The digital customer experience is becoming increasingly essential for the success of companies. More and more leaders and decision-makers recognize that, in this digitalized and networked world, it can foster great customer affinity, from which they benefit. A new study by the market research and consulting firm Lünendonk Hossenfelder offers fresh numbers regarding this topic.
The growing importance of customer experience
A survey of 121 companies reveals: The country’s decision-makers and leaders are aware of the significance of good customer experience. They know strategic considerations must revolve around the customer and a customer-centric viewpoint has to pervade the entire customer process chain. Their willingness to invest is growing accordingly. While in 2017 the surveyed companies have spent an average of 2.8 percent of their revenue on digital customer experiences, this ratio is expected to reach 4.1 percent for 2018. That’s good news.
Barriers to a successful customer experience
But here’s the catch: In many organizations, fragmented IT systems, unstandardized processes and poor data editing pose stumbling blocks to a successful customer experience. As a result, these obstacles quickly stifle any effort to personalize customer interaction. That’s bad news. The goal of creating a successful customer experience must stay a top priority.
In particular, automating the following four critical customer experience processes can solve many problems:
1. Accessibility: Provide a single entry point for customers
Quite simply, your customers want everything to be as simple as possible. They like seamless processes, prefer having a single contact person, and they want a central, digital access point to your company. Nevertheless, the reality is often quite different. Customers are frustrated by having to select a different access for each topic, which creates unnecessary hassle on both sides. Business process automation (BPA) allows you to create a much more effective front office. Offer your customers a single, centralized access point — via mobile app, online app or user-friendly customer platform. Intelligent automation software automatically routes centrally received customer inquiries to the suitable agent in the right department.
2. Stay consistent: Build a customer platform
A central customer platform not only simplifies access to your organization. What’s more, a well-designed portal promotes a seamless customer experience and builds trust. The key is to stick to a single login that gives your customers access to all systems and data. Provide plentiful and useful information. Additionally, ensure your data is presented appealingly and is updated automatically. Your visitors should want to hang out on your customer platform.
3. Good solutions: Establish a networked back end
Process automation provides important advantages not just to your front office operations. Automating back-end processes helps to create an improved customer experience, too. Let’s take an honest look at the reality of many employees in customer service, sales or marketing: To handle a customer inquiry, they often have to work in multiple systems simultaneously. Media disruptions are the course of nature in many organizations. Automating critical processes enables the breakdown of these data silos. How? Automation software interlinks various processes and updates critical data. It promises the best success if all customer processes converge on one central platform on the back end as well. Your employees get a 360-degree overview of all customers. Everyone is always up to speed on any given case and is empowered to offer the customer the best solution, quickly and easily.
4. Simple processes: Make the customer journey transparent
Sometimes, finding the best solution takes time. Customers usually accept that — if the process is transparent and the steps remain simple. Your customers simply want to know where they stand with you. Who is currently in charge of their inquiry? Where is their product? What’s the path of their claim? Making the customer journey transparent is key to a successful customer experience. Granted, making things transparent at all times can be challenging for your company. While your customers expect the processes to become increasingly simpler, customer service has become quite a bit more complex for you. Automating processes helps you to shield your customers from this complexity and makes your team’s daily work easier.
Creating structured processes across all channels is essential. Define which departments and systems are involved in certain processes. Decide how your departments should be linked together. Standardize procedures! If you accomplish that, internal processes involving multiple departments and systems can be coordinated automatically. This is a bit of work in the beginning — in the long run, however, you are saving many work hours.
Conclusion: Automated processes improve the customer experience
Process automation is the key to a successful customer experience. Today, many companies understand that customer experience is a critical success factor. Many decision-makers and leaders know which steps are necessary in their organization. In the future, they want to personalize the interaction with their customers. To be able to offer a seamless customer journey requires linking together central processes, systems and touch points. To achieve these goals, many organizations are willing to invest. What’s holding them back? Fragmented IT systems, lacking standardization of internal procedures and limited access to available data. The right automation software — used both in front and back office operations — can offer the breakthrough necessary to link processes, disperse information and extract relevant data. Automatically.