5 Ways to Improve Customer Experiences

Customer Experiences – It’s not mathematically impossible if the world finds itself engaging in pure-play digital services in the coming future. The pre-2020 trends of digitization and personalization which showed early bullish behaviors have now matured within the last few months. As the store and branch footfall reaches an all-time low, it no longer remains about the empty streets and marts; the consumer wants diversification in services. McKinsey reports that 89% of its respondents switched providers owing to one bad experience. That’s all it takes! So in times that are plagued quite literally with the volatility of customer experiences, how does an institution plan to stabilize them? Here we give you five ways to improve customer experiences in 2021.

1. Give your customers control on billing and transactional experiences

Close to four-fifths of all customers have now claimed that speed and clarity in transactional experiences as an essential part of their reconsideration (for renewals and referrals) process (PwC, Experience is Everything Study 2020). Yet, the American Customer Satisfaction Index has marked the clarity of billing experiences, website transparency, and speed of financial transactions for banking, utilities, and telecommunication at an all-time low (ACSI, 2020).

Paperless billing experiences powered by Meter to Cash applications can eliminate barriers to 100% digitization and mobility in customer communications management (CCM). This then directly converts into higher website visits, faster customer service, and more personalized customer experiences. Delivering them control on billing experiences will help millennials and baby boomers to manage services on their own terms and deliver higher customer satisfaction. Paperless billing experiences powered by Meter to Cash applications can eliminate barriers to 100% digitization and mobility in customer communications management (CCM). This then directly converts into higher website visits, faster customer service, and more personal customer experiences. Delivering them control on billing experiences will help millennials and baby boomers to manage services on their own terms and deliver higher customer satisfaction.

2. Digital is not enough, go mobile and device agnostic

64% of surveyed customers started and ended their transactional activities on different devices (Salesforce, State of Connected Customer Report 2020). With the restrictions on branch services and in-person experiences having services on mobile is not going to cut. Companies might need to host complete customer journeys on mobile.

Businesses will need to migrate experiences to a mobile-first model. To start with, companies must eliminate the processing lag between customer data legacies. They must take end-to-end communications frameworks to a single CCM platform like FCI CCM as a Service. This can help in reducing ‘time-to-serve’ and add more services to mobile-based delivery channels, thereby creating more connecting and contextual customer experiences.

3. Multilingual Communications is the key to customer success excellence

Amazon decided to start multilingual customer support services in Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu,  in September 2020. That’s how they delivered hyper-personalization in customer communications for their product-based business.

Serving a choice of language in billing statements, two-way transactional support, and onboarding experiences can go a long way in localizing one’s business. Studies (Intercom 2020) show that over 70% of end-users felt loyal to a business that offered regional language support. Another 29% switched businesses for lack of the same.

Templatization of Customer Communications can consolidate multiple support services and let businesses align their customer experiences to support a variety of languages. Some SaaS-based CCM Software solutions can even support conditional and programmed outbound communications for language-specific services. Speaking in the tone of your customer is one sure way of making them more loyal and satisfied.

4. Every reduction in ‘Steps to Serve’ is a 50% reason more to re-subscribe

Surveys confirm that half the customers made the decision of choosing a service channel or provider based on the urgency of their request. The odds of a customer not completing a digital onboarding process increase with every step added to the sequence.

Also, close to 2/3rds of customers had to repeat their details for a customer experience rep. or re-explain to the same one in the last 12 months (Salesforce, 2020). Overlapping service frameworks work in silos and turn customers back from the conversion funnels.

Communications Cycle must be shorter, simpler, and satisfactory. Additionally, ‘Live Channels’ are almost 13X faster than traditional emails and forms. Back-office automation, digital signatures, co-browsing e-forms, and other CCM based solutions can help one to deliver speed and agility in experiences.

5. Individualization is the new Personalization

Everyone can customize an email to greet a customer by name, but offering a day-wise insurance risk statement is certainly more sale-worthy communication. Personalizing customer communications beyond the limits of traditional programmable content and towards data-driven conditional insights is catching on continuously.

64% of customers confirmed that if their auto-insurance premiums were tied to their usage practices they switch from their old insurer (Accenture Global FS Survey 2019). So would another 38% if they received flexible pricing for utility bills for off-peak usage and energy savings.

When an interaction is converted into an individualized experience for customers it instantaneously becomes more reliable. Thus, embedded analytics and cross-integration of customer experience fringes, are rising trends that companies can’t afford to overlook now.

Some more ways to improve customer experiences in 2020

It doesn’t matter how volatile customer behaviors go, they always have a tendency to stabilize and come back to normal. However, it remains the job of organizations to closely orchestrate this repatriation of customers from distractions towards value-rich experiences. Some more techniques like 360-degree customer visibility, agent scripting, graphical transactional communications, can further enhance the CX quotient of any business. Cloud-based CCM Solutions and Integrated Customer Experience Dashboards act as singular platforms of aligning these techniques with the core service offerings of any business. While it’s evident that most customer journeys are projected to take the CCM driven path sooner or later, companies must not forget that the cost of not transforming in time is always balanced in customer churn. Unless of course, Customer Experiences get the well-intended attention they deserve.

Guest article written by: Vineet heads Technology & Support at FCI CCM.  Vineet’s 16 years of experience covers solving complex customer communication problems for large scale enterprises in banking, insurance, telecom, and utility sectors. He loves writing blogs on topics like Digital Transformation, Customer Experience Management, Robotic Process Automation, and Big Data Analytics.