Measuring is Key to Deliver Better Customer Experience

The age old saying goes, “A great product sells itself.” But your customer’s experience with the environment around that product often makes all the difference. And it even can become the main reason not to make the purchase. Salespeople, customer service agents and your brand image can take precedence.

According to Gartner and Deloitte, more than 60%of organizations agree that the customer experience their contact center provides is a strong competitive differentiator. And, this year alone, nearly 90% of businesses will use customer experience as their main benchmark. But only one in 20 organizations has performed a customer experience review in the last three years, shows data collated in early 2019 by Snapshotz Customer Services Audit.

Facing Reticence to Evaluation and Change
Baseline and continuous assessments can help customers understand the current state of their customer experience and future requirements. These assessments highlight what’s great about the business, as well as where people are meeting and, in many cases, exceeding KPIs. They also compare the business against world-class standards to pinpoint areas of improvement. These pieces of information are used to piece together the puzzle and map out what the business needs.

Often businesses are set in their practices; even when the top tier is ready to implement change, it’s common to find hesitation and opposition from mid-level execs and employees. The key to driving necessary changes is to ask for their input. Every person in an organization has a piece of the overall knowledge needed — delegating responsibility for specific feedback from relevant people makes an otherwise huge task accessible and engaging.

Measuring Enables Positive Changes
Customer service leaders support the evidence that identifying customer experience levels helps reduce the risk of lost revenue from unhappy customers. Lesley Lindsay, GM Customer Services Group for VicTrack, is a fierce advocate of performing continuous assessments with a focus on driving to world-class standards. This ensures teams are focused on service delivery and that stakeholders — and customers — are well served.

Following a 2017 – 2018 customer experience review, executives at Sampath Bank, a leader in Sri Lanka, identified that it ranked below world-class standards in many of performance measures. The review showed that as many as 21% of customers weren’t being serviced. Things as simple as a lack of health and safety planning led to low levels of employee satisfaction and low customer servicing.

After following a customized plan that was drawn from the review, bank executives repositioned the customer center to achieve better balance between service and revenue, increasing agent performance by 51%. In just one year, customer complaints have fallen below industry average, a 20% rise in customer servicing and a 45% increase in customer reach — lifting business and investments.

Get Back on Track
Conducting a business performance assessment helps you get back on track or build new tracks, if the old ones are no longer relevant. In the last year, all customers of Genesys AppFoundry partner Snapshotz found areas for growth. Eighty-percent of those customers focused on opportunities to automate and use artificial intelligence (AI); multichannel or omnichannel capabilities with unified reporting; and weaknesses around workforce management, knowledge management and workflow management tools. And about 20% of these organizations saw the need to go to market with a preference for cloud in the six months following their assessments. However, only 5% of these companies had the internal capacity to support a needs-assessment program.

To learn more, contact Snapshotz in the AppFoundry Marketplace or watch the 20-minute webinar, “Elevate your customer experience delivery and reap the benefits.” Please also visit Snapshotz at Xperience19 in June.