Why CX is the Secret Ingredient

Not long ago every business claimed that the quality of the product or service they delivered was the key ingredient to winning customers... but innovative business leaders understand things have changed and now, an even more important success factor has emerged.

Excellent Customer Experiences

It has rapidly become a main priority for businesses over recent years and 2020 will be no different.

Consistency is Key

65% of customers are frustrated by inconsistent experiences (Accenture)

95% of customers use more than one channel to communicate with companies (Forrester), and regardless of the reason they expect any multi-channel support experience to be seamless.

Whether its email, SMS text, web chat, or social media, your customers want you to have a single view of their customer profile across each channel. This includes all their customer information, billing and ordering history, and a log of all their interactions with you. By empowering your CX agents with this information they can pick up the conversation without hesitation so the customer doesn't have to repeat their story and a seamless omnichannel reality is born!

So why keep customers happy?

A Happy Customer is a Repeat Customer

93% of customers are highly likely to make repeat purchases with businesses who offer excellent customer service (Hubspot Research).

CX is a double edged sword where a positive experience can boost retention, but a negative experience will increase the likelihood of churn. The truth is that if you can't keep up with your customers increasing demands, your customers will find someone who can... but fear not as it can be fixed! Kolsky reports that 85 percent of churn could have been prevented with improved CX, so if this sounds all too familiar for your business then lets address it because the statistics are compelling!

• Estimated 5-20% probability of selling to a new prospect but 60-70% probability of selling to existing customers; retention is key!
• 84% of businesses that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue.
• Forrester report that CX leaders achieved compound average revenue growth of 17% over 5 years while CX delayers achieved just 3% growth during the same period.
• It's 16 times as costly to build a long-term business relationship with a new customer than to simply retain and cultivate the loyalty of an existing customer.

The clear message here is that is that customers no longer base their loyalty on price or product. Instead, loyalty increases when they receive excellent CX experiences. A happy customer is a repeat customer.

So why else do you want a base of happy of customers?

"Word of Mouth"

Word of mouth is not new. It’s as old as people trade, and it still has an important offline dimension. However, things change fast. With social media, brand advocacy, has become a holy grail for many marketers, not in the least because of the mere scale of social media.

The fact is, it’s getting harder to reach the people who say they want to hear from us through the social media channels and email lists on which we’ve built our businesses. Word of mouth (offline or online), however is still one of the most powerful tools as 84% of consumers don't trust adverts anymore. People are now seeking third-party validation when making an online purchase, and this is why it's extremely important to nurture the relationship with your biggest brand fans.

Remember, focusing on creating an amazing CX experience further embodies the desire for your business to go above and beyond. You're creating an advocate out of every customer and you want their message to be positive. Ensure their CX journey, from start to finish, is scored highly consistently so today’s customers become tomorrow’s brand advocates.

Next Steps

Omni-channel will become more Omnipresent, so the first thing to establish is if your contact centre is prepped and primed for the future. If not, it's time to build a strategy!

You can learn more about this here where we look at a case study from Laithwaite's Wine, the UK's leading direct to consumer wine merchant. They noticed a change in how their customers wanted to engage with them, and their objective was to ensure they continued to achieve consistently high levels of customer satisfaction. To achieve this they invested in a new cloud-based Contact Centre and Unified Communications platform delivered by Olive Communications.

So when creating your strategy the focus should be on the below:

• Building a customer-centric approach thats personal.
• Make sure your strategy is Measurable and Scalable.
• Leverage tech to enhance your results: AI, IoT, Speech analytics, chatbots.

Some Things Never Change

You have designed excellent customer journeys, developed the most efficient operational processes to support them, and invested in the correct technology but you still fell short of your goal of delivering simply brilliant customer experiences. How? You still need a team of well-trained and highly engaged contact centre staff who feel appreciated and empowered to perform, and as once said by Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin group, “take care of your employees and they’ll take care of your business”.

So are you ready to start your digital journey? Get in touch today on 0203 675 3072 or yussef.elmansouri@olive.co.uk