Gain and retain customers or lose them! It’s your decision!
In our fast moving markets customers are becoming increasingly demanding while the number of communication channels is growing. Furthermore the underlying technology evolves at very fast pace while organizations request new and innovative approaches.
It becomes very important to have powerful features allowing us to react nimbly to changes in our Customer/member environment.
The Customer Interaction market
The market is constantly changing, the business is moving faster and faster. Customers are becoming more and more demanding and are easily frustrated. They expect high responsiveness, a personalized approach and consistent answers. Nixxis is offering global solutions in this Customer Interaction area.
Customers are becoming ever more demanding
They initiate contact 24hrs a day through their preferred communication channel, demand responsive service and ask for consistent answers. The image they have of a company is based on the experience they might have with the responsiveness and quality of answers over the different communication channels.
Customers nowadays are easily frustrated. They will quickly express their discontent if the responsiveness of the company does not meet their expectations, or if the answers they get are incomplete. With the help of their social network and media-outlets, the company unfortunate flaws will be swiftly exposed.
It becomes very urgent to analyze our situation towards Interaction strategy!
Customers may choose the type, amount and information channel of their preference, for interacting with the organization, as opposed to being imposed what to use.
Some might stick to the phone, others would send an email, start a chat session or may even like to use the self-service capability of your web. What if a consumer does not have access to a specific service, information or product through his chosen interaction channel? He will most likely turn to a competitor.
Nowadays, if you would want to force your customers to use one particular interaction channel, you will obviously fail in giving him the attention he needs and expects.
Every customer/member would want to be approached individually. Budgets once spent on one-way mass-marketing actions are now allocated to interaction strategies, allowing this highly personalized approach.
Every time a customer/member comes in touch with our organization, he obtains an opportunity to form an opinion. Over time the collective set of experiences will form a picture in his mind, which will ultimately shape the brand’s image and its values. Interaction channels are contact points: moments of truth!
‘Nine to five’ serving hours are totally outdated. Customer/members expect service around the clock. Not being able to cope with these renewed demands immediately results in customer/member loss.
Furthermore, customer/members will no longer accept any disruptions in the communication channels due to technical malfunctions. Such occurrences might be interpreted as an excuse to cloak a lack of organization.
The new generation is being raised with state-of-the-art multimedia communication techniques, constantly present in their immediate environment. They see the world through their e-browser. They do not leave the house without their video-enabled mobile phone or PDA.
How does this chatting, text messaging, surfing, and video-conferencing generation affect your interaction strategy? Today they may already represent a consumer group with significant buying power. Tomorrow they might be managers with decision power.
An organization’s success depends on its response speed, capability of using relevant existing information in the interactions, and the speed at which interaction channels are embedded and integrated into the entire organization. The organization will become one large interaction center.
In a globalized world, virtual interaction solutions with short implementation times are vital to allow the organization to react swiftly to new approaches/services.
Interaction managers entering the board of directors are aware that there is no way around the new compelling changes of customer interaction. Interaction managers determine the strategy, and control the profitability of interactions in a globalized and virtual world.
Whatever the interaction channel may be, customer will surely stay and buy services if they trust you. The first and foremost feature to introduce trust into the interactions is the response speed. It is the characteristic of an organization that can easily meet quality standards. The first fundamental success factor in an interaction strategy is the capability of guaranteeing the customer quick response times and service levels over all interaction channels.
The immediate availability of relevant information about the customer and about the former interactions he has had with you, will evoke the customers’ trust. The ‘I am known’ effect has an immediate productive result on the interaction. The second major success factor in an interaction strategy is the integration of the interaction channels with the company databases and information systems.
A customer initiates a question through a chat-session, calls one hour later to give additional information and the day after sends an email to follow-up. The customer is expecting his contact attempt to be handled uniformly, regardless of the interaction channel. It is frustrating to get different answers across the interaction channels.
The fact a question of a customer is routed to several employees each of them handling one specific interaction channel is not accepted anymore. Every customer hates it when he has to repeat over and over again who he is, why he is calling. His frustration reaches the top when he finally hears that emails are read by another department, or that the information is stored in an information system only accessible by another employee.
To answer customers’ questions, companies often decide to put a contact center ahead of the organization. Rather than solving communication problems, this solution evokes customer frustration. What if the customer’s question cannot be handled by front-end employees and has to be forwarded to the back office? If back office employees do not feel customers breathing down their necks, they are less tempted to immediately provide answers. Customer requests should be handled by the appropriate employees, who should have all necessary customer information on display along with the call, email, chat,… This can be achieved by integrating interaction functions in the applications they work with on a daily basis. In short, a company becomes one large interaction center that is able to give the customers first contact resolution. The impact on the customer satisfaction is huge.
Organizations want to develop new markets as fast as possible where these markets were previously absent. In this start-up phase the whole range of interaction channels have to be made available quickly to the prospects and customer’s. Employees need to be equipped with business functionality and interaction channel integrated solutions. Fast and cost-effective implementation of the underlying technology is essential for the success of this new markets.
In case of peaks in the number of interactions, technology has to be able to add additional (human) resources without delay, such as home workers, employees in another subsidiary, self serving solutions, etc. The business requires a truly ‘virtual’ infrastructure.
