How Human Interface and MarCom Create the Ideal Customer Experience
Whether a business is B2B or B2C, excellent customer experience lies at the core. All activities along the customer journey — from acquisition to retention to referrals – begins and ends with quality customer experience.
So how should your company approach customer service to bring it to the next level?
Troubleshooting the Customer Experience
The most valuable asset to a customer is their time, and identifying where you can save your customers’ time is crucial to a quality customer experience.
In some instances, technological solutions are the most efficient path to a quality customer experience. In others, a direct line to a human agent will save your customer the frustration of dialing through automated systems. There are also times where one approach is a helpful lead into the other.
The key is defining which approach (human, technology-based or both) is ideal for the situation.
Utilizing a Tech Forward Approach
Various MarTech products focus on this – whether it’s gauging customer satisfaction or preferred outreach methods.
Automation, for example, can significantly increase the quality of the customer experience. It allows customers to complete simple tasks quickly and efficiently while also freeing up agents to tackle more complex tasks that demand human interaction. Automated services are reliable, efficient and extremely cost-effective.
Another strength is constant availability. Although ideal, most companies cannot have real people available to their customers 24/7. There are plenty of MarTech solutions to help your customers when employees are unavailable. Automated chatbots can be valuable tools to help customers troubleshoot problems for customers who may need guided help after hours.
In outbound customer service, using MarTech suites to reach your customers with special offers and exclusive deals based upon prior purchase history is another great way to enhance the customer experience. These promotions show that your business values the repeat customer and ultimately builds the relationship between you and them.
MarTech also shines in its ability to deliver targeted, relevant advertisements to your customers based on previous interactions. In today’s world of automated marketing processes, this is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. Use it.
Utilizing a Human Approach
It should be noted that a business should not hide behind its automation. While efficiency is crucial, it should not come at the expense of human interaction.
The human element of customer service starts not with how your business treats its customers, but how your business treats its employees. Building a corporate culture of patience and appreciation is perhaps the best thing you can do for your customer service in the long run. Those same core philosophies will translate to interactions between customers and agents.
It’s important to note that certain standards of customer service need to be understood business-wide. All departments that interface with customers should have the same basic understanding of the way your business treats all customers, regardless of their level of business dealings.
Different departments should also understand that they’re expected to make themselves available to customers without exception and prioritize a high level of attentiveness to the customer experience.
It’s crucially important that these ideals of customer service are implemented business-wide, and consistently. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link and quality customer service across the board can easily be negated by one bad customer service in any one department.
Utilizing Both
MarTech – like organizational suites centralizing customer inbound requests to make for easier, team-wide response – are great tools to increase your ability to efficiently process customer input.
This should be a focus of your MarTech strategies.
There are a host of MarTech products that allow your customers to interface with real people through technology, like the increasingly popular use of web chat windows. These are ideal because they’re instant, proactive solutions to enhance your customer experience.
There is also data aggregation MarTech that can help you constructively organize and distill customer feedback to pinpoint your company’s strengths and weaknesses throughout a customer’s experience.
The beauty of this type of communication lies in the way it initiates contact with the customer in an era of endless automation. It says your business wants to connect with the customer instead of simply being tolerant of them.
The Future of Customer Service
It’s true — we’re careening towards a new era of customer service.
To succeed in the realm of customer service, it’s important to focus on company-wide policies that put the customer first in a way that’s human and efficient while providing them with actionable resources when agents may not be available.
With today’s tech and the right corporate culture, a motivated business can create a great customer experience with ease, and that might just be the deciding factor in customer retention.
If you’re interested in earning more about how our smart marketing solutions can help enhance your customer experience, contact us.
Back to Blog