Engaging your Customers

How you engage with your customers, drive continual improvements in services and products will directly impact your customer’s experiences and whether they will actively promote you.  But how do you know your customers like these services, products or experiences? Get feedback directly from them and try using Net Promoter Score (NPS) as one of the indicators. The site www.netpromoter.com states that,  “Whether you are aiming for faster growth or increased profits, use NPS as the foundation of a measurement framework that is tightly tied to the customer journey”.  The key point here is that if you don’t have any metrics that measure your organisation’s transformational journey how do you know whether it was successful or not?  An organisation may also use internal metrics such as % of customers using on line channels, customer retention rates and response times to customer queries to gauge their success.

Personalising Customer experience (CX)

More importantly customers want a more individualised approach to service, across multiple channels and devices where they can engage with organisations and its products anytime, anywhere.  An example of this is a customer completing their tax returns on a train while being assisted by the in app support or interacting with a bank on their mobile device while on the bus.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS will not always work in every situation, for example it is probably not a great idea to ask your customer if they would recommend your products or services to others after they have just paid a bill on-line or had to deal with an issue.  In these situations, you could ask them how easy it was to deal with your organisation and, in this way, customers still get to rate their level of satisfaction based on this experience (rather than a product or service). This is more valuable to the organisation for improving or validating the effectiveness (or not) of their support channels and processes.

More than just NPS

Metrics like NPS should only be used in conjunction with other customer/industry specific indicators (such as retention rates or sales conversions through Live Chat) to give an organisation a complete picture of how customers feel about their products/services.  Personalising your customer experience is paramount for any organisation, where products/services can be used anytime, anywhere, on any device, supported through an individual’s channel of choice (e.g. Live chat, FAQs Email or social media).

Another area that can enable an organisation to excel in getting to know their customers is to combine the power of analytics to provide a 360-degree view of customers and to predict customer service needs/activity. An example of this is the provision of automated case routing or faster access to customer data for support agents to enable a customer support case to be paired with the most suitable agent.

“Today’s customers demand seamless, individualised service across all devices and channels.  The best service teams know they need to personalise that service, connecting with customers wherever they are. More than one-third of high-performing service teams are already delivering customer service via mobile apps, with an expected 67% growth over the next 2 years.  Among all service leaders surveyed, the use of social media monitoring technologies will increase nearly 2x in the next 12-18 months”

Excerpt from 2015 State of Service Trends’, an eBook by @salesforce