The significance of the adage that the “customer is always right” is no less relevant today than when the phrase was first coined. Currently, the expectations of customers are at an all-time high, yet surveys show more than half feel the companies they interact with fall short when it comes to delivering a great experience.
This is not good news for organisations, and so new ways to improve customer experiences need to be found – and quickly. There are a number of places in which to start a program of customer experience transformation and improvement. These include how you interact with your customers, the data you gather and analyse, how service cases are managed, and how documents and correspondence are processed.
Phone avoidance
No customers like waiting on hold to speak with someone from customer service. Also, these days many customers actively avoid the phone and prefer to have their interactions with businesses take place online. For this reason, it’s time to allow them to communicate and provide information using simple, fast, and convenient digital forms.
Today’s digital forms can be accessed via mobile devices or desktop computers alike, allowing the customer to get in touch, make their query/request, or provide their details whenever and however is most convenient to them. That’s a lot more appealing than whiling away endless minutes in a call centre queue.
Better data collection and processing
The latest generation of digital forms can apply rules to validate data when it’s collected. In this way, customers and employees can be automatically alerted if an error has been made or any other incorrect data entered.
Once the information is collected, it can then be automatically and instantly processed. Any necessary calculations can be performed by the system, and the data stored or forwarded to the relevant parties within the organisation. All this can be achieved using the power of workflow automation.
Speeding up customer support cases
If a customer gets in touch seeking support, workflow automation can help to greatly improve the experience they have. Customer support cases can be automatically created when the customer makes contact via a digital form. Then, the details they provided are instantly forwarded to the staff member or department who will be handling the case.
To ensure the case is not neglected or forgotten, employees dealing with it can receive automatic reminders that action is needed from them, to keep everything ticking over as smoothly as possible. When one participant has played their part in resolving the case, the next employee required is automatically notified.
In this way, cases move smoothly from creation to resolution as swiftly and efficiently as possible. You can even keep the customer in the loop with their own automated notifications when steps in the process have been completed, giving them a sense of greater transparency and control.
Automatic, error-free document creation
Stored customer data can also be used to create documents such as invoices or letters and other business correspondence. Instead of painstaking, time-consuming manual drafting by staff-members, these automatically-created documents require no human effort. And, because they use pre-defined templates, rules, and data, you can be sure they’re complete, compliant, accurate, and represent your business correctly.
Generated documents can then be automatically transmitted via email or shared with customers from cloud storage, instead of relying on employees to complete the task manually each and every time.
Together, these enhancements will significantly improve the experience of customers every time they interact with your business. Taking the time now to put them in place will pay big dividends in the future.
