Most customer experience professionals know their way around improving touch points along the customer journey, however overhauling the whole customer journey can feel like a huge task even for them.
One way to deal with such a task is by simplifying into lesser manageable pieces. Rather than revamping the whole customer journey at once, pick a single customer touch point to begin with. Use your customer journey maps to know which touch points customers experience as they engage with your brand. To improve each touch point, one should follow these four steps:
- Find out whatgoal the customer is trying to achieve
- Relate to what customer may be thinking or feeling in that moment
- Look for possible ways to improvethis touch point
- Outline which KPI(key performance indicator) would be affected by any improvements
By undertaking each touch point one at a time, you’ll be able to make more progress than if you had tried to revamp the whole customer journey in one go.
The following are some examples of how to use the four steps above to scrutinize and improve customer touch points:
Example 1: Shopping online
In this case, the customer touch point is a webpage on your e-commerce fashion website: a product sizing chart. The shopper’s aim while he checks the webpage is to discover which shoe size will fit him perfectly. At this juncture, the buyer may be feeling uncertain or nervous about buying the wrong size.
With his feelings and goals in mind, what could you do to improve this touch point? One way is to aggressively interact with him via a web chat, asking him if he would like any help finding the right shoe size. Bearing in mind that more than 50% of online buyers are expected to abandon a purchase if they can’t get fast resolutions to their queries, aggressively responding to those questions can have a great impact. From a KPI perspective, your website’s conversion rate stands to improve significantly.
Example 2: Using live chat on a mobile app
Let’s say this shopper bought a pair of shoes from your online shop, and the next day he’s wondering when they’ll be delivered. He accesses your mobile app, clicks the “Ask a Question” button to open a live chat. His aim is to discover precisely where his new shoes are and when they would be delivered. Considering he’s using a mobile app, it’s reasonable to assume he’s on the go, and wants a swift, simple response. And seeing that he’s presented with a messaging interface, he’s hoping to be able to interact with your brand in the same way he texts with his family and friends.
With these hypotheses in mind, how could you improve this touch point? First, ensure your app supports natural language; meaning that consumers are able to converse in a two-way dialog with a personal ai bot who can comprehend their intent and respond to their queries, much in the same way a real-life agent would. Responses should also be personalized to each person — after all, this shopper isn’t querying about your normal shipping times, he’s asking when he will receive his shoes. He didn’t ask a nonspecific question, so don’t give a nonspecific response.
Improving on this experience further, you could contemplate providing this functionality through Facebook Messenger, enabling your consumers to interact with you without having to install another app. What’s more, you could also give extra communication choices from within the chat interface. For example, you could allow one-click escalation to a voice or video call with an agent who already has all the information about the consumer’s character, past, and present requests.
These improvements would impact some KPIs, such as:
- Improved customer gratification, resulting from finding swift, simple responses to their queries
- Lesser call volumes and shorter hold times, since easy, monotonous questions can be answered using call center ai technology
- Higher agent interaction, because they have the time and tools required to improve customer experiences
Gain a better understanding of how-to better customer experience through ai call center software.
Example 3: Calling the call center
The customer finally receives his shoes, however after seeing them in person, he decided he didn’t like the style after all. He gives your company a call. The purpose of the call is to inquire if he could exchange the shoes for a different style. In this moment, he’s perhaps experiencing a number of feelings: He’s upset he didn’t like the shoes as much as he thought he would, he’s terrified having to wait on hold and describe his circumstances to however many different call center agents, and he’s afraid the exchange procedure is going to be tormenting.
Understanding what he now wants and how he’s feeling at this touch point, how could you make this experience exceptional? First, you could resolve his concerns quickly by providing in-the-moment management and intelligent data entry tools for your customer service staff. Once the agent recognizes which shopper they are interacting with, they should be in a position to swiftly confirm what product he bought and reasons for wanting an exchange. Their CRM software could offer a proposed next action — in this case, an email to the person containing a return label for the shoes. The email could even contain all the shopper’s relevant info, enabling the agent to basically review and send.
Individuals often hate calling customer service, so by making the experience far less tormenting than they anticipated, you create customer loyalty. Moreover, according to recent studies, a typical agent spends 15% of their time looking through enterprise systems for the info they require to sort out customer issues. For a considerable big call center, that adds up to millions being unnecessarily lost yearly. Giving all the guidance and info call center staff need at their fingertips can lower your budget — and enable agents to focus on offering exceptional service to each shopper.
Using the 4 steps and the cases stipulated above, you’ll be able to make eloquent and manageable enhancements to your customer journey.