Customer expectations are at an all-time high. According to research from Salesforce, 67% of customers say their standards for good experiences are higher than ever. Furthermore, 51% of those surveyed said most companies “fall short of their expectations for great experiences”. That isn’t good news for organizations, which often feel they have bigger priorities than CX. So, how can customer experience transformation enable you to raise your CX standards and meet these high expectations?
Customer experience transformation starting points
Customer experience covers a lot of ground – and a lot of contact touchpoints. But let’s focus on four particular places where you can start making an impact and transforming CX:
- Interacting with customers
- Gathering and processing their data
- Managing customer service cases
- Documents and correspondence
Let’s start with the first one: how your customers interact with you.
Put the helpdesk on hold
Nobody likes waiting to speak to someone from customer services. And these days, many customers actively avoid the phone, preferring their interactions with businesses to take place online. So, why not grant their wish and allow them to communicate and provide information via simple, fast, convenient, digital forms?
Today’s sophisticated digital forms can be accessed via mobile devices or desktop computers alike, allowing the customer to get in touch, make their query/request, or provide their details whenever and however is most convenient to them. That’s a lot more appealing than wasting your lunch break on hold, waiting to speak to someone—so you can see why digital forms play a vital part in customer experience transformation.
Quicker, more accurate data collection and processing
Because these advanced modern forms apply rules to validate data when it’s collected, customers and employees can be automatically alerted if a typo has been made or any other incorrect data entered. That can solve a lot of time later putting mistakes right—for instance, if a payment doesn’t go through because the wrong account details have been entered—not to mention wasted expense and customer/employee frustration.
Once the information is collected, it can then be automatically and instantly processed. Any necessary calculations can be performed by the system, and the data is stored and/or forwarded to the relevant parties in your organization. All this can be achieved using the power of workflow automation.
Think about if the data is instead collected over a phone call, by an employee who has to deal with it all manually. Or if the information arrives at your business in a handwritten paper form, and someone has to manually transfer it to your systems of record. Both of these would mean more time and attention required from staff, and more chances of data entry errors. But digital forms take away the hassle, the risk, the holdups, and the potential for customer dissatisfaction, further transforming CX.
Expediting customer support cases to a smooth resolution
If a customer gets in touch seeking support – with technical issue, say – then workflow automation can help here, too. Customer support cases can be automatically created when the customer makes contact via a form. Next, the details they provided are instantly forwarded to the staff member or department who will be handling the case, i.e. the helpdesk.
So that the case isn’t neglected or forgotten, employees dealing with it can receive automatic reminders that action is needed from them, to keep everything ticking over as smoothly as possible. When one participant has played their part in resolving the case, the next employee required is automatically notified. In this way, cases move smoothly from creation to resolution as swiftly and efficiently as possible. You can even keep the customer in the loop with their own automated notifications when steps in the case process have been completed, giving them a sense of greater transparency and control.
Generating perfect documents automatically
Customer data stored in Salesforce and other systems can also be used to generate documents such as invoices or letters and other correspondence. Instead of painstaking, time-consuming manual drafting by staff-members, these automatically created docs require no effort. And because they use your own pre-defined templates, rules, and data, you can be sure they’re complete, compliant, accurate, and represent your business correctly.
These documents can also be automatically transmitted via email or shared with customers from cloud storage, instead of relying on employees to complete the task manually every time—another great added efficiency.
As with the time-savings in data collection and processing, streamlining and reduction of errors are sure to have a big impact in terms of transforming CX. No more, “Hey, you got my name wrong!” or waiting forever for confirmation and paperwork.
Making your customer experience soar
We hope this article has been useful. If you’d like to explore this topic further, be sure to take a look at our Workflow Wonders webinar featuring Flight Centre Travel Group and discover how they achieved customer experience transformation with the Power of Process®.
Meanwhile, maybe this blog has prompted you to start looking at your own organization’s customer service. If so, why not think of some ways that online forms, document generation, and workflow automation could make a difference for you? Once you start implementing these technologies, you’ll be surprised at all the new usages you can find, raising the bar for your customers and bringing their experiences to new heights of excellence.
Want to learn more about customer experience transformation? Contact Nintex today.
