Four strategies to improve the Aussie customer experience
According to a recent Ovum survey, customer service in Australia is getting worse, with a jaw-dropping 90 percent of customers stopping doing business with a company following a bad customer experience.
Consumers also said that it takes six different interactions on average to resolve an issue. According to Aussie customer experience expert Cyara, which is providing an Australian-made Software as a Service (SaaS) platform enabling companies to improve their customer experience in the omnichannel age, these findings are alarming, yet not surprising.
Cyara’s co-founder and CEO, Alok Kulkarni said: “Customer experience has to become the center of attention! Many companies want to push innovative solutions and platforms to provide their customers with reliable omnichannel customer service, but most of them don’t invest in the right resources nor follow the right steps, and end up providing poor customer service that impacts their reputation, and customers’ loyalty”
Kulkarni shares four ways for Aussie businesses to improve their customer service experience:
1. Provide a seamless customer experience
“Providing a seamless experience across all channels is challenging because most companies built their customer service with a range of different technologies,” said Kulkarni “And when they try to link all these platforms together to unify the customer experience, things go wrong.”
“Organisations, especially in the financial services, retail and telco industries, can’t afford to get their customer service wrong, even more as they offer an increasing number of services through digital channels and are trying to get Millennials’ attention”
“Getting the customer experience right is work. In fact, it takes the hard work of learning from your customers, looking at the data, and listening to feedback that provides insights into what customers are actually experiencing.
2. Testing
Kulkarni also explained that, for any organisation, the first step in pushing a new customer service upgrade or innovation should always be to invest in optimising the customer experience innovation lifecycle through automated testing and monitoring.
3. Be deliberate
“Organisations often rush into innovations,” Kulkarni adds, “If they took the time to properly develop and orchestrate their testing strategies they would actually reduce their time to market - at Cyara for example we help our clients reduce their time to market by 40 to 70 percent for innovations that improve customer experience”.
He said that a testing and monitoring phase is key to ensuring that the customer experience project is delivered with a high degree of automation, and a reduced risk of failure. He added: “Testing strategies must include omnichannel testing, discovery and monitoring of IVR, chat, and mobile self-service platforms.”
“By identifying defects earlier in the development cycle you can reduce development costs by up to 80 percent. Indeed, fixing issues earlier on is less costly than once your system is up and running and that you need to interrupt your whole customer service platform for several hours”
4. Remember - this is just the beginning
“Once your system is up and running this is not over!” Kulkarni added “You need to continuously organise check-ins and monitoring, and regularly prepare for your worst case scenario. That’s how you will get a seamless and flawless experience that will give you a competitive edge and keep your customers’ trust and loyalty intact”.
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