Customer experience is fast becoming one of the most important factors in businesses, and as a result, customer experience professionals are increasingly working in more agile environments. But what does this mean? And how can you become more agile and flexible in your own environment to improve your customer experience team’s performance? With so many businesses focussing on their customers, it’s no surprise that making sure that their experiences are perfect has become a priority for so many organizations. As a result, almost every organization now includes some kind of customer experience strategy or plan in their annual business review or strategic plan. However, there is much more to creating an effective CX strategy than simply writing it down. If your own team also wants to improve their agility and flexibility when it comes to customer experience and services, you’ll find these seven points helpful:
What does being more agile mean?
The first thing to understand about making your business more agile is that it isn’t a single action, but a series of changes that can be implemented both internally and externally. One of the most important aspects of agility is flexibility. Businesses that are more agile can change more quickly and easily, adapting to changes both in the marketplace and in their own processes and services.
Get to know your customers
Businesses of all sizes often make the mistake of thinking of their customers as the people who come into their stores or use their online platforms. While this is a part of the overall picture, it is only a part. To fully understand how your customers experience your business, you need to get under the skin of your organization and look at how customers are served and supported at every level. How do new customers find you? How do they choose you over your competitors? What experience do they have when contacting your customer service representatives? Are your partners and suppliers helping or hindering the experience that your customers have? These are just a few of the areas in which you can gain a deeper understanding of how customers experience your business, and they are the kinds of questions that can help you build a more effective CX strategy.
Automate the things you can automate
One of the most important ways in which businesses become more agile is by reducing the amount of manual work that goes into delivering their services. This doesn’t just mean having an automated phone system (although this is a good start), it means looking at every single process in your organization and asking yourself: “Is there a smarter way to do this?” When it comes to customer service, for example, you may have to deal with a lot of repetitive conversations each day. If so, you can significantly improve your agility by using a service like AI-driven chatbot that allows you to standardize these conversations. Other examples of this include automating your email sequence or marketing campaign, or creating a standardized approach to managing your customers and their data. In every case, you can reduce the amount of time and effort required to complete tasks as well as increase the amount of accuracy in your work.
Standardize the services you offer
Along with optimizing your current workflows and systems, your team can also increase its agility by standardizing the services that it offers. In some cases, this can mean adding what might previously have been seen as a luxury service, but in many cases it means simply making a standard solution available to more customers. For example, if your organization offers a standard one-year warranty on all of its products, it may be possible to extend that to all customers, even if this isn’t specifically written into your warranty policy. Similarly, if you have a variety of different pricing plans, terms, and conditions, you can make your organization more agile by standardizing these elements across your service offerings.
Don’t be afraid of making small changes or updates
For many businesses, a key part of the CX strategy will be making adjustments and updates to existing services. However, many teams are reluctant to make these kinds of changes out of a fear of disrupting their customers or upsetting their own workflow. Similarly, some businesses are reluctant to make changes because they feel this will be seen as a sign of weakness or inexperience. However, there is nothing weaker than being afraid to make any changes because you’re worried they will go badly. Every business is different, and every customer is different. While it is important to stick to your core values and keep your promises, you can’t do this if you remain stagnant. You need to make sure that you are constantly moving and progressing, not only for your own benefit, but for that of your customers.
Be transparent with your employees and partners
It’s important that every employee working on your customer experience team is aware of what the team’s key goals and objectives are. If your team is increasingly agile and flexible, they will be working in a much more fluid environment than they may have done before. So you need to make sure that everyone on the team understands why certain changes are being made and knows what they can do to contribute. You can also improve your agility by keeping your partners and suppliers informed about your progress and goals. If you have a large number of suppliers, this may be a bit more challenging, but it’s still possible. While you don’t want to share every business strategy with anyone who asks, you can be more transparent about your progress, targets, and challenges than many organizations are. Being more transparent can help you build better relationships with your partners and suppliers as well as provide better service to your customers.
Wrapping up
As you can see, becoming more agile is an ongoing process that needs to be implemented across many different areas of your business. However, the benefits are well worth the effort, as agility enables organizations to better meet the needs of their customers.
