There’s no faster way to drive away customers than poor customer experience. 58% of customers will stop doing business with a brand that fails to meet their service expectations. Yet, despite this, 48% of companies still feel that they fail to meet CX expectations.
Clearly, something’s gone awry. In this blog post, I’ll be helping you bridge the gap between customers’ expectations and tangible service levels by sharing seven common CX pitfalls and, most importantly, how to fix them!
7 pitfalls that signify an incomplete CX strategy
1. Failing to put the customer first
Of course, customer success means putting the customer first. Right? Well, actually, there’s a surprising misalignment between these two factors that go unnoticed in many customer success teams.
When we prioritize pushing more and more customers down the sales funnel over the needs of our customers, it’s a recipe for customer dissatisfaction. It may benefit your company in the short term, but it’s nothing more than a quick fix and you’ll be sacrificing long-term customer loyalty (and business revenues) in the process.
How to fix it? Make customer-centricity part of your company culture
Make customer-centricity part of your wider company culture so that it permeates everything that your company stands for and does.
Make customer-centricity a core business value that trickles down from all the way up in the executive suite. This will create conditions in which quality CX can thrive.
Here are a few tips for planting customer-centricity in your company culture:
- Make customer experience data accessible across teams and departments
- Provide a unified platform for customer feedback and analysis
- Share your company vision in everything you do
- Develop regular CX training programs
- Create customer-centric goals cross-departmentally
- Make it clear how different roles and responsibilities relate to CX
2. Poor data collection
Another common pitfall when it comes to CX is poor data collection. Remember that data is information. In order to become more customer-centric, we need to understand what our customers need and want. That’s where data collection comes in.
How to fix it? Take advantage of data
In order to understand your customers, you’ll need to collect, analyze, and use your customer data to inform CX practices company-wide.
Luckily there are amazing technologies and customer data platforms out there that will help you store and analyze large amounts of data and integrate all of your data sources into one platform to give you a 360-degree view over your entire customer journey. For example, an ecommerce store would benefit from using retail analytics software to collect and analyze customer data more easily.
With the perfect tech stack in place, you can start reviewing customer data by cohort. Instead of treating all of your customers as the same, it’s important to segment your customer data according to customer demographics, geographies, pain points, behaviors, and goals.
For example, you might find that your contact center experiences troublingly high call volumes during peak season (leaving customers in long call queues). By identifying this problem it’s much easier to identify a solution – e.g implementing an ACD call center software to distribute calls more efficiently.
Armed with precise and targeted data your CX teams can start to treat customers as individuals, identify what is (or isn’t) working, and move customers down the sales cycle even faster (without sacrificing on customer satisfaction).
3. Lack of creativity
It’s easy to think of providing a good customer experience as a simple tick box category. You’re either doing it or you’re not, right? Well, no, not exactly. A lack of creativity is one of the single biggest killers of high-quality, personalized, valuable customer experiences.
But all too many companies neglect creativity and innovation in their CX strategies in favor of tried-and-tested methodologies, techniques, and campaigns. The result? Companies that hold themselves back from creating amazing customer experiences that generate long-term growth.
The solution? Transformational thinking
Take a look at your CX strategy and ask yourself: is what we’re doing innovative? If the answer is no then it’s time to get creative. It could be that you’re just one SaaS referral program away from onboarding a ton of new customers.
Creativity is all too often stifled by judgment. Transformational thinking is a powerful tool you can use to nurture a culture of innovation in your company and get to the best ideas.
The key to transformational thinking is to tap into your team’s ideas without judgment. By welcoming bigger and bolder ideas – no matter how unorthodox – at the discussion table, you’ll see the creativity flowing once more.
4. Missing the link between CX and value
We already touched on the importance of putting the customer first. But what if I told you that one of the biggest roadblocks keeping companies from doing this is a fallacy about value. All too many senior business leaders fail to see the link between improving customer experience and increasing business value.
Many businesses neglect to calculate and attribute a clear ROI to customer experience efforts. For example, improving customer call center experiences by investing in a small business VoIP service is likely to increase overall levels of satisfaction and add value to your business. When senior leaders don’t show their CX teams the value derived from high-quality customer experiences it, inevitably, leads to complacency.
The solution? Harness business metrics
The best way to demonstrate the link between CX and monetary value is by tracking a few core business metrics. Customer experience analytics will show the link between CX and other business metrics by highlighting how CX impacts customer behavior.
Pick a few user engagement metrics that are influenced by customer experience and share these across departments to reinforce the importance of customer-centricity company-wide. Combine this with regular customer feedback collection and you’ll find it’s much easier to identify which factors impact your CX and how.
Some metrics you can measure include:
- Customer retention: use this to demonstrate how better service equals increased customer loyalty and reduced church.
- Upselling: use this to show how better customer experiences lead customers to purchase additional products and services.
- Cost-to-serve: use this to show how better CX reduces overall costs associated with serving customers by increasing efficiency and reducing complaints.
5. Neglecting personalization
When it comes to customer experience today, personalization is king. Not providing customers with a personalized experience is like giving them a first class ticket direct to the competition. Lack of personalization hinders brand reputability and leads to decreasing levels of customer engagement and higher church rates.
The solution? Invest in outstanding customer service teams
As we’ve already discussed, personalization in customer service can be improved by harnessing customer data. This data can be used to inform service teams about the needs, wants, and problem areas of each individual customer and avoid one-size-fits-all interactions based on broad generalizations.
You could segment the customers based on their industry or location, for example an engineering company from Australia may receive different emails to an ecommerce company based in America.
Customer-centric teams should always demonstrate proactivity with customers, as well as tailored support throughout the customer journey. For example, imagine you’ve got a customer interested in Azure data lake storage. Instead of just telling them about your product, it would be much better to offer them an Azure data lake storage tutorial.
It’s important to invest time and effort into providing customer service teams with effective training in personalized service. They will need to learn how to react to customer inquiries and provide appropriate answers for that individual customer and they will need access to an excellent knowledge base from which to work.
6. Departmental silos
One of the biggest roadblocks to achieving a truly great customer experience strategy is departmental siloing. It’s quite common to find companies with a whole bunch of departments that work in isolation.
Failing to adopt a cross-functional approach will place blinders on your team when it comes to CX. The customer journey is affected by everything from the graphic design team to the folks in accounts, to the support agents in the contact center. So why aren’t we communicating!?
The solution? Embrace a cross-functional mindset
The solution is simple. Eradicate silos. Train employees at every level of your organization to be customer-centric. Make sure they understand how their role impacts customer journeys and what they can do to maximize each customer’s experience.
7. Poor leadership
If there’s one thing that kills a good CX strategy before it’s even started, it’s poor leadership. Many businesses fail to sufficiently invest in quality CSM leadership leading to erratic customer management, poor service, and organizational inconsistencies.
The solution? Hire a dedicated CSM leader
Hiring a dedicated CSM leader is money well spent. Customer success managers work with customers to make sure that they’re experiencing quality service to their desired standards. CSMs advise and support customers along and after their purchasing journeys. It is their sole priority to look after the needs of the customer.
Ramp up your CX strategy
So, there we have it. Nobody can afford to neglect customer experience, service, and success in today’s day and age. Make sure that you’re avoiding these seven pitfalls and you’ll have a CX strategy that’s ready to go in no time. Remember that CX isn’t an accessory. Customer experiences are directly linked to business growth so there really is no reason not to ramp up your CX strategy right now.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jessica Day, Senior Director, Marketing Strategy, Dialpad
Jessica Day is the Senior Director for Marketing Strategy at Dialpad, a modern business communications platform that takes every kind of conversation to the next level— managing a remote workforce effectively and turning conversations into opportunities. Jessica is an expert in collaborating with multifunctional teams to execute and optimize marketing efforts, for both company and client campaigns. Jessica Day also published articles for domains such as Startups Magazine and Handle. Here is her LinkedIn.