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The Six Most Important Components of a Customer Experience

4 Mins read

Thus, it is quite clear that customer experience is the key to the success of any business. This is the reason why every business needs to analyze the below-mentioned six triggers that impact a customer’s experience.

According to PwC, Consumers will pay a 16% price premium for a great customer experience 

1. Reliability as a Significant Element of Customer Experience

Reliability is an important component that affects the customer experience. The reliability of overall systems and networks, ensuring that the right resolutions are offered in the shortest time is quite vital in delivering a phenomenal customer experience. The customers necessarily rely on the businesses for getting support for both critical as well as non-critical business issues. Integrating different channels to understand these issues better, finding out the resolutions in the shortest of time and communicating it back to the customer on the right channel is of utmost importance to companies.  The perception of reliability goes a long way in building your business’s brand image and generating a positive word of mouth.

2. Availability is another Major Component of Customer Experience

With the fast paced environment today, the customers always expect that they can contact a business whenever they want, however they want. Naturally the demand for providing self help and always-on channels of engagement like chat-bot, voice-bot, Knowledge base have gained primary importance today with companies investing heavily in services like conversational bot or speech based IVR to give their customers quick and agent less experience. Apart from availability customers also demand convenience, they do not want their time to be wasted on waiting in telephone queues or repeating their questions. To satisfy this ever moving customer base, businesses need to deploy tools like callback and sticky agent that provide personalised attention with the benefit of convenience.

3. Personalised Communication helps to Improve Customer Experience

Receiving personalised message from a company, that can be related to past interaction with a company or offers that are linked to purchase history or simply an IVR message that is personalised with first name gives a customer a valued feel. This makes personalised communication one of the key components of a customer’s experience and their expectations. Omnichannel is a wonderful tool with businesses today. Omnichannel integrates multiple channels that customers use along with the CRM used by a business to better identify each customer and track their movement across their journey with the brand. It gives them a unified view of all customer interactions, giving them a more intimate understanding of what issues a customer faced with your business and the feedback they are sharing on social channels.

4. Simple Steps for Issue Resolution Improve Customer Experience

While devising a customer experience strategy the focus should be on minimising the steps to resolution. Higher the number of jumps a customer needs to make from one process to another, the higher their chances of falling in the cracks will be. The simplest approach will be to aim to provide one-step-resolution or access to information across channels. Another important factor to be accommodated for should be to collect and store as much data as possible at each step, so customers do not have to share the same information repeatedly. With this idea, the businesses can take the required steps for necessarily making the lives of the customers extremely simple in each of the aspects throughout their journey enhancing their experience to a significant extent. 

5. Accountability has a Higher Influence on Customer Experience

Accountability is another high impact components of customer experience. The customers always evaluate on what the business has delivered as per their promise. And this evaluation happens at every stage even before a purchase is made, to after sales to evaluate if a resolution provided is clear and fair or not. So, accountability has a very important role to play in providing a very good customer experience. As a business there are situations when it may be tough to deliver the promised resolution, in those scenarios, it should be important that the customers are compensated enough and are clearly informed of, why the promised resolution could not be delivered.

6. Adaptability is another High Impact Component of Customer Experience

The digital world is quite rapidly changing and customers specially the newer generations are  the first to experiment with the newer technologies and making newer engagement channels famous. As a business, you should be wary of this changing consumer environment and should be ready to adapt with minimum slag.  Adaptability however works both ways, one is the changing interest of customers and second is the changing technological environment of the business. In order to provide improved services to customers in terms of speed, data security, data accuracy etc, you should also be aware of the technological advances in your business environment. In order to ensure that customer’s experience remains smooth, customers should always be kept informed of downtime due to technical maintenance or upgrades.

Conclusion

The six triggers mentioned above are some of the most important components that can make or break a business’s experience. Building a successful customer experience strategy involves balancing many such smaller pieces and is certainly no cake walk. A business should carefully chalk out its touch points and use all the available technology and data to map each customer across the different touch points. They should then evaluate the channels or touch points based on their cumulative usage versus the cost of owning and maintaining them. They will then have to carefully design content suiting each channel and customised for each customer. Needless to mention the team behind the customer experience should be adequately trained, passionate and have loads of empathy in making the customer experience truly spectacular.

A detailed task like this can be easily achieved when you have experts with multiple years of experience handling it for you.