According toShep Hykenand Forbes, 96% of customers will stop doing business with a company because of bad customer service. Improving customer satisfaction and delivering excellent customer service experiences should be more important than ever for today’s business leaders — research fromPwCshows about one in three customers (32%) “say they will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience.” To avoid the pitfalls of poor CX, modern businesses should remember the 3 Ps of Self-Service.
“To avoid the pitfalls of poor CX, modern businesses should remember the 3 Ps of Self-Service.”
Personalized CX
Today’s customer service must be personalized — not simply using customers’ names but also personalizing information and carrying interaction history across channels. A Salesforce study found 97% of marketers surveyed reporteda measurable lift to business outcomesfrom their personalization efforts. From integrations with back-end databases, new advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, and interconnected, multi-channel solutions, modern customer service solutions should deliver a deeply personalized interaction for each customer.
Companies today know a lot about consumers and leveraging all of that information is important to successful CX. Amazon, for example, has various personalized elements in their customer experience like “People who bought this product, also bought these products”, “Inspired by your shopping trends,” or other personalized interactions. Providing new product and offer alerts to retail customers, automatically displaying coverage information to insurance consumers, and other applications goes a long way to creating a feeling of loyalty and a favorable opinion of a business.
Predictive CX
The next step to premier CX in 2022 and beyond is predictive customer service — delivering answers and solutions to consumers without the need for them to ask, based on data and customer actions. For example, since the vast majority of inbound calls during extreme weather events involve outage reporting, many utility companies have added an outage alert as the first thing callers hear when they callin from from locations they know are having issues.
“Gartner believes predictive customer analytics are slated to become the most valuable capability for service organizations moving forward.”
Predictive CX is so important thatGartner believespredictive customer analytics are slated to become the most valuable capability for service organizations moving forward. Predictive solutions provide a truly white-glove experience that also proves to customers they are being directly catered to, not simply a number in a CRM system. Today’s service organizations are using predictive analytics to raise the level of interaction from “customer” service to interactions that make consumers feel more like members of a special club getting special treatment.
Proactive CX
The final step to preventing customer churn and achieving the best levels of modern customer service are proactive solutions that successfully resolve customer needs without the need for them to even call in, reaching out ahead of time whenever possible.
Most corporations operate out of a reactive stance, conserving resources to start behind the eightball and react to any new CX need that arises. By shifting to a proactive mindset, companies can expect to rapidly improve their customer satisfaction while appeasing customers and providing the best service possible. Leading customer service operations should stop reacting to problems and start proactively stopping them before they can snowball into larger hurdles.
Proactive CX addresses calls before they happen, reducing the inbound volume reaching agents and reducing call center costs. Some proactive actions — like notifying customers their shipped order has been delayed — sound simple but can get complicated quickly. As customer service leaders implement proactive CX they must remember it requires: understanding what your customers expect, having clear and fast-moving communication channels with customers to deliver proactive service through, and being able to identify issues as they arise and cook up customer service strategies quick enough to react before consumers call in.
The Three Ps
These three Ps of modern CX are transforming the customer service industry and paving the way for premier customer experiences in the future. It is not enough any more for customer service channels to simply exist passively, waiting for customers to find details, enter information, and fill in the gaps. Slow to react, cumbersome to use, dated CX solutions are fast way to lose customers today. In our increasingly fast-paced society, customers demand customer service be personalized, proactive, and predictive.
