How to Create a Customer-Centric Culture
Customers expect consistency in their interactions with your company, from sales to support. This may become difficult when dealing with a complex system of multiple independent and ever-changing parts. Hence, it’s necessary to get customer experience (CX) right in every area of your organization.
A great start is creating an effective culture of caring for customers at all company levels, beginning with customer service agents. One-third of agents report feeling stressed from modern workforce challenges, including rising customer expectations, growing call volume, and a shaky work-life balance.
Whatever makes it easier for colleagues to collaborate across teams and departments (i.e., sales, marketing, services, and operations) will benefit a call center culture, especially in these work-from-home times.
Today’s customer service professionals are more skilled and more motivated than ever to increase customer satisfaction—one of the highest drivers of business profitability, according to Christian Wettre, our SVP, and GM of the Sugar platform.
There are a few essentials you must consider if you want your agents to provide a seamless and effortless customer journey:
Create Harmony Between Services, Marketing, and Sales
You need an integrated CX strategy and a well-defined execution across all departments of your company. This is particularly important if you want to build long-term, high-value relationships with your customers.
With a common platform for CX spanning all customer-facing teams, it becomes easier for service agents to fully understand the customer situation in their CRM data. At the same time, tasks can be assigned and tracked to other teams without disruptions. The efforts made by the call center can more easily be translated into positive revenue results recorded in the same system by the sales team, who can later build up new opportunities to upsell or cross-sell.
Services, marketing, and sales working in harmony translates into better visibility, which means knowing when and where customers need support, and also improving loyalty and retention.
Understand Your Customers
Establish a foundation of empathy towards your employees and your customers so they feel seen, heard, understood, and valued. It helps them feel connected to the business and more inclined to accept new suggestions. Data management platforms integrate precious information and insights, but the voice of your customers and employees should remain at the center of your CX strategy and design.
Positive and negative reactions can be communicated to relationship managers whose job is to cultivate relationships and meet CX’s increasing demands for personalization.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning empower you to understand your customers and improve business operations, enabling you to work smarter and save time.
Optimize Performance
To cultivate your customer relationship, you must always search for new ways of improvement and to keep up with business and technology evolution. Serving your customers’ best interests is an ongoing process, so optimization should move to agile and adaptable approaches.
Modern customers expect to have long-running conversations with companies that span multiple sessions on multiple channels of their choice, but it’s the customer journey, not technology availability, that dictates whether new channels should be deployed. They expect the companies they buy from to adapt—the last thing they want is to repeat themselves with each interaction.
Performance optimization is leveraging AI-driven insights to manage data volume, analyzing the past, present, and potential future issues to identify when a customer is at risk or a service priority and react accordingly.
Closing Thoughts
A customer-centric culture captures the story of a customer and pulls them into the reference program. It anticipates their needs and delivers at the right time to reduce customer churn.
Cross-functional collaboration is particularly important to build those long-term, complex, high-value customer relationships, especially in the current remote contact center environment.
To keep your customers connected, refine your CX strategy, make sure you provide them a truly effortless journey experience that will create value for both your customers and business.
