Customers are undeniably the most important part of any business – without customers, the business simply would not exist. At the start of a new year, Get To Know Your Customer Day is a crucial reminder to reflect on how your organisation is interacting with its customers.
The value of customers
Before implementing any strategies to improve customer experience, it is vital that everyone within an organisation understands the values of their customers and why good customer service is vital.
“When it comes to the customer experience – whether it be for property maintenance, or for public utilities such as water or gas – customers don’t want to be waiting days or weeks for something that needs to be fixed urgently,” notes David Webb, Managing Director of Property and Facilities Management at Totalmobile. “But while mobile workers are often still coping with backlogs created by the pandemic putting a lot of work on pause, combined with smaller teams to comply with social distancing, organisations need to ensure that they are supporting customers as best as possible.”
Sharon Eilon, Chief Customer Officer at Aqua Security explains that “customers are the lifeline of the company, [and] accelerating customers towards their success targets is core to mutual success. The Customer Office and specifically customer success and customer support are typically the ones getting direct feedback from users and serve the advocates on behalf of the customers.”
Equally, taking the time to listen to the customers’ needs and implementing their feedback will enhance customer experience whilst the organisation will reap the benefits.
Providing customer feedback to the product team leads to new, innovative capabilities,” continues Aqua’s Eilon. “Customer advocacy inside the company is key for both customer and company – while customer achieves value and company continues innovating.”
The feedback can be received directly from the customer or obtained by other methods. Joel Reid, UK&I VP/General Manager at Axway adds: “Recent consumer surveys conducted by Axway show there’s a clear appetite for Open Everything: more than 60% of people globally believe it’s worth allowing companies to access their personal data if it means a better user experience. Securely opening everything while building on heritage infrastructure can help craft the Omni-experience that people have come to expect.”
The power of technology
In today’s digital world, there are a number of ways that organisations can enhance the experience they offer to their customers.
Axway’s Reid champions “the new API-fueled universe of mobile apps, the connected cloud, and distributed workforces – having well-designed APIs and a healthy partner ecosystem are only the beginning. To gain significant success, a seismic culture shift toward creating brilliant customer experiences is needed at every level throughout an organisation, which requires an API strategy based on unique company processes, markets, and plans for business growth.”
“A Distributed Order Management System (OMS) also bolsters the customer experience, as it helps keep all systems and platforms unified,” adds Rob Shaw, SVP Global Sales at Fluent Commerce. “For example, if a customer adds items to their cart on the mobile app, and later finds some more items on the website, will both sets of items show up in their basket? Technology that allows for the recall of every session from your customer via any channel will help improve ease and experience.
“Retailers also need to ensure their systems and platforms are agile yet scalable. This flexibility will help ensure they operate with the best-in-breed industry-standard technologies while achieving the connection and personalisation their customers want and will return for.”
Speaking on customer experience in the public sector, Totalmobile’s Webb explains how companies with mobile workers can improve customer experience “through the implementation of scheduling applications. These solutions not only benefit the workers themselves – helping keep employees up to date in real-time – but they also ensure customers receive visits from workers with the right skills and resources to complete the job at hand, reducing the number of repeat visits needed. This is particularly useful when an emergency job is required, and the application can ensure that changes are made to the schedule with the least disruption to customers with existing appointments.”
Get to know your customers
There is no better time than the start of a new year to get to know your customers. Understanding what they want, why they require it, and the best method for them to receive the goods or services, is crucial to providing good customer service. Once these basics have been established, implementing technologies can provide intelligence, automation, and organisation to allow businesses to reap the benefits of excellent customer experience.