People live in their own functional domains. They have their responsibilities, their metrics, and they can become defenders of their domains. Though from the best intentions, internal competition ultimately creates the reactionary boundaries that we have come to call silos, which harm an organization in ways that are becoming increasingly fatal.
I won’t spend an inordinate amount of time on this because we all know and dislike silos. We have built an awareness of the problem, and we have an accurate model, so our task is to put our heads together and figure out how to stop them.
As it turns out, customer experience unlocks a radical capability of mapping the customer journey. This sounds innocent enough, I’ll admit, but if you look deeper you will see that this fundamental process is anathema to silos. To destroy silos, all you need to do is focus on changing customer journeys.
https://customerthink.com/break-silos-with-this-secret-customer-experience-weapon-cascading-collaboration/
Implementing the insight from research into your Customer Experience strategy and acting accordingly is a different story.
Just because your satisfaction levels have fallen may not be due to a faulty product as first predicted – you might need to look a bit deeper to discover that actually, the customer service hasn’t been satisfactory or the website is too confusing when purchasing items.
Whatever it may be, the common denominator doesn’t always mean it’s right. So, the data is in front of you, but what next?
http://customerthink.com/how-to-understand-the-truth-behind-customer-feedback/
Surveys might be undermining every customer experience improvement you’re trying to implement. While that may sound counterintuitive, according to a 2016 study of customer perceptions by CEB (now Gartner), 75% of customers agree that their survey experience influences their overall impression of a company ("Closing the Customer Feedback Loop," Gartner's CEB Leadership Council). In short, customers see their survey experience as a component of their customer experience; it’s another touchpoint that impacts their overall relationship. Yet, the increasing ease with which surveys can be created (sometimes without regard for best practices or sound research methods) has led to an ever-increasing number of feedback requests — threatening the quality of those survey experiences and potentially eroding companies’ brand image or increasing customer friction. As a result, organizations must reflect on their survey practices and ask, “How do we adapt to effectively capture customer feedback while improving the customer experience?”
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2018/03/how-salesforce-is-leading-customer-feedback.html/
Earlier this month I attended Social Media Marketing World, the largest conference on social media marketing in the world. Over the last few years, customer service has shifted from traditional phone support toward social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others. Dan Gingiss started the Social Customer Care Track and interest has grown exponentially. The room I spoke in this year was three times larger than last year’s room, and we packed the house.
https://customerthink.com/how-to-turn-social-media-customer-service-into-a-marketing-strategy/
A few years ago, if you were a small business looking to grow, you would have been at a disadvantage when it came to technology-enabled transformation, due to high costs and limited options. Today, the story is completely different. With the rise of cloud-based SaaS applications, technologies that were reserved for businesses with big budgets are now available to small and medium businesses (SMBs) at a fraction of the cost. This makes digital technologies far more accessible and scalable for SMBs. In addition, capabilities available through these applications have also increased exponentially.
Let’s look at some of the ways in which small businesses can use digital technologies to their advantage.
https://www.firstpost.com/business/why-leveraging-data-can-be-a-game-changer-for-small-and-medium-businesses-4417589.html/
Organizations use a variety of data collection techniques. While some are polished and highly effective, others are a jumbled mess and the results look worse than a teenager’s bedroom. If you’re in the latter, good luck trying to make sense of it.
Some organizations have clung to using paper forms. Yes, a form that was created at some point in history and has survived many generations via the copy machine. This means customers and employees are still using a long outdated process to collect data. Paper forms can lead to a truckload of errors – mainly due to poor handwriting, lost forms, paying someone to accurately type the form information into a database, which can lead to typos – thereby rendering the data inaccurate, and the time required to manually input this data possibly worthless. And this could represent a single department in a large organization. If several departments use this same methodology, the error rate may increase by a magnitude.
If this is your data collection process towards building a stronger relationship with your customers, you could be starting off on the wrong foot. If it takes too much time to respond to customer inquiries, or if you can’t because the data is incomplete, you’re probably going to have an uphill battle on your hands if your goal is to impress the customer.
https://customerthink.com/how-companies-can-initiate-customer-relationships-through-smart-and-actionable-data-collection/
Can you go more than a few days without receiving a survey from one of the many companies you do business with?
Companies are hungry for data to guide their business, especially data about their customers and their preferences. And when the use of their product or service made it necessary for you to reach out to customer service for assistance, companies are even more interested in how those interactions went.
A lot has been written on performing customer service or customer satisfaction surveys. I would like to offer just a few best practices to consider based on my own experience being on both sides of the survey.
https://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/3-important-considerations-customer-service-surveys-02037297/
Expresso Fashion and Claudia Sträter are two well-known Dutch fashion brands with stores in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. Alongside their more traditional, brick-and-mortar shops, these labels are also sold online. This omni-channel strategy makes it possible for these two webshops to not only serve as sales channels but also platforms for inspiration. Visitors can get their inspiration online and then choose to do their shopping in the webshop or in-store. In other words, their online services are critical to the success of both on- and offline channels.
Let’s take a look at how they’ve experienced the Mopinion software thus far…
https://mopinion.com/expresso-fashion-claudia-strater-customer-story/
Customers across industries now expect a better overall experience thanks to Amazon, and here are a few ways your business can follow their lead.
http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Web-Exclusives/Viewpoints/3-Ways-Amazon-Has-Raised-the-Bar-on-Customer-Experience--124230.aspx/
Gartner revealed over 50 per cent of businesses plan to reinvest in improving customer service experience. Another study showed that 72 per cent of customers will share a positive experience with six or more people. Getting your customer service right not only improves retention and brand reputation, but it reduces the reliance on new business through upselling to an already captive audience.
With this in mind, I’ve written down some of the core activities I believe every small business should be doing in 2018 to improve customer service experience online.
https://realbusiness.co.uk/sales-and-marketing/2018/04/09/why-customer-service-still-remains-the-most-valuable-weapon-in-your-digital-strategy/
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