Customer experience has a significant impact on your brand.
In fact, customer experience is your brand.
Getting it right means customers who’ll stick with you, buy more, and recommend your service.
Getting it wrong is just as impactful – customers are quick to leave if the experience doesn’t meet their expectations.
How do businesses get CX right?
These days, the majority of businesses know they need to make customer experience someone’s job.
Around two-thirds of businesses have a senior CX leader and a centralized CX team.
This person digs deep into service touchpoints, identifies the issues and puts forward solutions.
They push for an optimal at every stage of a customer’s journey.
And it really pays off: Customer Experience *leaders* achieve 17% compound annual revenue growth compared with just 5% for CX laggards.
What is a customer experience specialist?
A customer experience specialist is someone who aims to make life easy for your customers.
They identify customer touchpoints and optimize the experience at each one.
They can improve CX in several ways.
This includes:
- Analysing processes to highlight problem solving opportunities
- Using technology to remove barriers that impact customer experience
- Training staff to ensure agents have all the information they need
There are two kinds of CX specialist in contact centers
Responsibility for customer experience should fall to people that live and breathe it daily.
In the contact center, that (usually) means two people.
#1 The Leader
This is usually someone like the Head of Customer Experience.
They are the person who defines broad customer experience goals and plans strategies to achieve them.
They will typically:
- Define customers’ wants and needs
- Identify touchpoints and analyze experiences
- Plan CX improvements
- Train and support the CX team
- Track and report on KPIs related to CX
#2 The Builder
This is usually the Operations Manager.
Their purpose is to put the theory into practice, often developing the concept along the way.
They will typically:
- Build and manage customer-facing teams
- Work with other departments to ensure that top issues are being worked on
- Plan the logistics of new processes
The three stages of CX design
A customer experience specialist’s role has three main parts:
- Identifying issues
- Planning solutions
- Implementing them
Let’s look at each stage in more detail.
Stage one: Diagnosing problems
At the Diagnosis stage, the specialist takes a deep dive into your customers’ needs.
They’ll start by creating different customer profiles for each segment.
Each group has its own challenges and expectations. Creating profiles helps CX specialists understand the needs of each group.
You may already have customer profiles. In this case, they can move straight onto the next step: identifying all the relevant touchpoints between a customer and your business.
This will highlight exactly when and why people call your business.
You can begin tracking call center KPIs. This will show your specialists which interactions need optimizing.
For example, a high call abandonment rate may be solved by reducing hold time, while a high call transfer rate suggests you have a problem with routing.
Stage two: Planning fixes
Next is the planning stage. Your specialist will look at the issues they have identified and plan solutions.
The problems may be things your agents are doing.
Imagine employees struggle to help with a particular type of query. In this case, your CX specialist will create processes or training plans to help.
Tech can also play a significant role in solving CX challenges.
Take this great example: how AT&T solved the issue of bill shock.
When new customers received their first bill, they were often confused about what the charges meant. This resulted in a poor customer experience and plenty of costly callbacks.
But there was an easy solution.
The company sent out an automatically generated explainer to each new customer. It helped them understand what each charge on their bill was for.
This removed the element of surprise, improving the customer experience and reducing inbound calls from confused customers.
Tech can help CX specialists improve the contact center experience in many ways.
It can:
Reduce hold time
You won’t be surprised to hear that 70% of customers get very frustrated waiting on hold.
(Possible solution: virtual queuing. This reduces hold time by allowing customers to hang up and receive a call when an agent becomes available.)
Reduce wait time
Studies show that 75% of an average six-minute call is spent on manual research. If customers have long waits while agents find answers, you’ve got a CX problem.
(Possible solution: CRM automation. This provides agents with in-depth information about a customer and their problem, helping them deliver more relevant advice.)
Proactively solve common issues
If you take a look at the common call drivers in your contact center, you’ll notice many recurring issues.
This is fertile ground for the majority of contact centers that view call reduction their number one priority.
(Possible solution: proactive service. Don’t wait for customers to contact you; instead, stop issues from occurring in the first place without routine outbound contact.
The key is deciding which of the solutions will help with the relevant problem and then being able to implement it.
And this brings us to the final stage point.
Stage three: Implementation
This is where it all gets a bit dicey.
One of the most substantial challenges that CX specialists face is how to implement new changes at speed.
We’re talking about people with great analytical and problem-solving skills. But… they’re not software engineers.
And that creates an issue.
The actual creation of new processes is outsourced to an internal or external development team.
That development team adds the task to an amazingly long to-do list.
Then, they’ll do their best to bring your ambition to life.
Of course, they won’t have the CX insight that your Leader and Builder have so… there are no guarantees that the outcome will match the hope.
It’s frustrating because, although you’ve identified the problem and conceptualized a solution, you’re unable to get them through the door.
Is there a solution?
The only meaningful solution to this problem is the No-Code approach.
That means… well, it’s exactly how it sounds. No-Code platforms are designed with pre-built components that users arrange to create specific services.
This has massive benefits for both of your key Customer Experience specialists.
The Leader has a radically increased scope for the kind of process improvements which are realistic.
If they can put their idea on a whiteboard, it’s something that can be created without code.
The Builder has a toolkit that allows them to create impressive new processes in a matter of days or even hours.
They don’t need any technical or coding knowledge; they just arrange the pre-built components in whatever order they need.
The benefits of increased speed and flexibility are obvious.
It’s great that you won’t overburden IT resources.
Automation is much easier when you can drop pre-built automated tasks into any workflow.
But overall, the biggest benefit is that you’ll keep the design and implementation of customer services with the customer experience specialists you already have on the team!
