Customer Delight with Enhanced Delivery

Milan Kumar

INDIA: In this highly competitive era, setting up a new brand is extremely tough. Customer retention is of paramount importance and organizations are striving towards bringing that ‘wow’ factor to ensure long term relationship with the customer.

Customer experience can be measured in three ways:

• Consideration for continued engagement

• Ranking competition against your brand

• Testimonials to a peer or potential customer

Successful organizations are continuously focusing on elevating their relationship with customer to partner. Additionally by delivering better customer experience you can achieve greater business agility, improved productivity – a must to have requirement to stay ahead of race and competition.

Improving customer service operations is a change management process which requires co-ordinated effort across people, processes, and technologies and may run for multiple years for an organization.

Following are some important pointers one can consider for enhancing customer experience:

1. Customer service strategy: Customer experience strategy details the experience you want to deliver across all communication channels and all company touchpoints that are in line with your brand proposition. Make sure that customer service strategy does not conflict with overall company strategy.

2. Communication flow: Dynamism in technology has exposed the customer to various communication channels. Make sure to choose the right communication channel for customers, and understanding the interactions that customer will have via each channel. Delivering omni-channel experience is a definite plus. Also ensure that your team is empowered with the right content and information to meet your customers' expectations of service.

3. Technology empowerment: Choice of technologies will assist you in providing optimal customer service experiences. Customer service experience across communication channels should be standardized by the use of technologies available, including social media channels; empower agents with contextual customer, product, and service information and content; and allow agents to easily collaborate to quickly resolve inquiries. They must also be agile to allow companies to quickly react to changing business and customer needs.

4. Connect with people: People providing the customer services are an important asset. A delivery organization’s culture, team structure, leadership practices, collaboration methods, training programs, and performance measurement approaches are a key factor affecting the individuals providing the service and hence affect customer service success. It’s also important to empower your agents to do the right thing for the customer.

5. Constant Feedback: We need to develop a constant feedback mechanism to capture, discuss and agree improvement areas rapidly. Feedback needs to flow uninterrupted and people should be geared up to think beyond. Customer satisfaction tool can be a good mechanism and should be designed to cover various customer stakeholders.

Organizations are adopting new incentives to implement these drivers to add value to their customers. According to Forrester Research, 93 per cent of corporate considers customer experience improvement as an important item on their strategic priorities and amongst them around 23 per cent organizations, have pulled it up to the topmost position.

Each area offers different benefits to customers. Engaging people creates the warmth and compassion of your brand. Process helps removing pain points while technology eases the customer journey.

So, if you are still aspiring to deliver great customer experience, your competitor is already enjoying the lead you offered them.

(Milan Kumar is Global Head - Delivery, Nihilent Technologies. Views expressed here are of the author and CyberMedia does not necessarily endorse them.)