Plan your digital future with an effective customer experience strategy

To be successful, organisations like yours must engage and empower your clients and employees in a seamless and productive way. To achieve this, you need to look at removing the friction that antiquated legacy systems and processes create.

By deploying sound, future-proofed, and strategic digital solutions that are designed with your organisation’s targets in mind and guided by a you can improve employee morale and productivity, streamline experiences for your clientele (customer experience, aka CX), and have the confidence to experiment and innovate securely.

Your digital solutions strategy will enable you to:

• Boost competitiveness and enhance operational efficiency and innovation
• Unlock value by modernising and integrating applications
• Enable seamless, data-driven client and employee experiences, to improve satisfaction and problem resolution
• Remove guesswork with data-driven decision-making, automation, and business intelligence across all client touch points.

The importance of being customer-centric

Prior to the digital age, many of us became complacent knowing our clients would always return. We believed our competitive advantage was secure, and client loyalty was strong enough to protect us from any new and existing competitors.

Today? Customer experience – or CX – looks very different. Consumers now have a range of options, literally at their fingertips, to choose from, and they’ll go elsewhere if their expectations aren’t being met.

To remain relevant, and therefore successful, it’s necessary to place your customers (or clients/patients/residents, etc) front and centre of your strategy. By focusing on your client’s lifetime value over any short-term gains, you’ll be rewarded with improved client loyalty, which in turn leads to improved business outcomes.

CX mistakes to avoid

If a great client experience is focused on ensuring that all interactions and touchpoints with an organisation are easy, enjoyable, and seamless, the opposite is true when it comes to a negative client experience.

Bad client experiences often start simply due to miscommunication – on all sides. However, there are other CX factors at play, and here are some CX mistakes to avoid:

• Difficult purchasing processes
• Inconsistent service delivery
• Lack of understanding regarding client needs
• (Made worse by) negative or ambivalent attitudes from client support staff
• Compromising a client’s personal security
• Long hold times
• Not addressing client feedback – especially when it has been given in a public-facing forum, such as on a review site
• Rude, angry or disengaged employees – yes – your EX directly affects your CX

What does a great client experience look like?

A client experience is defined by every interaction and experience they have with your organisation. This includes everything from navigating your website to talking to customer service and receiving the product/service they bought from you.

Everything you do impacts your client’s perception and their decision to keep coming back or not; so, it stands to reason that providing a great client experience is key to your success.

The benefits of delivering a great CX include:

• Increased client loyalty
• Increased client satisfaction
• Better word-of-mouth marketing
• More positive reviews and recommendations

Remember, while your organisation and your clients are unique, a great CX is now universally expected. Effective customer experience management will include following these common principles to ensure you consistently offer an exceptional client experience:

• Ensure listening to clients is a top priority across your organisation
• Use feedback to develop a deep understanding of your clients and their expectations
• Implement a system to help you collect, analyse, and act on client feedback
• Reduce friction and solve your client’s’ specific problems and unique challenges
• Engage your staff in creating exceptional experiences – ask for their input and give them ownership of their role in the delivery of these experiences

The 6 essentials when developing a client experience strategy

Identifying ways to create a great client experience strategy can help you improve client satisfaction, reduce churn, and increase revenue.

Understand what’s important to your clients

A good CX strategy should start by gaining a deep and nuanced understanding of your clients via surveys, questionnaires, and feedback.

Interview your clients to generate insights

Listening enables you to learn from and talk to your clients to create ever-improving experiences.

Develop a road map

Understanding how your clients interact with you holistically and across their whole journey is crucial to delivering an enhanced client experience.

Elevate the highs and mitigate the lows

Identifying high and low points and creating strategies to accentuate or remedy accordingly, allows you to create a robust and meaningful journey.

Reimagine the client journey and experience

Imagining a clean slate can help you change perspectives and think outside the box as to what your client journey could look like in an ideal world.

Ensure the strategy is applied across your entire organisation

You should approach transformation as an ongoing process for continuous improvement – rather than a one-off, linear change.

Start designing your enhanced client experience today

Good client experiences start with a complete view of their interactions, preferences, and history. By identifying moments of opportunity to support, guide and delight your clients through their lifecycle, you can design, deliver, and scale your ideal client experience to:

• Better manage and communicate with prospects and clients across your organisation – front office, back office, warehouse, on the road
• Deploy and integrate contact centre, CRM, and Cloud voice technologies and workflows to drive the experience forward
• Automate key engagement processes for consistency, continuity, and reporting
• Gain a complete view of your client interactions and equip your team to deliver personalised and efficient experiences