A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives: a curated forum reserved for leaders nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the Construction Tech Review Advisory Board.
It is easy when budgets are tight to look at costs and play the short game, but during an economic slowdown, the one area not to cut is customer experience. As consumers put more thought into when and where to spend money, now more than ever, customer experience as a driver of loyalty and realising its role in reducing the cost of acquiring new customers has never been such an important lever. According to Invespcro, increasing customer retention rates by five percent can increase profits by 25 percent to 95 percent. In addition, the average repeat buyer spends 33 percent more than a new customer. When customers get a great experience in tough times, they are more likely to remember, trust, and reward those brands when things improve.
From a customer perspective, we know that they want a great experience and simple and easy interactions that meet their needs and make them feel valued. This means that during tougher economic times, mapping and meeting customer expectations across the business at every touch point is critical.
Your Front Line Team
While great ‘customer service (CS)’ is not just the purview of the customer service team, this team is vital. As consumers look for ways to cut their budgets and better understand their spending, contact centres are invaluable in providing personalised services. Research from HubSpot states that a 93 percent of customers are likely to buy multiple times from companies that provide a quality customer experience, and 80 percent are willing to leave a brand after just one bad one. Correctly answering a customer issue, the first time provides a better customer experience (CX) while helping the company decrease costs. Repeat inquiries simply strain CS budgets. Investing in chatbot automation, inquiry routing procedures, and agent assist tools that generate the most effective and highest quality initial interaction with the customer will pay dividends in the long run.
Technology is also driving access to intelligence as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms and contact centre technologies merge. This also means that the intelligence coming out of the contact centre is shaping how we understand our customers, giving us vital insight into brand perception, product, and service quality. Data, when smartly harnessed and fed back into the business, can dramatically impact the bottom line.
Personalisation and Data
Brands must capitalise on personalisation to maintain customer loyalty. 91 percent of consumers say that they are more likely to shop with a brand that provides offers and recommendations that are relevant to them, and 74 percent are only willing to engage with personalised messaging.
Catering to customers by providing an authentic and valuable experience focuses on the use of unique personas for each customer and aligning communications, CRM content, and physical experiences to these at each stage of that customer’s life cycle - ultimately improving confidence and consumer spending. This approach helps cut through the noise, reduces friction, and increases conversions at a time when every sale really matters. Combining rich marketing data with operational data provides a holistic picture of a customer, allowing easier identification of their lifetime value and can have massive impacts on the success of marketing campaigns.
Technology
With digital and social media channels constantly reshaping customer expectations, consumers are becoming more demanding. An unhappy customer will shout about it for the world to see, making meeting expectations more crucial than ever. The contact centre sits right on the frontline where customer expectations can be met or missed, and trust can be won or lost, and it is the intersection of team and technology that defines great service to mediocre.
The team needs instant access to all the information on a customer when a call or chat or email comes through. They need instant understanding and access to your policies as well as the training and ability to use these tools while also building a relationship with your customer.
When customers get a great experience in tough times, they are more likely to remember, trust, and reward the brands that deliver in good times as well as bad
However, technology without the human touch falls short. Training advisors to use empathy is key. Understanding and reading into the customer’s issue are vital - not every resolution is about jumping in and trying to problem-solve immediately. It is about listening and understanding the feelings of the customer, especially during an economic downturn and when every penny is counted. This is where the interconnections of trust, team, and technology really play out, where the best use of your resources in the right situation is the best thing for your brand in the long run.
Chatbots, for example, already use analysis to automate Instant Messenger (IM) queries. While they tend to be used for more routine queries, these technologies fulfil a purpose with the customer who wants and expects a quick resolution to an easy-to-fix issue. So, this technology is not to be used solely but rather as an extension to a team - providing self-service resolutions as well as collecting initial input up front to drive a quicker and more satisfactory resolution once the customer interacts with a member of staff. As machine learning technology develops, its use will become increasingly widespread. However, this will be matched by teams who are versed in hands-on customer relationship building.
At Groupon, we are also rather unique in that our experience extends beyond the buy button into the hands of our merchant partners delivering the service. As a local experience marketplace, the magic happens when a customer has an amazing experience with one of our partners. This is where technology and our people combine again to help support our partners through feedback, updates to campaigns, and reports on deal performance, to deliver the level of experience we expect to meet our joint customers’ expectations and ensure a positive brand perception.
To conclude, a great customer experience is the most effective avenue to manage churn, deliver added benefits, and increase the value of the customer base you have. This counts even more in times when marketing budgets are tight. What is more, when customers get a great experience in tough times, they are more likely to remember, trust, and reward the brands that deliver in good times as well as bad. CX is all about the long game, and during an economic downturn, it will be thrown into the spotlight. Smart brands will be the ones to build trust with their customers and reap the benefits down the road. They are also aware that every one of their employee bases, no matter their role, ultimately has an impact on CX. Putting the customer at the heart of everything you do has to be a goal for everyone.
