When it comes to Customer Experience, things are changing rapidly. Companies are constantly innovating the ways customer experience can be more efficient. In the past customer experience has not been prioritized in organisations. But business are starting to realise just how important customer experience is to keep customers, and maintain them in times of recession.
We have gathered the trends that will be crucial to get a grip on to be able to elevate your customer experience next year.
Self reported data
As it gets harder and harder to track customers as rules about privacy are getting stricter and stricter, self reported data has become more important in all functions in an orgranisation. When it comes to Customer Experience, simple ways of gathering data based simply on quantitative data is not enough anymore. Instead companies are finding ways to find more qualitative data straight from the customers. Platforms that enable self reported feedback from customers have become more popular.
By gathering qualitative self reported data from customers, companies are able to get better insights in how to tweak their customer experience to quickly get effects that echo in all functions in the organisation.
Gamification
To maintain great Customer Expreince, you need motivated employees. It is hard to keep employees in a support organisation. And the lifespan of an agent in a support organisation is shorter than many other jobs. The key is to keep employees motivated as the longer an agent stays at a company, the higher levels of customer satisfaction they are usually able to maintain with their customers.
To be able to keep employees longer in a support organisation, companies are now using gamification to make work more fun. Competing in KPIs on a scoreboard for instance, can take you far. Taking even further would be to use an experience system where certain work based achievements can make you level up. This is a great way to motivate employees and make sure their prolonged motivation will not only make them stay longer at their place of work, but also deliver a better exprience to the customers while doing so.
Automation
Customer Experience suffers from not having the same budget room as other functions like sales. That is why it's so important to make sure the budget is spent as effective as possible. Automation has been on the rise for a long time in customer service and support, but next year is where it will truly take off. As technologies like chatbots are getting more and more sophisticated, it's easier to make the whole support journey way more effective without damaging the customer exprience. Let a chatbot answer the uncomplicated questions and pass on to a human agent only if the errand is complex enough so that the chatbot cannot handle it.
Other forms of automation include smart integrations between communcation platform (livechat, phone) and ticketing system, minimizing the time required to handle an enquiriy. As handling times per support enquiry goes down, costs also go down drastically. And the budget then, can be spent on actions that will increase the expreience.
Bot Human Hybrid
While chatbots are getting better and better, it will still be awhile before chatbots can take over support all together. This is where technologies that let the chatbot and the human agent collaborate comes in.
One example is the collection of details from a customer. While it takes a long time to wait for the customer to come back everytime a new bit of personal information is needed, it is way more effecient to be able to pass on these types of tasks to a chatbot.
Bots can also help human agents by creating smart quick replies so that the agents can answer customers more quickly.
All these techniques of collaborating between chatbot and human support agent are amazing ways to work with imporving the customer experience!
Exciting times ahead! Check out our industry specific pages for more tips on how to create a better customer experience depending on the industry you're in!
