As technology converges and start-ups grow, businesses and consumers have more choices than ever. Smart executives know that the customer experience is what is going to win in today’s crowded marketplace. 

But you’ve got this, right? You’ve mapped the customer journey and you’ve analyzed the customer experience (CX). Customer support is the pride and joy of your company. Your execs think that customers are thrilled with your service. 

But are they?

According to a recent survey commissioned by Insightly and conducted by Zogby Analytics, there is a disconnect between what consumers say and what companies believe. 

Only 6% of consumers say a company’s customer support always exceeds expectations but 35% of business decision makers believe that their company always exceeds customers’ expectations.

Ouch.

There’s a CX disconnect  

Maybe your CX team isn’t killing it? Check out these stats:

About a third of Americans (31%) would rather wait in line at the DMV than try to resolve an issue with a company or service. They would also learn a TikTok dance with their kid (18%), get a tooth pulled (14%), or stay with their in-laws for a month (10%).

Why would anyone choose these awful alternatives to simply placing a call with customer service? According to the study, they say they fear being ignored (30%), having to repeat oneself to multiple departments (30%) and length of time to get the issue identified (27%).

How does your customer support process work? Would your customers ever feel ignored during the process, get stuck in ‘a phone tree of frustration,’ or spend an unreasonable amount of time on the phone? 

When was the last time you tested it? Listened to calls? Sent in a social media message to see the response?

It’s always a good time to examine your processes and look for incremental improvements. 

Appreciating your customer support team

Don’t ever underestimate what it takes to answer support calls. You need a deep understanding of your product and your customers, plus a whole lot of empathy. These team members start each day knowing that every time they pick up a call, they may be dealing with an irate person. 

Business decision makers on the same Insightly survey don’t seem to have the personality to perform the functions that their support teams do. 

For example, 44 percent of business decision makers surveyed said they’d rather enter data in a spreadsheet than deal with a call from an angry customer, while three in 10 said they would do almost anything other than take an angry call, like sit on an 8-hour Zoom call (13%) or sit next to a crying baby on a cross-country flight (15%).

How do we show this team how awesome they truly are? First off, put National Customer Service Week on your calendar. It’s typically the first week in October. Use this as an opportunity to recognize your team’s hard work. But don’t wait for a special occasion; check in on the team and ensure they have the leadership, tools, and bandwidth to make every engagement a successful one. 

CX shows up on the bottom line

There is good news here, too. Unlike the external threats to your business like emerging competitors, market forces, economic downturns and the like, customer experience is something you fully control.

Data from the same study reveals just how powerful this can be.

When customers are unhappy, businesses worry that they will complain to customer service (23%), complain on social media (56%) or, even worse, choose a different provider (21%).

However, when happy, American consumers are most likely to tell all their friends (27%), tell the company (25%), write a comment on review sites (23%) and post about it on social media (15%).

These actions should sound familiar since they are all characteristics of brand advocates. According to Entrepreneur.com, brand advocates are super fans and brand loyalists who engage with the brand because they truly love it and will take action if asked.

If you reframe calls and outreach to customer service as an opportunity to create brand advocates, you start a cycle that fills the top of your funnel with new leads. 

Feed the top of the funnel with successful CX

After seeing these statistics, what are some action steps that leaders like you can take today? 

• Examine closed tickets. Don’t just read them. Look at the time stamps. Look at the length of the calls. Listen to the calls if possible. How can each interaction be studied and improved the next time?
• Reframe your mindset on support. Every time the phone rings or an email is submitted is an opportunity to create a positive experience and produce a brand advocate. Think about the things that people said they would rather do than talk to you (e.g. learning a TikTok dance), and then elevate their experience by delighting them.
• Some people will never be happy. Ensure you have ‘no blame culture’ from the top. Frame those negative customer interactions as learning experiences for the team without blaming team members, product, sales, etc.
• Encourage leadership to personally call random customers regularly and check-in to see how they are doing. They could potentially intercept a problem before it snowballs, but they will also gain an understanding of what’s going on daily on the front lines.

Manage relationships with Insightly Service

Your customer service team needs a powerful tool to meet the needs of your customer base. Wouldn’t it be ideal if your tool for customer service was part of the same suite of products as your CRM and marketing automation platform? So the sales, marketing and customer service teams are aligned on a single, powerful platform?

Built on Insightly’s platform, Insightly Service is a customer service and support ticketing product designed to work seamlessly across the business applications that companies are already using. With Insightly Service, critical data is shared across departments and in real-time, so that all customer-facing teams are aligned and empowered to have more relevant conversations that drive customer satisfaction and success.  

Insightly Service can be bundled with the entire Insightly suite of customer relationship management applications and is also available for purchase as a standalone customer service and support product. 

Get a demo of Insightly Service today.

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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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