Enhancing the Customer Experience with the Right IT

Whether you refer to them as clients or customers, the people who act as patrons to your business are essential to its success and survival. This means that you need to keep them as happy as possible. While there are many aspects of maintaining a high level of customer service, we wanted to take a bit of time to examine how deploying the right technology can assist your business in doing just that.

IT Needs to Be Less About Product, More About Experience

Lots of businesses are shifting their focus over to the experience they can give to their clientele, rather than what they offer taking the prominent spot. The theory is a simple one: clients are less interested in the how, so long as they see a desired and consistent result. This focus on customer experience has risen precipitously, with 78 percent of the CIOs (Chief Information Officers) who responded to IDG’s State of the CIO survey reporting that customer interaction has become more important over the last year.

Let’s face it, recent events have changed a lot of what were once the default needs of a customer. Safety became paramount to a business’ long-term success and reputation, while new ways to do business with their audience were required in order to keep an organization in operation. In light of this, there is little surprise that about half of businesses surveyed by SuperOffice were prioritizing customer experience for the next five years.

Customer experience (abbreviated to CX) envelops everything about how a customer and an organization interact. The capability to “delight” the customer, as the official terminology puts it, has become key… which itself requires the right technology. 

Is CX Really That Important?

To answer this question, let’s consider yet another study, undertaken by Forrester. In their US 2021 Customer Experience Index rankings, it was shown that the top 5 percent of performers were the brands who focused on making things easier for the customer during the tough times that the previous year had presented.

So, in other words, yes! CX is very important. It’s simple math: a customer that has a positive experience is more likely to continue working with you, making you more money over time.

How to Boost CX

There are a few ways that customer experience can be improved, all of which should be carried out in tandem with one another:

Understand Your Customers and What You Want Their Experience to Be

It is important to remember that the people your business serves are not a generic monolith. Instead, they are a relatively diverse mix of people with different needs, tendencies, and capabilities. Depending on your business, you may serve tech-savvy clientele, those who are generally computer illiterate, and/or everyone in between. Once you’ve identified what range your business audience falls in on this spectrum, you can use that information to design an experience that suits it.

Collect Feedback

The simplest way to determine whether or not your clients are having a positive experience is to just ask them. This kind of feedback can be collected through a variety of tools, from live chat tools to surveys to your clients’ conversations with your employees.

Speaking of your employees, they are also an invaluable source of direct feedback. Listen to what they have to say about their interactions with your clientele. Their perspective is a valuable one when it comes to identifying opportunities to improve the client experience.

Standardize Your Processes

One particularly effective way that you can ensure your team provides your clientele with a positive experience is to simply make the processes that they follow ones that are most likely to generate that positive outcome. Once you’ve identified these promising processes, establishing that they are the ones to follow will enable you to improve the experience that your customers can see.

Directive is here to equip you with the IT tools you need to streamline your processes and help you manage these tools. Find out more about what we can do for you by giving us a call at 607.433.2200.