems, is a key driver to successful CX. A challenge many businesses face is a lack of awareness within the workforce around technology. By focusing on upskilling employees’ digital skills, you will empower your team to fully exploit the digital tools that they have access to. This will help to create a more productive, ready and confident team that can strive towards a better experience for your customers by embracing the tools you have provided them. Lean more about how you can create a digital skills plan to suit your business, here.
Change can be difficult. Systems and processes that have been in use in our organisations for many years can often hold businesses back from truly excelling in their quest to provide excellent customer service.
Understanding where improvements can be made, on even the smallest of scales, can change the way you deliver CX. If you would like to learn more about enabling your organisation to deliver better CX, contact us today by emailing getstarted@actionpoint.ie or click here to learn more about our digital transformation services.
