Over the past two years, the Internet has become our conference room, gym, doctor’s office, personal gathering place—basically, our whole life. With consumers spending more time online than ever before, companies have had to rethink their customer service experience. Businesses need to gain a clear understanding of the type of digital interactions customers want instead of relying on intuition.
You’ve probably heard someone say that the customer is always right, especially if you’ve had experience in customer service or retail. But have you ever thought about what the statement implies? Who came up with this philosophical note? Does this hold true 24/7? Let’s reveal some of these answers.
A great customer experience features efficient and personalized interactions at each step of the buyer’s journey. But in order to achieve this, companies need a way to quickly analyze customer data and act on it. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report, businesses that leverage customer data see 36-percent faster resolutions and a 79-percent reduction in wait times; they also solve four times the number of customer requests.
Let’s start with the basics: What is a customer touchpoint? To put it simply, a customer touchpoint is any time a consumer interacts with your brand, whether that’s through an employee, a website, an advertisement, or an app. And the experiences consumers have with those touchpoints can shape how they view your company.
When it comes to relationships between individuals, building trust isn’t a very difficult thing to do. It typically requires only a few points of relatability—movies or books you both enjoy, places you’ve visited, and so on—until a level of camaraderie is established. The task becomes infinitely harder, however, when it comes to sales relationships.
It’s easy to talk about being a customer-first organization. It’s comforting to think that everyone in the organization puts the customer first. This attitude should, in theory, lead to happier customers, better business outcomes, and the type of place anyone would love to work. But defining and executing a customer-first strategy is not as organic as it might seem.
Customer satisfaction has been dropping in the US since about 2018, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The question is why, especially when so many companies are trying hard to meet customer needs on a variety of fronts. There are some general trends that offer clues—for example, customer expectations keep rising. Customers have become much more critical of everything, whether it’s product quality, delivery, or customer service.
Social media is now a valuable part of many brands’ customer service strategies. While you can use almost every major platform like Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram for connecting with your customers, Twitter has become a personal favorite for customers to report any grievances or share their feedback.
A Contact Us page isn’t just another page on your website. In fact, it is one of your most valuable pages—and should be treated as such. A contact page provides guidance for existing customers and offers an overview of your brand for new visitors. But contact pages aren’t always crafted with care. They might be missing a phone number or links to social channels, or they may be totally outdated or tricky to navigate—all of which makes for a bad customer experience.
