With the power of an enterprise CRM, you can carefully examine each link in this chain.

How do you know if your customer interactions are as healthy as they could be?

What are customer interactions?

Customer interactions come in many shapes and sizes.

For example, service and support teams connect one-on-one with customers via phone, email, and chat. Chatbots act as first responders and direct customers to web resources. Social media teams respond to questions and concerns on public forums. Sales teams reach out for upsell opportunities.

Customer interactions aren’t easy; they require product/service expertise plus exceptional listening skills.

Why are customer interactions important?

Solid customer experiences define brand relationships after the initial sale. A single interaction can make or break a customer’s perception of your company. Your customer service/support teams are the face of your brand.

Every company should measure customer interactions by tracking important KPIs. Different KPIs need to be checked at different intervals; some are hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, etc. Once you establish a baseline and a plan, your team can set goals for improvement. Below are practical ideas to help your team move the needle.

6 Ways To Make Every Customer Interaction Matter

Healthy customer interactions and speedy complaint resolutions create better outcomes for all stakeholders. Positive customer interactions increase revenues and improve brand reputations. They also contribute to healthy corporate cultures.

When employees make customers happy, their morale increases. Good customer service and support create a positive feedback loop that can spread across your entire organization.

1. Show empathy

Empathetic customer interactions build brand trust. This increases positive outcomes like return business and referrals.

In a 2021 study, researchers at Belgium’s Ghent University found employee empathy statements increased brand trust. When customers felt understood, they believed their complaints had been handled well.

University of Pennsylvania senior fellow Annie McKee recommends three tips for demonstrating empathy. First, listen carefully to the customer without getting defensive or accusing them of being wrong. Second, be present with the person you’re helping and their specific situation. Third, don’t multitask when dealing with customers. Make them feel heard, special, and understood.

Customer satisfaction begins with empathy.

2. Solve problems quickly and efficiently

Speedy customer support and help desk outcomes can dramatically impact brand trust. All interactions matter, but fast first responses and final resolutions have the most impact in showing that you respect your customers’ time and result in an increase in their satisfaction.

In a 2020 study, researchers used a machine-learning algorithm to predict response times. They anticipated the messaging rates of both customers and customer service teams. These experts pointed out the utility of this analysis for support staffing since adequate staffing has the biggest impact on appropriate response times.

3. Make it easy for your customers

Examine each step of your customer journey and eliminate all unnecessary obstacles. All customers want convenience; new customers need smooth user experiences most of all.

Provide frictionless brand interactions by fixing all the little things that can damage brand trust:

• Make your contact information visible on all customer-facing content. 
• Have your web and social media teams hunt down broken links.
• Provide clear and concise pricing options.
• Make sure your support ticket autoresponder functions properly, so customers know they’ve gotten through to you.
• Have a human being follow up as quickly as possible.
• After resolution, ask for quick customer feedback on their support experience.
• Follow up a few days later with a second feedback request.

4. Act on customer feedback

As you resolve individual support cases, collect customer feedback for analysis. Then, integrate this knowledge into your products/services.

According to these Swedish academics, organizations with supportive workplace cultures do a better job of sharing customer feedback. These researchers encourage organizations to value this knowledge base as much as they do their technical expertise.

Identify broad trends in your feedback data but don’t neglect individual experiences. 

Remember, your customer base is your knowledge base.

5. Be where your customers are

All of your departments have a stake in your social media presence. 

For example, your tech team needs to see comments from people griping about bugs, glitches, and inefficiencies. You don’t just need to identify and fix your faults; you need to interact with users, acknowledge their frustrations, and let them see you addressing their issues in a timely fashion.

Your social media team can encourage people to interact both with your brand and each other. Help your loyal fans connect over their common interest in your product/service. And make sure to track your customer-to-customer interaction metrics.

A recent outage by the Slack app played out in social media with frequent communication, plus humility and empathy. Rather than stale, programmed status updates, Slack chose to communicate with messages like these: 

We’re digging into the problem with the highest priority. Thank you for your patience as we work on this.

Sorry for the panic. We’re working towards a resolution asap and will provide another update as soon as we can here: https://status.slack.com.

So sorry for making your morning harder. We’re doing everything we can to get everything back to normal as quickly as possible.

6. Be transparent and communicate often and effectively

Of all customer service outcomes, a positive feedback loop is the most desirable. It’s far easier to maintain healthy customer relationships than to repair your reputation.

By providing operational transparency, you can create a workplace culture that keeps getting better and better.

In a 2016 study of food service workers, researchers observed operational transparency benefits for both customers and employees. Customers who could see workers making their meals reported higher perceptions of employee effort. They were 22% more likely to rate their experience as high quality.

Workers in this study who experienced customer transparency felt their efforts impacted others. Researchers reported a 19% reduction in throughput times from employees who felt seen and appreciated. They pointed out the power of transparency to create reciprocal value for all stakeholders.

Not every business can make its operations publicly visible, but every company can communicate more often, own its mistakes, and share milestones. Demonstrate honesty and transparency to create loyal customers, and take care to track this customer communication.

Get creative: How can you provide genuine, transparent interactions between your customers and your employees?

Improve your customer interactions with Insightly

Use Insightly Service to foster customer relationships. Analyze feedback on centralized customer interactions dashboards. Close tickets and share mission-critical information across your organization faster than ever. Get a timely read on current and historical customer status and spark more engaging, relevant conversations. Empower internal teams with the data they need to perform their roles effectively. 

When you use Insightly CRM and Insightly Marketing with Insightly Service, you align your teams and provide unified help desk, marketing, and sales experiences. Your team is empowered to identify, meet, and exceed customer needs, in real time.

Get your free trial of Insightly today.

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Single customer view (SCV), also called a unified customer view, is the process of presenting a single, accurate record for each customer. SCVs allow cross-functional teams and organizations to use aggregated data to drive higher value business outcomes and provide high-quality customer experiences.

Single customer views are imperative for organizations looking to maintain a competitive edge and provide superior customer experiences. In many organizations today, customer data is stored across several different platforms, accessible by individual teams and access is limited or non-existent for many others. This decentralization and inaccessibility leads to missed opportunities, poor customer satisfaction, and lower value business outcomes. 

A 360-degree unified customer view often includes the following data:  

• CRM and customer data
• Behavioral data
• Marketing channel interactions
• Sales representatives’ interactions
• Support tickets
• Project status

Next, we’ll discuss what types of data you’ll want in your single customer view, and the six core benefits you’ll experience once you put yours in place.

What types of data should be in your SCV?

The single customer view is crucial for business success. Data can no longer be stored piecemeal in one platform or another and isolated from the rest of the organization. Instead, data must be shared and instantly accessible across your organization. Single customer views allow you to make critical business decisions with a full picture. The types of data that make the biggest impact are listed below.

Behavioral Data 

Single customer views aggregate a customer’s behavioral data, including website interactions, form submissions, and time on site data (among many other metrics) to allow marketers to make split-second decisions on their audiences’ preferences and buyer’s journey. This data is typically isolated to marketing. With a SCV, sales reps benefit when they know what content piece or pages a prospective customer viewed that prompted them to talk to sales. 

Sales Representatives’ Interactions

SCVs include the most important driver of revenue in a business: sales representatives’ interactions. Pre-sales follow-up and high-quality interactions with customers (driven by background information and superior customer intelligence) are some of the major reasons customers choose one brand over another.   

While most organizations believe they win or lose on price, it’s often service that is the bigger factor, according to recent research from DoubleCheck. In one of DoubleCheck’s recent new win/loss program client onboarding sessions with a midsize enterprise software vendor, the CMO stated, “We felt like the pre-sales support we received wasn’t great, so we didn’t think the solution was worth the extra price.” 

Flaws in pre-sales support can be a major reason C-suite execs or Product Managers often pass on one particular solution in favor of another. SCVs expose this interaction data to your entire organization to create a complete picture of how all teams share in the sales process. For instance, marketing and customer service can get better insight into the sales process when they see phone call frequency/notes, email chains, or in-person interactions (events or quick meetings) that the sales team conducts. Perhaps a customer success rep can better serve a client with a support question if he or she knows that the client is in talks with a sales rep about upselling to the next level of service on your platform.

Customer Service Representatives Interactions

The support tickets that customers submit give insight into how they are using your product or service.  Your technical support team can field hundreds of support tickets per day. Having customer service interaction data at the ready for all teams helps improve understanding across the organization when all teams can see the most common concerns coming in. 

For instance, if a sales team member is on an upsell call with a customer, it’s helpful for that person to know that the client has three open support tickets. Engineering may be interested in seeing what’s causing concern within the user base in real time. Marketing, the team most likely to be monitoring social channels, can benefit from knowing if there are issues with a feature that may come up in social posts.

Marketing Channel Interactions

The number of MarTech applications has risen astronomically in recent years. Chances are, your marketing team has a sizable MarTech stack with tons of valuable information on various platforms. 

Single customer views allow your organization to consolidate fragmented marketing channel interactions into actionable data. It is essential for marketers to clearly understand what is happening across social platforms, SEO tools, ad platforms, SMS tools, marketing automation platforms, and more.

With single customer views, marketers in your organization will no longer be required to waste time and effort logging into multiple platforms to monitor campaign data and conversions. SCVs simplify the work for data analysts by providing a holistic, easy-to-customize view of a customer’s journey across channels, providing a window into the customer’s behavior – tracking their journey from search, to clicks, and ultimately helping you better understand how, when, and why they purchase your product. Better yet, this data is shared across teams like sales and customer success for better communication.

6 Single Customer View Benefits

1. No more data duplication

SCVs eliminate the widespread issue of data duplication across your organization. When data is duplicated, there is a strong likelihood of errors.

2. A better understanding of every single customer

SCVs combine all of the random decentralized fragments of data collected across your organization and then build a true roadmap that clearly presents a holistic view of how your customers interact with your brand, make purchases, and interact with your customer service teams. SCVs allow you to:

• Instantly view each customer interaction and get up to speed on ticket statuses to avoid going into a conversation unprepared or ill-informed. 
• Avoid the frustration of working in standalone service applications.
• Access multiple data points in a single platform – communicate faster, deliver better experiences, and resolve customer issues faster.

3. Improved personalization opportunities

A 360-degree view allows customer service agents and marketers the ability to custom-tailor solutions and interactions as they track each and every touchpoint your customer has with your brand. 

• Understanding your customer’s behaviors allows your organization to build 1:1 relationships and rich, personalized experiences.
• Improved personalization increases brand credibility and enhanced authenticity.
• Better customer experience and more opportunities for customer engagement result from a deeper understanding of customer intent.

4. More efficient marketing campaigns

SCVs allow your team to improve targeting and reach customers at their decision point rather than dragging out marketing campaigns due to poor understanding of each segment’s customer journey. 

• Single customer views ensure better audience segmentation and improve campaign performance.
• Enriched data allows you to improve your ad spend and laser-target your marketing messages to ensure they reach the right audience at the right time.

5. Faster customer service inquiry resolutions

A 360-view of each customer enables you to empower your teams to quickly solve customer challenges.

• Mission-critical customer data is available to all your teams, in real time, empowering them to have more relevant conversations that drive customer satisfaction and success.
• Your team can close tickets and share information across your organization faster than ever.
• Understanding churn rates and churn risk tells you where and when to intervene, re-engaging customers throughout the renewal cycle.

6. A better user experience

Rich user experiences increase the likelihood of future purchases and ensure customer delight across all segments. Delivering world-class experiences will set you apart, drive growth, and improve your brand’s positioning as a leader in your industry. 

Get a 360 degree Unified Customer View in a Unified CRM

Your SCV can be a reality; choosing the right CRM is a first step. Insightly’s Account Plan feature is a great way to set the vision for your SCV. If you’re ready to choose your first CRM switch from your current platform, it’s time to check out Insightly, a unified CRM that combines sales, marketing, project management, and service into one platform to unify your teams. Plus, with Insightly AppConnect, you can build low-code or no-code integrations to connect Insightly with all of the other tools you use throughout your organization. 

Know your customers. Build stronger relationships and unify your fractured data with Insightly’s unified CRM. Schedule a free needs assessment and a demo today.

The post Single Customer View: What it is and why you need it appeared first on Insightly.

Engagement is a predictor of whether or not that customer will stay with you, and possibly even refer you, so it can be a leading metric for future revenue and growth.

So here’s how to use your CRM to track customer engagement and the appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your business size.

What is customer engagement?

Though a sale or a subscription is a landmark in a customer’s relationship with your company, it’s just the beginning. Engaged customers create emotional bonds with your brand, and can create a valuable feedback loop for product improvements. 

You can elect to add engaged customers to customer or member councils who can get early access to new products or services and provide candid feedback in both one-on-one and focus-group style programs. If you’re in software, your engaged customers can be the ultimate beta testing group. 

In the positive cases, engaged customers become brand champions who are willing to provide referrals, testimonials, and enthusiastic reviews. In the best cases, they become brand evangelists who regularly engage in a positive manner with your brand on social media, and may even speak on your behalf at events, effectively functioning as an extension of your marketing team. 

Why measure customer engagement?

While engagement is a major revenue predictor in recurring revenue businesses, all businesses can benefit from surfacing these metrics. No one will argue that engaged customers create lasting value for your company. Knowing you can count on positive references and referrals from clients will help you compete for more and bigger deals. While some of this will likely be qualitative in nature, there are tools and metrics available today that can quantify engagement and track it over time, giving you insights into past, present, and future performance.

Five customer engagement metrics and KPIs that matter

There are five top customer engagement metrics that matter to nearly all companies. Each is described below. If you are wondering which matters the most to your company in particular, read on. At the end of each KPI summary, you’ll see a list of which kinds of companies typically prioritize it.

Start-ups defining and implementing their Unique Selling Points (USPs) will track different KPIs than mid-market companies working to scale up, gain traction, and win market share. Massive corporations typically focus on metrics that reflect their dependence on established brand reputations. That said, these metrics surface at the top for nearly all organizations.

1. First-week engagement

Engagement is often at its peak at the start of a contract. Make the most of your customer’s initial enthusiasm with streamlined setups, progress tracking, and solid support.

In a 2021 study, Linköping University’s Gustav Fridell examined SaaS best practices. He found that reducing friction and monitoring progress increased first-week retention.

Consider guiding, tracking, and displaying your new user’s progress through the onboarding process. They are more likely to stick with your solution if they can visualize a successful customer journey, especially during their first crucial steps.

For example, these tips can improve the new customer experience and lower abandonment and unsubscribe rates in the software industry:

• Make your platform or tool intuitive and easy to learn.
• Offer fast page load speeds.
• Prioritize addressing bugs and glitches that emerge during onboarding steps.
• Demonstrate ‘quick wins’ and value early on.

No user experience is perfect. Inevitably, people will have some trouble adopting your products or services. When they reach out, you need to offer reliable customer service to promote customer retention. Invest in robust support and show new customers you care about their success. 

Chatbots can be a great tool when implemented thoughtfully, but nothing is better than interacting with a deeply-knowledgeable support person. Short term churn can be avoided by quickly showing value to your customer in the onboarding phase. You have to get it right.  

Best for: Mid-market companies, especially startups, should hyper-focus on frictionless onboarding, user journey tracking, and responsive, knowledgeable support. At a small scale, individual customer success equals corporate viability.

Large brands with solid reputations enjoy more initial customer enthusiasm than smaller organizations. Their positive legacy marketing efforts mean users are less likely to jump ship when frustrated.

2. User Activity

SaaS companies, mainly social media platforms, eCommerce brands, and game manufacturers, pay close attention to their Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU) metrics. However, DAUs and MAUs aren’t just about competing for market share. Together they create an early-warning system. 

Think of MAUs as benchmarks and DAUs as indicators. If you see a significant difference between your daily numbers and your monthly averages, something unfavorable is happening. DAU valleys or spikes could be your first signal of a major problem or win.

Best for: Companies of all sizes should compare DAUs to MAUs to stay ahead of news events and emerging trends. Small and medium-sized companies can track this metric to acknowledge marketing strategy milestones. However, MAUs are crucial for large companies to maximize their market share for bottom-line profitability.

3. Stickiness

You can use DAUs and MAUs to measure “stickiness.” This metric represents how happy people are with your product or service based on how frequently they are returning. It’s an effective way to predict how likely users are to stick with your brand.

Typically, stickiness equals Daily Active Users divided by Monthly Active Users.

Stickiness = DAU / MAU

However, you may want to consider alternative formulas that account for unique users. Unique users represent the number of visitors to your site. An increase in this metric shows your company and website are growing. 

Businesses often look to churn rate as a measure of stickiness, but keep in mind that churn is a lagging indicator that doesn’t allow you to be as proactive as the formula above. 

Best for: Stickiness matters most for startups that need to build momentum and raise brand awareness. 

Mid-market and large businesses also want to limit turnover, but they are typically better positioned to tolerate variations in customer engagement and have more varied marketing campaigns.

4. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

You’ve likely seen NPS in action even if you’ve never heard the term. If you’ve ever been presented with a scale from 1-10 asking how likely you are to recommend a company, you’ve been NPS’d. The idea is that the most satisfied customers (those who rank you as a 9 or 10) will spread the word about your product or service. 

When you survey your customers, some will say they’ll probably promote you to their peers. Some will say they won’t. And some won’t feel inclined to share positive or negative information about you. The scale lists scores of 0-6 as “detractors”, 7-8 as “passives,” and 9-10 as “promoters.”

To calculate your NPS, subtract the percentage of survey respondents who would say negative things from those who would offer positive things about your brand.

NPS = Promoter % – Detractor %

For example, if 70% of people share positives and 20% share negatives, your NPS would equal 50. Many popular brands struggle with their NPS score. Apple, which is considered world-class when it comes to NPS, sits at around 50.

Best for: Large companies with massive ad budgets need to track brand health with the NPS metric carefully. Experts consider this a fundamental KPI for predicting near-term revenues, especially your target audience. Smaller and emerging businesses that rely less on brand recognition and more on networking and feature-driven ad campaigns rely less on this KPI.

5. Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

SaaS companies often measure CSAT by asking users for short one-to-five star or emoji ratings. You can use these quick check-ins to measure the customer experience with the features they use. 

This is different from NPS, which provides a more general satisfaction rating of your product, service, or brand. In short, CSAT tracks customer satisfaction, and NPS measures customer loyalty.

Best for: Because they focus almost exclusively on new solutions and USPs, startups must measure CSATs. Small SaaS businesses need to know specific user preferences when offering suites of new tools. Larger companies need CSAT data when adding features but depend more on NPS scores for predictions.

Track user engagement and much more with Insightly Service and unified CRM

There are other metrics out there, but this list represents a good batch to focus on first.  

With Insightly Service, mission-critical customer data is available to all your teams, in real time, empowering them to have more relevant conversations that drive customer satisfaction and success. A dashboard view gives you rolled-up access to the data that’s important across the organization and to measure the KPIs that are vital to your team. 

Break down silos with a robust view of the customer. Empower your support teams to solve tickets quickly, listen with empathy, and create sales opportunities right in the application. See the features that matter to you with a free demo of Insightly today.

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Customer success and customer service are fundamental components in your organization’s ability to deliver great experiences and create long-lasting relationships.  More specifically, these two teams are at the very center of your organization’s efforts to drive adoption, retention, and ultimately, customer loyalty. And according to the Harvard Business Review, companies with a focus on loyalty grow revenues roughly 2.5 times as fast as their industry peers.

Businesses are increasingly differentiating themselves from the competition by providing seamless continuity across customer success and customer service, and ensuring that their employees are able to demonstrate expertise, insights, and empathy in every single customer interaction.  

Customer service and customer success are aligned in that both teams are responsible for creating and maintaining customer loyalty. But there are differences in each team’s remit. Understanding the differences and how they can complement each other is essential for minimizing churn and maximizing revenue growth.

Identifying the differences between customer success and customer service

Customer service and customer success together constitute the perfect marriage of reactive and proactive customer engagement. 

Customer service is primarily reactive. Teams respond in the moment, as quickly as possible, to customer tickets, concerns, and complaints. There might be a technical issue to solve, or a bug to identify and report to engineering. Customers might also reach out to the support team to address learning needs, or alleviate confusion about how to leverage and optimize product feature sets and functionality.  Customer service also has the opportunity, by listening with intention, to identify and create sales opportunities based on unique customer requirements and growth strategies. 

Customer success is primarily proactive, with a focus on the strategic, long-term view. CS teams typically focus first on the onboarding process to encourage engagement and adoption, and drive retention. They continue to build for the future by leading customers through quarterly business reviews to analyze performance and create long-term, strategic mutual success plans to optimize the investment that customers have made in your product or service. 

Exploring the intersection of customer success and customer service

Even though these roles are clearly differentiated, ultimately, they need each other to optimize performance and orchestrate successful customer outcomes.  They become exponentially more valuable to your organization through cross-functional engagement and alignment. The primary way to achieve that is through enhanced communication across teams, facilitated by a unified customer data platform. 

To explore this concept in more detail, we spoke with Zeke Silva, Insightly’s Senior Director of Client Services, and Luke Via, Insightly’s Senior Director of Customer Success. They share key takeaways on their partnership in delivering exceptional customer experiences at Insightly. 

Securing a complete view of the customer

“Our collaboration has centered on breaking down barriers around securing a complete view of the customer. CS maps success to alignment with customers. If my team isn’t armed with detailed customer service ticket information to round out that full view, there’s a risk that we look out of touch,” said Via.  

Via and Silva’s teams are empowered to capture actionable customer insights through Insightly’s unified platform. “With data across sales, marketing, and service on the same platform, we’re armed with a complete view of our customers,” adds Silva. “My team works primarily in the Service app to capture current customer status, and that information is available to Luke’s team, and the rest of the organization, immediately–it’s completely frictionless, which enhances our ability to be successful across functional groups.”

Maximizing performance and creating impact

This seamless flow of information across the platform has made a tremendous impact in their teams’ ability to drive great experiences. 

According to Via, “With a consolidated platform view, we’re all able to do a much better job of anticipating and over delivering on outcomes. We’ve got the right information to guide conversations more effectively and with more impact. It also helps our teams move with greater velocity. We don’t need to schedule meetings to find out more about current customer status; the data is right there in the platform and anyone can access it quickly and efficiently. It’s made a huge difference during COVID, with remote teams. Ultimately, having access to support, marketing, and sales data in a single platform, and easily accessible to everyone, has freed up time for our teams and enhanced their productivity. It’s empowered my team to be much more strategic in their account interactions, which creates value for us and our customers.”

Silva adds, “With a unified view of our customers, we can all pick up the relationship right where it’s at. My team uses the data they collect in the Service app to quickly react and troubleshoot on behalf of customers, and Luke’s team uses that same information, along with data in the CRM, to facilitate proactive, strategic conversations leading to transformational growth.”

Empower your teams with unified data

A unified data platform is at the nexus of creating loyalty, building long-term customer relationships and growing your business.  Customer success and customer service teams, along with the rest of your organization, require unified data to optimize communication, create visibility through the entire customer lifecycle, and maximize productivity.  Empower your teams with the data they need to capitalize on insights and deliver exceptional experiences. 

Key takeaways:

• Remote work makes it even more imperative for cross-functional teams to have access to the tools and systems they need to support their customers
• The tools and processes you create should make it easier, not harder, for your teams to do their jobs, and ultimately, create impact for customers.  Think about ways to deliver information quickly and easily, with fewer meetings. 
• Optimize knowledge transfer, communication, and outcomes through a unified data platform across sales, marketing, and service for a full view to the customer relationship
• Make sure everyone has access to the same information so that, as Silva says, you can all “pick up the relationship right where it’s at.”

If you’re just getting started, be sure to check out the other articles in this four-part series: 

• Part 1: 5 customer service skills to build great customer relationships
• Part 2: 4 customer service challenges (and how to solve them)
• Part 3: 4 tips for creating a customer-centric experience

Interested in learning more about how you can align your customer service and customer success teams?  Chat with us.

The post Customer service + success: designed to drive exceptional experiences appeared first on Insightly.

Many companies talk about being “customer-centric.” In reality, too few invest the time and effort to provide truly customer-centric experiences.

How can you push your organization to become more customer-centric?

Recently, I sat down with Luke Via, Senior Director of Customer Success at Insightly, to discuss best practices for enabling customer-centric experiences. Here are four important tips to consider.

1. Align around providing the best possible customer experience

Modern buying cycles are complex. Gone are the days of exclusively relying on sales to handle every customer interaction. Marketing, customer success and support, product development, finance, and a myriad of other stakeholders play important roles in the customer experience.

Before you can align your teams and individual contributors around an ideal experience, you need alignment at the top. “Being customer-centric requires alignment among all of a company’s executives and agreement to focus on the best possible customer experience,” says Luke Via, Senior Director of Customer Success at Insightly. “From marketing to selling to supporting customers with great products and services, leaders must consciously seek new ways to improve.”

Open and honest communication is the best way to cultivate alignment among leaders. Start an internal conversation and begin collecting opportunities for improvement. Explore how your company can maximize value across every stage of the customer experience—and with the highest level of satisfaction. Which parts of the customer experience are contributing to (or eroding) satisfaction?

Tip: Frontline staff, who regularly interact with your customers, can be an excellent source of ideas. Find ways to include them in the conversation, too!

2. Define your ideal customer journey

Once leadership agrees that the customer experience is a top priority, it’s time to develop a shared vision of the ideal pre-sale and post-sale experience. “Leaders need to gain a clear understanding of a customer’s desired outcome,” says Luke. “It’s about knowing where customers are today, why they arrived at your solution, and the resources they’re willing to spend to achieve their goals.”

Journey mapping is one approach for obtaining a shared vision of the customer experience. As pointed out in 3 ways to use CRM data in building customer journeys, mapping your current journeys involves three basic steps:

Define your ICPs and personas. Gain a clear understanding of the types of companies and people you serve. What do they have in common? Organizing customers by ICP (ideal customer profile) and persona will make it easier to think in terms of an “ideal” experience.

Gather data to identify similar journeys. How do your ICPs and personas advance through the customer journey? Do they go through common steps when purchasing or renewing? Use data from your CRM or other business systems to avoid flawed assumptions.

Build your customer journey map. Your journey map could be a simple spreadsheet or a complex diagram. Either way, the end product should be backed by real-world data and easily accessible by leadership. Which parts of the journey are less than ideal for the customer? What steps can be taken to provide a more customer-centric experience?

Frequently reevaluating your journeys through the eyes of the customer will help you close the gap between the status quo and the ideal. And, according to Luke, it’s also an activity that can have a measurable impact on your bottom line. “If you provide the best experience possible, customers are more likely to stay,” says Luke. “So, if you’re looking to grow, you should be customer-focused through the entire journey.”

3. Get the right data, metrics, and tools

How do you know if you’re providing a customer-centric experience? Collecting the right data and monitoring the right metrics is key for establishing a baseline and tracking progress. Which data and metrics are most important? The answer may vary from company to company, but here are a few to consider:

CSAT is the measurement of a customer’s satisfaction with a particular interaction. A sustained uptick in aggregated CSAT can mean that customers are generally happier with their experiences.

Contraction, or churn, measures the number of customers who take their business elsewhere during a period of time. Negative experiences lead to elevated levels of contraction, while positive experiences reduce churn. So, it stands to reason that lower contraction indicates an improvement in the customer experience.

Average time spent per support ticket measures how long agents take to resolve customer issues. Customers prefer shorter wait times to longer ones, so reducing time per ticket is bound to make customers happier in the long run.

Aligning all of your customer interactions—across sales, support, and marketing—into one system like Insightly can make it easier to track and report on key metrics. Eliminating data silos reduces complexity and makes it easier to develop a comprehensive view of the customer experience.

4. Establish an effective feedback loop

Internal data and metrics are no substitute for direct customer feedback. Unfortunately, many companies struggle to implement a scalable feedback loop. “Effective companies do more than ask for feedback,” says Luke. “They use feedback to initiate meaningful internal discussions and ultimately communicate it back to their customer base.”

For example, Insightly’s founder and CEO, Anthony Smith, regularly hosts product release webinars to share the company’s latest innovations—innovations that stem largely from customer feedback. These webinars not only serve as an effective vehicle for feature announcements, but they also help customers feel more connected—and committed—to the Insightly experience. “Celebrating victories is huge because people want to feel like they’re being heard,” says Luke. “Forming an emotional connection further solidifies the customer’s connection to the company.”

Time for a customer-centric approach?

Customers have never had more choices at their disposal. In an increasingly commoditized marketplace, the companies that deliver the best experiences will win.

Stay tuned for additional customer service tips. Next time, we’ll explore the relationship between customer success and the customer experience.

The post 4 tips for creating a customer-centric experience appeared first on Insightly.

This is part 2 of a customer service blog series based on conversations with members of Insightly’s client services and customer success teams.

In part 1 of this customer service blog series, we discussed five important skills for building great relationships. Continuing on with my discussion with Zeke Silva, Sr. Director Client Services at Insightly, today we’ll discuss a few challenging situations in customer service—and how agents can apply their skills to overcome them.

1. Getting to the root of the problem

“It just doesn’t work.”

If you’ve spent any time in customer service, you’ve probably heard customers make general statements like this. Deciphering what the customer actually means can sometimes be more challenging than fixing the problem at hand. Is your product or service actually broken, or does the customer simply not understand how to make something work? Is this a support issue, or does it have more to do with training?

The customer’s level of technical expertise is a key factor to keep in mind when trying to get to the root of the problem. “You have to be very careful with word choice, especially if you’re working with someone who isn’t tech-savvy or familiar with your product,” says Zeke Silva, Sr. Director Client Services at Insightly. Newbies aren’t the only ones who can cause challenging situations for customer service agents. “On the flip side, you also have to be ready to help that super-technical customer, too,” says Zeke.

Try this: Avoid jumping straight into the weeds and making incorrect assumptions. According to Silva, a better approach starts with asking general questions. “You have to treat it like a funnel and slowly—or quickly—work towards more pointed questions,” says Zeke.

2. Dealing with seasonal fluctuations and other growing pains

Answering dozens of similar support tickets can lead to a numbing effect that quickly erodes an agent’s ability to empathize with customers. That’s especially true when your company experiences a period of rapid hypergrowth or a seasonal uptick in demand. Focusing too much on average handle time, time to resolution, and other performance metrics at the expense of the customer journey will only compound the problem.

Experienced customer service teams seek a balanced approach that focuses on efficiency and effectiveness without losing touch of the bigger picture. For Insightly’s support team, this means reminding agents that each new quarter is an opportunity to serve an entirely new batch of customers—many of whom may have similar questions. “Having agents ready for that prepares them to be in the right mindset for responding appropriately,” says Zeke. “Preparing the team for an influx enables them to offer a great experience, especially for brand new customers who may be switching from a competitor.”

Try this: Re-examine your company’s revenue patterns and identify periods that tend to yield large influxes of new customers or support requests. Proactively communicate this to your customer service team and make sure they’re amped up to handle the surge.

3. Advocating for the customer when things break

Not every customer service issue can be resolved with a simple email, phone call, or screen share. Sometimes things break and require a considerable amount of effort to identify, replicate, capture, and fix the underlying problem.

Training front-line support staff to diagnose and escalate tickets is the first step. However, escalating a ticket will do no good unless there is a reliable infrastructure in place to deal with bugs and other unexpected problems. “You don’t just throw a baseball at someone and hope they’re ready to catch it,” says Zeke. “They’ve got to be ready to receive it, and the same is true for dealing with escalated tickets.”

Solving complex problems may require input from multiple stakeholders across customer service, operations, engineering, and other teams. And, that’s no small task in a business environment that’s still dominated by remote work. It’s difficult to be an effective advocate for the customer when information is spread across multiple inboxes, threads, and systems. That’s why having all of your essential customer data in one, easily accessible location is particularly important.

Try this: Audit your existing ticket escalation workflow and look for ways to improve it. Where does information tend to get lost or overlooked? How does communication break down across departments? How can you consolidate overlapping systems and make it easier to advocate for your customers?

4. Holding other teams accountable

Streamlining ticket escalations, reducing overlapping systems, and eliminating data silos is a major step forward, but doing so doesn’t guarantee accountability from the rest of your company. To ensure timely resolution for your customers, it’s best to establish cross-departmental service-level agreements (SLAs) that are backed by leaders from each team.

Tying internal SLAs to customer-facing SLAs is another strategy for creating urgency throughout the organization. For example, Insightly users on the Ultimate success plan can expect to receive a response within one hour of sending an email. “That builds confidence with customers that they’ll get a first touch within a certain amount of time,” says Zeke. Once an issue has been validated, Insightly’s engineering team sequences the work based on previously agreed to SLAs, which gives the support team—and, in turn, the end user—a specific time frame for achieving a satisfactory outcome.

Keeping the lines of communication open is essential for avoiding misunderstandings. Insightly’s support team also sends a bi-weekly email to engineering, which contains additional context for prioritizing customer requests. “We’ve created multiple avenues to prioritize and elevate,” says Zeke.

Try this: Formalize the working relationship between your customer-facing and back-office teams, perhaps through one or more SLAs. Gain buy-in from leaders from across the organization and look for ways to tie agreements back to customer expectations.

Next up, tips for becoming even more customer-centric

Stay tuned for the next article in this series. We’ll be moving beyond customer service issues and focusing our attention on proactive strategies that ensure a customer-centric experience.

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