First, why is it important to reduce effort? I think for each of us, as consumers, the answer is obvious. From an ROI perspective, there’s a lot to consider when approaching effortless CX. There are some great stats in one of my favorite customer service books: The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty, by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi of the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), a subsidiary of Gartner.
In The Effortless Experience, the authors note that with low effort, 94% of customers will repurchase from your business, but if your business is high effort, then only 4% will. Similarly, with low effort, 88% of customers will purchase more from your business, but with high effort, only 4% will. Finally, if your effort is low, then only 1% of customers will spread bad “word of mouth” reviews, versus 81% if effort is high. In today’s social media-driven world, word-of-mouth feedback that can be spread virally to tens of thousands of people is especially critical.
There are many ways to create personalized experiences. Here are some tips:
- Ensure that agents have real-time visibility for each customer’s complete journey and interactions across all channels.
- Use skills-based routing to connect customers from any channel with a preferred agent (e.g., their travel concierge, nurse, personal shopping assistant, financial advice team, etc.)
- Use journey orchestration with your preferred business rules for customers, and treat them according to your business strategy
Consider designing journeys from the “outside in” rather than the “inside out.” Instead, start with the customers and how they would want to be treated. For instance, when a gold customer calls in, let them bypass the dreaded IVR and route them to their personal agent or concierge. If that same customer hits your website, offer them a personalized proactive chat.
Start with your customer and what they want using an outside-in approach to create great customer journeys, and then implement customer-centric business rules. Doing so will give you omnichannel that’s as seamless and effortless as it is personal and natural for customers.
By coupling omnichannel technology with your customer-oriented business and customer service goals, service will become more personal, faster, efficient, and even predictive, with klower effort. What’s more, you will beat your competitors.
About the author:
Previously Ted worked at Genesys where he led North America Marketing with over 15 years in the customer experience industry. Prior to that Ted worked for startups and enterprise software and hardware companies in all marketing functions. In addition to his CX experience, Ted has a background in business intelligence and large scale computing systems. Ted is a graduate of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan with a marketing and finance background.
