The COVID-19 pandemic has forced brands to elevate customer experience to stay competitive. As more consumers turned to e-commerce, more companies had to step up their digital game, in turn forcing SaaS providers to deliver so brands could satisfy their buyers. This accelerated a digital-first customer success transformation that was already in motion before the pandemic. Consumers and the companies which serve them are no longer content with slow, inconvenient technology and mediocre online support. They demand a satisfying digital experience or they’ll take their business to a competitor who can deliver it. In this blog, we’ll take a look at why brands need to elevate the customer experience in the wake of the pandemic and what you need to do to deliver results that will satisfy today’s customers.
Why Do You Need to Elevate Customer Experience?
When your primary point of interaction with your customer is digital, delivering a satisfying digital customer experience becomes the key to satisfaction and retention. The upside of this is that it allows you to harness technology to optimize your customer experience. The downside is that if you’re not using technology effectively, your only opportunity to make a favorable impression on your customers easily can be lost almost immediately.
A PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) survey highlights why technology has made customer experience so central in delivering customer satisfaction. The results showed that:
- Consumers value customer experience so highly that they are willing to pay a price premium of as much as 7% to 16% more across different industries for products and services which come with great customer experience
- Bad experiences have an even bigger impact, with nearly one in three consumers saying they will walk away from a company, even a brand they love, after just one negative experience
- 54% of U.S. customers say most companies need to improve the experience they deliver
- 82% of U.S. customers want more human interaction as part of their experience
As these numbers illustrate, the customer experience you deliver can make or break your brand.
What Does It Take to Elevate Customer Experience?
What kind of qualities make an experience satisfying in the eyes of customers. PwC’s survey found that customers prioritized three qualities above all. Nearly 80% of U.S. consumers listed these three qualities as the most important components of customer experience worth paying more for:
- Efficiency: customers want things fast, whether this means instant service or same-day delivery
- Convenience: customers want technology solutions to work consistently and to be user-friendly
- Friendly and knowledgeable customer service: customers expect support that is both caring and competent
These qualities define the essence of a satisfying experience for today’s digital customer.
How to Leverage Technology to Elevate Customer Experience
PwC’s report on its survey stressed the role technology plays in delivering elevated customer experiences. On the one hand, companies that get technology right can deliver phenomenal customer experiences which outshine competitors. On the other hand, effective deployment of technology depends on using solutions that achieve the goals of improving speed, convenience and support for customers. Technologies that don’t deliver these results don’t achieve their purpose and could possibly be making it harder to help support customers thus damaging the customer experience.
- To deliver efficient, fast experiences in an online environment, technology solutions must be able to instantly tap customer data in order to provide the customized experience individual customers require. This is one reason Totango’s customer success platform is designed to integrate all your customer data in one interface so you can apply it to improving customer experience. Instead of having data from different parts of your customer journey scattered throughout different information silos, Totango lets you pull together everything you need in one place for instant analysis and deployment.
- To deliver convenience, technology solutions need to implement best practices consistently so that customers experience the same satisfying results every time, not just sporadically. Totango’s platform includes automatically and manually triggered workflows called SuccessPlays which implement best practices consistently to optimize customer experience at every stage of the customer journey. For example, you can set up a workflow which is triggered whenever a customer has not completed the onboarding process in a certain amount of time, automatically initiating appropriate actions such as emailing the customer tutorial tips or alerting a customer success manager. This helps make the onboarding process more consistently convenient for your customers.
- To deliver support, technology solutions should use customer data to deliver customers relevant, personalized responses quickly. SuccessPlays may be used to streamline the support process by using customer data to provide customers with self-service solutions as well as provide human agents with relevant data from knowledge bases. This can shorten response time, avoiding delays that can frustrate customers. SuccessPlays can also preempt common support issues if you track customer service data and design automated workflows that address frequent issues before they arise.
These are some of the most critical criteria technology solutions must meet in order to deliver a competitive customer experience under the new normal. Choosing the right technology solution can play a decisive role in your ability to implement an effective customer experience management strategy.
Elevate Customer Experience to Satisfy Today’s Customer
The mass transformation of businesses to digital, forced by the pandemic, has raised customer expectations for both consumers and businesses which rely on SaaS providers. Customers expect their experiences of digital technology to be fast and convenient, while still feeling human. It’s important to consider the way you personalize the experience as it should be based on customer behavior. They expect digital support to be caring and competent. Brands that use customer success technology effectively to meet these expectations will have an advantage under the new normal. Companies that lag in digital customer engagement will run the risk of churn from dissatisfied customers.
Totango’s customer success platform provides all the tools you need to plan an optimized customer journey automated for efficiency and integrated with a human touch. Try it free to experience how the right technology can empower you to deliver an elevated customer experience.
