Best practices for customer service
Enterprises recognize that delivering a good customer experience is key to winning long-term loyalty and competitive advantage. But what customer service best practices do you need to succeed today? It's a vital subject worth exploring.
Compelling customer experiences
A while back, IBM completed a fascinating piece of research when conducting 2,000 face-to-face meetings and 10,000 phone interviews with CEOs and other business leaders from all over the world.
These conversations revealed that the most successful and innovative leaders are those who excel in the customer experience. In essence, they redirect their resources to scale to new heights. They are also masters at achieving better outcomes, restructuring their organizations, and redefining company culture.
But at the center of it all, these business leaders can leverage their data and knowledge to achieve compelling customer experiences.
So, what makes a great customer experience — and what customer service best practices are required?
There are common characteristics that define the most effective leadership business strategies. Any enterprise embracing these five steps should be able to achieve similar success.
1. Nurture customer relationships
Success requires close direct customer relationships coupled with partner discussions and collaborations. Many corporations are now focusing on training their teams in the art of personalized customer experience.
In the IBM survey, 86% of organizations said they were somewhat effective at creating individual experiences, while 53% considered themselves very effective.
Those who designed personalized customer experiences said they needed to understand human nature: moods, motivations, desires, even temper. It was more than just going through all the data.
Personalizing an experience for the customer required understanding the person as a human being — not an easy feat. But good relationships were possible to achieve when given proper consideration and focus on achieving a good customer experience.
2. Use real-time data to achieve better outcomes
Today, there's no need to employ guesswork when defining what makes a good customer experience. With real-time data from AI and other tech sources, leaders can guide their teams better towards consumer satisfaction and customer service best practices.
In the past, companies could only rely on statistics and data sourced over time. But today, the digital workplace enables enterprises everywhere to monitor customers' behavior and map their journeys, from moods to desires, from purchases to feedback.
In this way, companies can predict customer behavior and adequately measure the desired outcome while innovating and changing current operation modes to ensure complete customer satisfaction. By redesigning their businesses and strategies, they can understand what makes a great customer experience and deliver it.
3. Develop customer empathy
This point is about more than mere customer proximity. It is about having real customer empathy. One way to achieve this is to co-create communities to gain a deeper source of insights.
As mentioned already, many businesses are now employing customer mapping to decompose the journey. By seeing where one customer has come from and predicting where they intend to go, an enterprise moves from guesswork to actual personas, which can then be used in the product redesign to achieve a good customer experience.
Muji is one of the enterprises that achieved this by allowing its customers to co-create products. Those products went on to outsell the company's own-designed products by three times. This is true collaboration, giving the customer a sense of empowerment and satisfaction throughout the development process.
4. Value smart experimentation
A true innovator enables others to excel. Innovating enterprises encourage their employees to become innovators by giving them the freedom and flexibility to collaborate on the design and thinking process. They can see the path from point A to point C clearly, and simply eliminate the bureaucratic middle management who aren't necessarily contributing to the success of a customer's journey.
The most globalized organizations are now those who prize experimentation and empowerment, and they embody those values themselves as they set an example on the highest level. This is all part of developing customer service best practices.
5. Empower your people for change
Essentially, leaders must strive to trust and empower their people. But it is also a matter of having the right systems in place that allow for this. If companies do not have this kind of thinking ingrained in their culture, innovation will be a long and tiring process.
China-based Haier's CEOs strived to be responsive to customers, and the ideas brought forward by the company's staff. This is now one of the fastest-growing enterprises in the world.
Embracing customer service best practices
Being a successful CEO also means that one is willing to back off when employees feel they are not being heard or seen. They are willing to acknowledge failure and the fact that they are fallible. This takes humility, the courage to admit failures, and encouraging other people on the management team to do the same. If the company can be transparent while having digital fluency throughout, it will survive even the most substantial changes and grow through new opportunities.
In the new digital collaborative culture, this is not just important but vital for survival. Are the leaders of today willing to apply new systems never used before and be the first to try and fail? If so, they may even achieve new energy in motion. They will be the ones who continue to innovate and create because they benefit from the constant flow of new ideas and new resources.
They seek out those opportunities and collaborate not just with customers or partners but also with competitors. And they are the ones who excel at customer satisfaction every time by delivering a good customer experience.
Lifting the burden off your team is key
At Unit4, we appreciate that delivering a good customer experience requires time and focus. That's why automating and transforming work with robust ERP solutions. Integrated systems like human capital management (HCM) can free up people's time to excel at delivering excellent customer experience.
Once you've modernized your enterprise systems and saved your teams from repetitive, non-value-added tasks, you can finally get the breathing space to rethink the customer experience —and deploy customer service best practices that will give you the edge.
Contact Unit4 to discover how our solutions and support can help you deliver excellent customer experience.
