13 Tools That Will Improve Customer Experience Instantly
13 Tools That Will Improve Customer Experience Instantly
Give one way your company is improving customer experience?
To help you improve customer experience within your company, we asked customer service managers and successful entrepreneurs this question for their best insights. From making transparency a core value to doing monthly check-ins over email, there are several tips that may help you improve your business’s customer experience in the future.
Here are thirteen ideas for improving your company’s customer experience:
- Make Transparency a Core Value
- Answer the Phone Yourself
- Be Vulnerable and Open to Feedback
- Utilize Omnichannel Support to Improve Customer Experience
- Involve Your Customers in Product Innovation
- Install an Instant Message Application During Non-business Hours
- Provide Various Forms of Content
- Shift FAQ Page to a Knowledge Database
- Make Sure Your Website is Responsive On All Devices
- Retain the Human Element in a Digital World
- Develop an Obsession With Adding Value
- Install Peerlogic Call Intelligence to Improve CX
- Do Monthly Check-Ins Over Email
Make Transparency a Core Value
We're prioritizing transparency in 2022. That means being upfront about everything, from our social practices to who a customer is speaking to when they contact us. It seems like a minor thing (and most companies like to think they're transparent) but we're taking steps to make radical transparency a core value, from our hiring to our marketing to our customer support.
Benjamin Graham, AnswerConnect
Answer the Phone Yourself
One customer experience strategy we utilize is having real people answer the phone. If you call our company, you'll likely reach one of our three founders. We believe in forming personal relationships with our customers. We don't want them to reach a customer service agent in another country when they call us. This can lead to a bad customer experience because those agents don't understand our product and our brand the way we do. Having customers speak to us directly improves their experience immensely.
Katie lyon, Allegiance Flag Supply
Be Vulnerable and Open to Feedback
To improve customer experience, you need to understand how your customers feel. Often, we make assumptions about their feelings (based on the internal team's feedback, no direct complaints coming in, etc.). However, this is doing customers a real disservice. By implementing a consistent check-in with clients and introducing various touch-points throughout a client relationship, you're enhancing the partnership between the two (client and organization/agency). This encourages more honest conversations and allows issues/concerns to be brought up early. Additionally, sending out a quarterly NPS survey is another way we improve customer experience. We send these out to all of our active clients quarterly to encourage clients to provide a score and message about their experience of working with us. Watching the scores trends is critical to see if implementing what is working for the clients.
Annie Raygoza, WebEnertia
Utilize Omnichannel Support to Improve Customer Experience
As we have continued to make efforts to improve our customer experience, we have moved to a new model of omnichannel support to integrate them into a single system. Customer support can often become disjointed where various entities within business operations are separated, causing confusion, delays and resulting in an unhappy customer. By coordinating our customer support through the omnichannel system, whether our patrons are asking questions on our social media outlets, are utilizing our chatbots for queries, or engaging with live help, issues are distributed across our entire network to ensure they get resolved quickly. Through this method, we have sped up and personalized our service, reduced churn, bettered the customer experience, and increased their satisfaction.
Cody Candee, Bounce
Involve Your Customers in Product Innovation
We’re using customer feedback to drive product innovation. Whoever said, “Give the people what they want!” was a businessman. When our consumers have a hand in the new products we design and release, it makes them feel their input is valued and appreciated. That, in turn, drives sales and referrals while creating promotional opportunities for our business to lead consumer-driven marketing campaigns. Social media facilitates this type of campaign, and our Instagram is already our most-used customer experience platform for our product outside of our website. This year, we want to show our customers that we understand the assignment, are taking notes, and want to release products that will have that gold-star shine.
Dylan Trussell, Culprit Underwear
Install an Instant Message Application During Non-business Hours
Marketers need to develop an easy customer service experience to give real time feedback, and that starts with an instant message application during non-business hours. An after hours live chat automation can be extremely effective at answering frequent questions quickly - 24/7, even during holidays or off peak hours. Live chats offer fast-to-market solutions that can be customized in a professional way without compromising the brand, that way customer service teams can focus on tackling the more challenging inquiries that come in.
Dino Ha, Kaja Cosmetics
Provide Various Forms of Content
One way we are improving our customer experience is by providing content in various forms. We have blogs with explanatory graphics, a video podcast, eBooks, and social media graphics. We want to connect with our audience in ways that make sense to them and we understand that will require more upfront work from us but if it helps someone understand how we can help them, then we are doing our job.
Amanda Russo, Cornerstone Paradigm Consulting, LLC
Shift FAQ Page to a Knowledge Database
Our FAQ page was the natural progression of answering the same customer questions. Between answering questions online and sending out customer interest surveys, we gathered enough data to optimize customer experience by organizing it into a knowledge database. In the database, we integrated customer experience feedback “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” to help us evaluate where our customers need the most help. We are constantly listening to the needs and questions of our customers to get an idea of how our website can best function. Use surveys through your email membership, post-purchase satisfaction surveys, and any other feedback to best optimize both your website and customer service capacity to be as informative and clear as possible.
Zach Goldstein, Public Rec
Make Sure Your Website is Responsive On All Devices
Having a responsive website design is one CX area you must master. In 2020, Statista revealed that the average person was multitasking between an average of 6.58 screens. Don't wait for negative feedback from customers before you ensure your website functions properly across mobile devices, tablets and desktops. By avoiding implementing a responsive website, you are compromising your response time and limiting user preference to desktop users. I'd also recommend implementing an annual survey process where you ask your customers for feedback on what you could do to improve your CX.
Stephanie Venn-Watson, fatty15
Retain the Human Element in a Digital World
At Digitile, a SaaS Document Tag Management solution, we leverage a live chat, AI-driven virtual personality for the initial touch to qualify website visitors. Then, we route our ideal customer profile to a live conversation to understand their use cases and the general nature of their business to provide personalized answers that fit their inquiries. We've measured that injecting a timely human touch early in the process increases the likelihood of an opportunity moving to the next stage.
Michelle Eichner, Digitile
Develop an Obsession With Adding Value
At Mashman Ventures, we are constantly thinking about "What more can we do for our clients?" It is a recurring topic of discussion in my biweekly meetings with our company founder, Isaac Mashman. Our clients are entrepreneurs, creatives, and professionals building their personal and company brands. Even when we're not meeting, I will have phone calls and text conversations about what we can do for our clients as a useful value-add to help them build their brands and businesses. What resources can we create and provide? How can we use our networks to help this client? How can we go above and beyond for our clients? The more we obsess over these questions, the more we are able to include in the services we provide to our clients.
Eric Chow, Mashman Ventures
Install Peerlogic Call Intelligence to Improve CX
Peerlogic’s Call Intelligence technology is improving the customer experience (CX) in dentistry, and disrupting the inbound caller experience. Most visits to the dentist are preceded by a call in to your dentist to schedule an appointment. Call Intelligence technology works by rapidly processing the data points generated throughout the course of an inbound phone call, and rapidly transforming those data points into deep insights. Customer benefits can include a decrease in on-hold wait times, less frustration, and overall a more effective conversation. Business benefits can include faster conversation contextualization and a higher brand affinity.
Natalie Figueroa, Peerlogic
Do Monthly Check-Ins Over Email
Our customer support team now email all our customers once a month to check in. The premise of this email is to make sure they are happy with our service. If they are not, we ask more questions to find out why they may be unhappy and use this information to make the necessary changes in our business.
Marc Bromhall, StorageBuddy
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