customer experience - Afrikan Heroes

How mobile service cloud can transform customer experience: 6 key steps

October 18, 2021

James Bayhack is the Director for Sub-Saharan Africa at CM.com

By James Bayhack

Service, service, service. That’s been the call for businesses that want to keep their clients happy and turn one-time customers into lifelong fans. Now, however, the focus has moved to brilliant customer experience. But what does this mean? And why are we seeing the shift?

Think about how you do business today compared to just a few years ago. Customer service was measured by metrics like how many rings there were before your service department answered. In addition, were your retail staff smiling and pleasant, and did your team respond to a customer email timeously? While customer service is still crucial, there’s a lot more to it in today’s multilayered, omnichannel world of business.

**James Bayhack, Director for Sub-Saharan Africa at CM.com**

What is Customer Experience (CX)?

Customer experience is how your customers perceive their interactions with your company or brand.

From navigating the website to contacting customer service and receiving the product that they ordered, customer experience is the sum of every interaction the customer has with your company. It impacts their feelings and emotions, encompassing their entire customer journey. It also determines whether or not they come back.

A recent report by integrated customer experience company Ajua (https://bit.ly/3vkHoPw) found that 81% of Kenyan companies with strong capabilities for delivering customer experience are outperforming their competition. By contrast, 91% of customers will not do business with a company a second time if their first experience is negative.

Findings also suggested that certain industries have upped their CX game and are experiencing growth even in a pandemic. These include banking, insurance, retail, and food and beverage. In the Telco space, Safaricom ranked top in terms of customer experience.

So, some companies are getting it right. Now, the question is, how can you do the same? With such a broad range of expectations, how can you narrow down the most critical factors and eliminate friction where it matters most? You’ll be thrilled to know we’ve done the heavy lifting for you and the easiest solution lies in mobile service cloud (https://bit.ly/3DP9Zj0).

Here’s how this smart technology helps to solve the most common customer issues.

Creating bulletproof CX in 6 key steps

Omnichannel Inbox

In a single, convenient inbox, you can manage conversations from all channels. This solves the issue of long wait times when customers have a problem or question as it places all communication in one place for easy reference and super-fast response.

It’s common for many customers to conduct research before purchasing something from your company, and checking different platforms is one way of doing this. Whether they trust you or not depends on the quality of information they find and your responses along the way.

An omnichannel inbox allows you to deliver a brilliant customer experience on all channels. Don’t you agree that it looks unprofessional if you respond quickly via live chat but not at all via Facebook? When customers receive excellent service, they will tell their colleagues and friends about it.

Communication Stream

It’s important to communicate with customers wherever they feel comfortable and wherever they are likely to be.

Remember, CX is built on the somewhat fickle foundation of customer perception. What makes one person irate may not bother another, so it makes sense to cover all bases. Communication can make or break your CX. Lengthy delays, inefficient processes, or insufficient access to information will have your customers rolling their eyes in frustration.

Customer experience is about strengthening relationships with customers and building bonds through the use of technology.

Chatbots

It used to be considered bad form to chat with a customer via text or any automated platform, but today it’s the norm. In fact, it’s expected.

Streamline repetitive tasks by automating them. Our system allows you to create your own chatbot to automate conversations and implement quick replies. Your team can serve customers better and more efficiently if you make service easier and faster for them, without weighing them down with unnecessary and unproductive conversations.

Chatbots can reflect the personality of your brand, answer FAQs, and direct customers to where they need to be. Fast. A super-efficient addition to your customer service team, they don’t require sleep so they’re even more perfect for those after-hours shoppers. Your customers will benefit from swift response times for quick questions or enjoy assistance from stress-free and focused staff.

Team Collaboration

The problem of disjointed communication between internal and external teams ends here, as do many customer frustrations.

Remote employees, global time differences, and communication with external parties can get messy and negatively impact your SLAs. And really, your internal communication choices shouldn’t impact your customer’s experience, should they?

Mobile service cloud alleviates this problem by bringing all players together in one place, allowing conversations to be automatically assigned based on skills, or snoozing conversations as needed. It’s like putting everyone in the same room at the same time, relegating forgotten messages or misplaced communication to a thing of the past.

Customer Profile

Develop customer profiles based on data from your CRM or Customer Data Platform. The integration of systems enables you to provide customers with a quicker, more personal service experience.

Data can be displayed right next to the customer’s questions, so there’s no need to search across multiple systems. Improve customer profiles by including all available data and getting more insights about customer impact.

This key area grants your team the information they need to assist a customer, no matter what platform they come from. All data is immediately available to all employees no matter where they are, which, let’s face it, makes you look good!

Statistics

Customers are the lifeblood of a business. This is why corporations are concentrating on how to develop new business and, importantly, retain existing customers. However, if you don’t know where a problem lies, you won’t know how to fix it.

Identifying and addressing customer issues can be prevented by using reporting tools that uncover metrics that directly impact your business. Other vital statistics such as ‘response time’ or ‘availability’ highlight how your team is coping with their responsibilities and where improvements can be made. The data in these reports is invaluable to improving customer experience and deep-diving into customer experience metrics (https://bit.ly/3ASUWmC).

As effective as your management team may be, they can’t be omnipresent. But having real-time access to your channels, your team, business partners, and any other stakeholders you care to track gives you information worth its weight in gold.

Boost customer service today

Businesses that adopt a customer experience strategy enjoy success in key areas: their churn rates are reduced, they increase brand loyalty, and revenues are increased. Surely those advantages are worth exploring?

Ultimately, good customer experiences are the most effective form of marketing with the highest ROI. Successful businesses are simply those with happy customers.

James Bayhack is the Director for Sub-Saharan Africa at CM.com

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

Why Most Companies are Getting Customer Experience Wrong

August 5, 2021

Brent Haumann, Managing Director, Striata

By Brent Haumann

Every business knows (or should know) that in order to thrive in today’s competitive world, it has to provide a great customer experience. Unfortunately, too many organisations only have a vague idea of what customer experience (CX) actually means and how to go about getting it right.

This isn’t helped by the fact that there’s so much indecipherable jargon around CX, with the same terms meaning different things to different people.

While there’s no foolproof formula for successful CX, clearing up some of these misunderstandings and constantly referring back to the primary aims of CX are important starting points for any organisation. And one thing that becomes clear when doing so, is how big a role digital communication has to play in driving customer loyalty and advocacy.

The Journey to Loyalty and Advocacy

There are two main drivers of loyalty and advocacy. The first is products and solutions. If your products or solutions stand out from the crowd, chances are customers will come back to you time and time again.

But in a world where almost everyone has access to the same materials and technology, that’s not always easy to achieve. That makes the other driver of loyalty and advocacy, customer experience, all the more important.

The two primary pushers of customer experience are: the perceptions of an organisation, which it can only control to a degree, and the journeys it takes customers through, which it has much more control over.

This is particularly true of the digital journeys organisations take their customers on. These digital journeys take place across all digital touchpoints a customer has with an organisation, including its website, app, social media, and digital communication. Unlike their analogue counterparts, digital journeys allow organisations to build lasting relationships with virtually their entire customer base, creating regular engagement, which is vital to good CX.

Breaking Down the Digital Journey

But digital journeys don’t just happen on their own, organisations have to take care to ensure that the communication driving those journeys happens across the right channels, includes the right content, and is made up of the right processes.

But it breaks down further than that too. Take channels for example. Whatever digital channels an organisation is using to build relationships with its customers, it has to meet certain attributes.

Right Channel, Right Customer, Right Time

It should, for instance, align with a customer’s life, slotting in without disrupting their routine in any way. A good example of this is Discovery’s rewards programme, which recognised that certain segments of its customer base were already living healthy lives and rewarded them for it. That others later wanted to be a part of this and change their lives for the better only validated the point. Customers aligned their lives with the programme because they wanted to, not because Discovery forced them to.

Similarly, organisations need to meet customers where they are. Let’s say a customer is in their email inbox and wants a statement. They should be able to search for and find that statement as easily in their inbox as they can on the bank’s app or website.

That said, organisations shouldn’t introduce elements to a digital channel that don’t make sense. If everyone else sends out digital documentation using email and apps, don’t try and reinvent the wheel.

Relevant, Hyper-Personalised Content

No matter how hard you work on your channels, however, they have to be supported by good content. Any content an organisation sends out to its customers should obviously be relevant to their wants and needs.

But it should also be hyper-personalised and contextual, showing that the organisation is thinking about the customer and what their needs are at that point in time. Importantly, it should also be feature-rich, using the available technology to provide value to customers.

Embrace Process

Finally, the processes used to drive this communication need to be as simple and frictionless as possible: customers shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to interact with your brand.

It’s also vital that your communication is consistent. As is the case in real-life relationships, digital ones take time and because you’re the one trying to build the relationship, you have to make the effort. Equally important to building a relationship is trust. It’s therefore imperative that your communications are as secure as possible, ensuring that your customers feel comfortable interacting with them.

Getting an organisation’s digital communication to the point where it’s a powerful driver of customer experience is by no means easy. Redefining journeys and building a great customer experience takes time and is harder than it looks. Get it right, however, and your customers will do more for you than any marketing campaign or new product line ever will.

Brent Haumann, Managing Director, Striata.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

Don’t improve your customer experience. Revolutionize it – Steve Tzikakis

March 10, 2020

Steve Tzikakis, President EMEA South, SAP

Senior business leaders often ask me what new technology they should be investing in to improve their customer experience and loyalty. The short answer is that technology may not always be the natural first step to take. Trust me, we’d love to sell you some technology. But before you make any major technology investment, first ask yourself this: will more CRM help differentiate you from your competitors? Will technology alone help you win new business, or retain your most profitable customers? Do you really understand what your end customers want?

Businesses clearly need happy customers to survive and thrive. But every day, we see companies that have forgotten who their customers are and what their real needs comprise. The fancier technology they install, the further they grow away from their customers. In fact, one study found that 80% of CEOs believed they were delivering a superior experience. Only 8% of their customers agreed.

This may sound odd coming from a dyed-in-the-wool technology guy, but trust me on this. We need to put our end customers at the very heart of what we do. Undoubtedly you will need technology to be able to orchestrate the entire customer experience. But we do not want that to be your starting point. We first need to jointly understand your end users. And the first thing to understand is that 88% of customers expect a personalized experience.

Successful businesses that put their customers at the center of their business need to make 100% sure that anyone who interacts with customers has the right information and insight to help those customers get what they want. As we say at SAP, customers want songs, not CDs; they want sleep, not mattresses.

Today’s customers are firmly in the driver’s seat and relationships with them can’t be ‘managed’, but instead evolved, developed and nurtured. And these relationships don’t end once a deal has closed, but are ongoing. Making connections with customers is easy. Turning those connections into lifelong relationships and partnerships is what makes businesses truly successful. Do it right, and the rewards are huge: 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

To do this though, businesses first need to attain the almost-mythical single view of the customer. This means collating all their records and interactions from various sources and offline databases and knowing their history, passions, likes and preferences. Only then can we accurately start anticipating their needs, and providing the slickest possible experience for every customer: an experience that directly links sales and support, and has a connected supply chain that will help businesses keep their promises.

A great example of this is the automotive industry, which is fast becoming a leader in the experience economy. Why? Because car-makers have been quick to realize that actually driving the car is only one part of the experience. Passengers and drivers want to access the internet, consume digital content, even know where the closest fuel station and open parking spot is. They want to know if the mall or restaurant they’re driving past has a sale on. In response, car manufacturers are delivering previously unheard-of levels of customization. In some markets, customers can order – and customize – their car using an app. Google, Apple, Microsoft and other tech giants are jostling to be the dominant in-car connected system. The customer really is in the driver’s seat.

In the same vein, successful retail spaces have been completely reinvented and feel more like cozy lounges, where consumers can chill out and spend time browsing through books, artifacts and the like before they go on to actually making their purchases. This is all about understanding the need to deliver more than just a product and that the experience itself is elevating smart industry players way above their competitors.

Modern CRM is not about automation and efficiency. It’s about adding some intelligence to customer engagement, knowing when to talk to them, and what to say. It’s also about the insight into how the enterprise is fulfilling the promise. Is our supply chain efficient? Do we have the raw material or the engineers on stand-by? It’s about emphasising customer-centricity, a consistent experience, and trustworthy data. That’s why it’s so important that you understand the strategic importance and the implications of your technology choices. These are strategic considerations that often involve a complete transformation of a company’s business model, with huge effects on your business and its culture. You can’t simply apply technology to operational silos, or existing processes, and think you’re driving customer loyalty.

This kind of sublime experience with a product or a service can only be pulled off when businesses exactly understand their customer – and have the technology to back up their promises. That’s how you turn your customers into fans.

Steve Tzikakis is the President EMEA South, SAP

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry