Celebrate! Diversity, Creativity and Community in the Customer Experience

Each year we crescendo towards the last bank holiday of the year – the peak of summer and host to the UK’s biggest party. This party is not only inclusive, but vividly celebrates our diversity and cultural heritage. It’s Notting Hill Carnival, born from Caribbean communities and tradition, and raising the roof since 1964.

Over the long weekend 37 static sound systems blasted everything from soca to salsa, pulling thousands of families and revellers together for two days.  Any business looking to personalise its customer experience, diversify its channel approach or build a sense of community need look no further than Notting Hill Carnival for some fun inspiration. Loosen up, level with your customers and rediscover the universal truths that bind them together.

Humanising your Customers

Whether they’re foot tappers, booty shakers or silent observers, carnival goers are united by the atmosphere and tunes. Similarly, businesses should aim to create an atmosphere that appeals to customers, while making them feel relaxed, empowered and recognised as an individual. Fine tune your channel offering and provide the platforms that they will be most comfortable communicating through. Explore the multichannel offerings that most suit your customer base and focus on training your contact centre agents to up-hold the brand values that inspired them. To truly humanise your customers and cultivate positive rapport, businesses need to place added emphasis on personalisation. Ensure that customer data is being shared between departments, acted upon by agents and used to tailor solutions and products accordingly. At Notting Hill Carnival, everybody feels connected – let’s build a customer experience to mirror that feeling.

Put some rhythm into your customer journey

Design a customer journey that flows naturally. Get creative and build a positive customer experience by mapping out and connecting customer interactions across multiple touchpoints, in order to direct the end-to-end experience. Organisations that focus on optimising the customer journey drive customer loyalty. In today’s customer-centric IT economy, the challenge is to integrate multiple channels—mobile devices, website, social media, and voice— into a seamless customer journey. Omnichannel customer experience further complicates customer journey optimisation as customers may use multiple channels for a single interaction or need.  The Genesys Customer Experience Platform can help businesses find their rhythm, with flexible deployment models to fit business needs and evolving demands.

Building a community

Carnival was born from the community, thrives on community and cultivates community vibes. The result? A loyal allegiance of followers, a sense of connection and the heart-factor – people care.  For businesses, customer interaction signals either a point of contention, or the desire for more information.  This assessment leaves little room for proactive communication and with it the hope of building a community. Yet, with the arrival of social media, the role of the customer contact centre is changing and customer experience is filtering over to marketing departments. In order to stay up-to-speed with customers in real-time and demonstrate brand values while connecting proactively with customers, businesses can use social media to build a sense of community – a sense of being valued and belonging. This is where brand loyalty begins.

Equally, businesses can take the emphasis on community to its true roots in the real world and commit to community projects. Vodafone Germany has been doing this for over 10 years, using the Genesys Customer Experience Platform to generate donations for partner RTL Spendenmarathon, a charity telethon that first aired on the RTL television network in 1996. In 2015, it debuted the MeinVodafone app to streamline the user experience. Could your business do more to build up its community, with the community?

Customer experience built on customer values

Notting Hill Carnival strikes the heart of London’s values – a city proud of its cultural heritage and diversity. Is your business doing enough to embody its brand values and are these shared with your customers? Particularly in the age of digital transformation, where change is rapid and businesses fight to remain competitive, it is essential that they operate from the grounding of their core values. This means recruiting staff who share these values and who demonstrate behaviours  that exemplify these values. You can train skill, but it’s much harder to train behaviour. Do not underestimate the importance of team culture; it will cultivate your business and customers’ shared values. From the initial point of contact to the delivery of goods, across all touch points and business departments, these values must be aligned to deliver timely, expert customer service.  Of course, the technology, chosen platforms and CX strategy will serve to underpin this culture and disseminate your values.

To find out more about how your business can benefit from the power of the omnichannel, read how Vodafone  created a holistic view of customer  interactions, bringing people and technology together in one virtual contact centre.

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