by Eduardo Brunetto | May 17, 2023 | Customer Experience (EN)
Customer support is no longer a nice-to-have — it is an essential function that all businesses need to invest in.
In fact, 52 percent of customers will switch to a competitor if they have a single negative impression and 60 percent of consumers have purchased something from one brand over another based on the service they expect to receive, according to Zendesk.
Customer experience (CX) is the new battleground and businesses that provide the best service are winning. This article will explain how CX consulting can take your customer support to the next level.
What Is CX Consulting?
CX consulting is a service that helps businesses build effective interactions with their customers. Consultants work with you to improve your customer experience and ensure that expectations are being met.
Some of the areas that a CX consultant focuses on are as follows:
By looking into these and other aspects of a business, a CX consultant can help shape your business by improving its customer experience.
Reasons You Should Invest in CX Consulting
Most companies today would agree that a frictionless customer experience is necessary to survive. The best way to guarantee this is through CX consulting. Here are exact reasons why you need CX consulting for your business:
1. Helps With Customer Acquisition
Word of mouth has remained a reliable marketing tool even with the rise of digital and social media. It offers the most affordable marketing technique for any business. However, to get the best out of this method, you must leverage your customer experience to use their goodwill to spread the word about your business.
A CX consultant will help you create a great customer experience from their first point of contact until they get the service or product they need. This builds a long-term relationship which is a suitable ground for word-of-mouth recommendations.
2. Provides Ideal Techniques to Measure Progress Effectively
The goal of improving a business’s customer experience is growth. But sometimes determining whether your business’s growth is associated with improved customer experience or other improvements across the board can be difficult. Quantifying and reflecting on the results related to improved customer experience can also be daunting.
A customer experience consultant can help you create data from your customer experiences to measure any progress quantitatively. This will help you understand your progress more clearly and help you improve on areas to make your customer experiences better.
3. Reduces Customer Churn
Acquiring and retaining new customers can be costly. It comes with many trials and errors that would increase the total cost further. However, a customer experience consultant can help you reduce costs by providing efficient ways to deal with and retain new customers. They will help you streamline all your customer experiences to ensure the process is easy, friendly, and trackable.
Scale Your Business with CX Consulting Today
Any business needs to maintain excellent customer experiences to remain competitive. CX consulting can help you craft a roadmap with the necessary resources to maintain the best customer experience. We provide the advice and support you need to maximize profits through better customer engagement. Contact us today and learn how we can help you.
by Elisa Simicevic | Apr 5, 2023 | Customer Experience (EN), English
Customer expectations are evolving and businesses are starting to place more emphasis on providing a positive customer experience (CX). In fact, one third of consumers will walk away from a brand they were once loyal to after a single negative experience, and 92% would walk away after two or three negative reactions, according to PWC. Taking this into consideration, 81% companies today cite their CX as a competitive differentiator.
The writing is on the wall. Brands that invest in their customers see increased loyalty, lower acquisition costs, and healthier revenue growth. If you’re on board with us and ready to improve your CX, you’re in the right place! This blog post will discuss the emerging trend of digitizing the customer experience and how your brand can capitalize on it.
What does “digitizing the customer experience” mean?
The term “customer experience” refers to all the interactions a customer has with your brand. When we talk about the “digital customer experience,” we are referring strictly to the interactions that take place through technology. This includes:
- Your website
- Your mobile apps
- Your social media channels
- Your customer service portal
- And other digital channels
Basically, digitizing the customer experience means to provide a positive experience through online channels.
Best Practices for Digitizing The Customer Experience
Statistics show that a brand’s CX is becoming a more important differentiator than product and pricing. By investing in the digital CX, brands can see several benefits such as:
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Increased customer loyalty
- Faster growth through customer evangelism
Here are 4 steps you can take to improve your digital experience today:
1. Invest in Technology
You can’t digitize the customer experience without investing in technology, first. There are alot of customer experience softwares available to help businesses respond to requests, capture feedback, create internal tasks, and more. At Aktie Now, we are big on Zendesk as a customer support tool, but there are other technologies that can help, too. These include:
- Zoho
- Birdeye
- Intercom
- Freshdesk
- HubSpot Service Hub
Different softwares have different features and best use cases, so you will have to do some research to build a tech stack that works for you. Many of these softwares can also integrate with Zendesk. So if you need additional tools or features that Zendesk doesn’t offer, you may be able to enhance your customer portal with the right software integrations.
2. Create An Omnichannel Customer Experience
We aren’t in the 1990’s anymore! Haven’t been for a long time…
The internet has created a lot more communication channels that we have had in the past. This means your customers have several options to choose from and likely have their own personal preferences. Businesses need to expand their customer support channels to include more than telephone and email. Popular channels may include:
- Live chat
- Social media
- SMS messaging
- Website FAQs
- Mobile apps
- Email
The omnichannel experience removes friction by allowing customers to communicate with your team in whatever manner is most convenient to them – and the results speak for themselves. According to Adobe, brands that invest in the omnichannel experience will enjoy a healthy 10% year over year growth
3. Enhance Self-Service Options
In the digital age, customers don’t always want to talk with a service representative. Instead, some will prefer to search for their own answers.
Providing self-service options is a must for businesses that truly want to digitize their customer experience. But what exactly do we mean by self service? It means providing your customers with the resources they need to solve their own problems without interacting with a representative from their company.
Some of the main ways to provide self service options include:
- Online FAQs
- Knowledge base
- Online discussion forums
By building out these channels for your customers, not only are you increasing satisfaction rates, you are also putting less stress on your customer support team and enabling your business to do more with a smaller staff.
4. Be Mobile-Friendly
We’ve mentioned the omnichannel experience already, but it’s important to emphasize the importance of mobile friendliness. And this means more than optimizing your website and emails for mobile display. It means creating an entirely unique and engaging experience through mobile devices.
Brands need to do more than simply create a mobile app for their customers. They need to make their apps engaging, user-friendly, and full of features that actually help your customers. They also need to consider the messaging aspect and how mobile users prefer to receive notifications from your support team. SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging are great ways to offer seamless, frictionless communications between your team and your customers.
Get the Tools You Need to Digitize the Customer Experience
At Aktie Now, we believe that customer experience should be at the forefront of any business’s success. If you’re looking for a way to improve customer experience, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. With our Zendesk and other customer experience solutions, you can provide better customer service, gain valuable insights, and build stronger relationships with your customers.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your business succeed.
by marketingaktienow | May 13, 2022 | English
If you own a company or hold a leadership position in a service-oriented industry, you have certainly come across the concept of Customer Centricity. That concept has changed the way of doing business and relating to the customer in every industry.
This new way mainly affects what companies see as their operational focus. The product is thus no longer the main focus as companies prioritize the customer, determining the direction of the company and the product in order to fulfill customer needs and wants.
Consumer-centric companies seek to provide a unique experience to each of their customers throughout the purchase journey. From customer acquisition, to after sales service – every customer is seen as unique and special.
Customer Centricity also means that the company will define its next steps based on the customer. The launch of a new product, packaging changes, new advertising campaigns, changes in brand positioning – the entire strategy needs to be aligned with the expectations and feedback provided by customers.
Actions to Implement Customer Centricity
By now, you may be asking yourself: “But my company has always thought about the customer”. Customer Centricity is about placing the customer at the core of your strategy, and not just as the ultimate goal for the company’s success.
The quest to anticipate customer needs, in addition to the development of a culture that aims to provide the best experience to everyone who interacts with the company, are some of the main characteristics of consumer-centric companies.
There are some actions, highlighted in a study by Deloitte (please check out the full article in English here), that help companies in the pursuit of Customer Centricity.
Establish a customer-oriented culture starting from the leadership. In this way, inspired by the management, the team tends to accept the concept more naturally.
Understand customers’ profiles based on concrete data. Data-mine your CRM or conduct surveys with your customers. This profiling effort must be 100% led by data, with no room for using imagination or assumptions to build a persona.
Reduce or optimize service processes that cause customer dissatisfaction. Assigning more autonomy to solve problems can be a good alternative in these cases.
Measure the efficiency of the service provided with relevant data and implement continuous improvement plans.
Use customer feedback to implement or improve products and services.
Availability is a Keyword in Customer Centricity
Customers are not very interested in knowing what your service structure is and which channels they can use to reach your business. They just want to grab their favorite one and be able to start a conversation right away.
This is where Omnichannel Service comes in. The word is a little strange, but the meaning is quite simple: It’s about being present on any channel that might be relevant to your customers.
There will be those who seek help on Twitter, others will post their concerns among the comments of a YouTube video, and the more traditional ones will simply make a phone call. A customer-centric company will be prepared to respond anywhere and with the same efficiency, always demonstrating that the customer is a unique person, with very specific desires and needs to be met.
That is why being customer-centric is not just a concept, but rather the Mission of a Company. And everyone must pursue that Mission. Empathy becomes a key value that cannot be overlooked. Everything must be thought through and seen from the customer’s point of view, so that the best solutions can be developed.
Aktie Now specializes in helping your company make this change, using special tools designed to give your customers the best experience they could ever hope for. Find out more about what we have prepared for you by contacting us!
by marketingaktienow | May 13, 2022 | English
Check out these 10 reasons for why you should adopt our chatbot in your service structure!
1. Interactive, Humanized Channel
When we talk about a service bot, many people think of something too automated. But natural language processing makes it possible to understand intentions and subtleties (important texting contexts) to make the conversation much more humanized.
2. Scalability (anytime, anywhere)
Unlike human service, which requires a much larger physical structure to provide scalability, a chatbot system can serve as many people as the server can handle and all at the same time. In addition, chatbots don’t need to take lunch breaks, go to the bathroom or even take time off
3. Process Optimization
The chatbot can bring together several processes that your company offers, and even make them simpler for the customer. Consult balances or debts, request a duplicate, solve small problems with a product – there limitless possibilities for optimization via chatbot.
4. Skills and Service Standardization
It is only natural that your team has people with higher and lower skill levels. Counting on luck to get a better service is certainly not something that pleases your customer. The chatbot will always respond in the same way, without prejudice to the quality and speed of responses.
5. Bots are Capable of Solving from the Basic to the Most Complex Situations
You’d be wrong if you think that chatbots can only help with simple problems. This tool is ready to help with whatever you want – just train the bot and it will do what you ask.
6. Easy Integration
Seamlessly integrating your chatbot into the different company systems is paramount. With access to customer history in CRM, for example, personalization of service becomes better and simpler. Always remember to check out the integration features when implementing the bot platform.
7. Configured According to each Business
Chatbots are not solutions that work the same in every situation. On the contrary – Chatbots are customizable solutions that are tailored for each company in order to solve their specific service problems.
8. Service Speed
As we mentioned before, the use of chatbots brings agility to the service provided. That’s because robots don’t need to think or look in a system for an answer within the script. It will read and process customers’ interactions and in a matter of milliseconds provide an answer.
9. User Experience Improvement
With so many benefits, the improvement in User Experience is a natural result. When well developed, chatbots bring the solutions that customers expect, which is immediately reflected in the user experience.
10. Always evolving, always improving
Last but not least, we’d like to highlight one of the most important points: the chatbot service is in constant development and thus is constantly improving, bringing in endless growth and innumerous possibilities.
Curious about our chatbot? Schedule a conversation with our experts to get all the answers you may have in order to make the right decision!
by Rodrigo Hora | Mar 18, 2022 | English
Customer Service Consulting is gaining increasingly more space in the market and becoming essential to any organization. That is happening in a moment when high-quality customer service is no longer a differential: it’s necessary to have a thorough understanding of this area. Customer Service Consulting helps your business to achieve that, ensuring that you can offer your customers valuable experiences throughout their journey.
An insight into Customer Service
Investment in the Customer Service area grew exponentially in 2020, primarily due to the conditions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. According to a study carried out by Neoassist with the support of CS Academy, in 2020 there was a 44% increase in the volume of calls received by customer service departments, followed by a 40% expansion of new support channels such as chat, video chats, messaging channels, telephone lines, among other.
At the same time that the number of interactions between clients and companies grew, this increased demand generated new problems. However, only 30% of the companies surveyed offered some kind of training for their customer service teams, which can represent serious problems for the sector in the short, medium, and long term.
Business adversity is something that great managers are prepared to deal with on a day-to-day basis. In fact, managing teams, systems under update, or even delays is part of their daily routine and must be carefully monitored, especially in the area of Customer Service. After all, this is one of the essential departments in a company. It’s responsible for keeping all customer data, transaction information, interaction history, answers to satisfaction surveys, and FAQs.
Unfortunately, many companies do not prioritize the Customer Service area and its needs, not considering the impact that actions like these can have on results. With that in mind, we’ve listed below the top customer service issues that could be affecting your operation right now to help you identify and address them.
Lack of product and service knowledge
Can you speak knowingly of all the products or services offered by your business? Are you aware of every benefit, functionality, and even value differentiation aspect? Well, that is probably not the case for all customer service team members. When a customer contacts your business, the chances are high that he has already done some research and now wants to learn more from an agent. Thus, if your agents are not aware of a functionality update, benefit, or even values, they cannot convey credibility and the customer will lose confidence in the business.
Not Providing Customized Service
All people are unique, and we all like to feel that way. It is the same when contacting a company: offering personalized service is a key differentiator to stand out among competitors. It’s possible to get closer to the customer through personalization, anticipating their needs, and offering tailored solutions.
Relying on other channels to communicate with customers can also be a great move towards personalized service. For instance, e-mail messages starting with the customer’s name, landing pages, gifts, and interactions on social networks can differentiate your service from competitors and create positive experiences for your clients.
Not Providing Staff Training
The sales and customer service teams must present a coherent narrative about your business. For that, it’s essential to offer constant training regarding changes in the company, its products, and services. Otherwise, your customers might get lost in conflicting information passed by different teams and agents.
Having Complicated Processes
Customer service teams handle a considerable amount of interactions every day. This process can get slow and bureaucratic when working with many complex processes and tools. As a result, the team will struggle to perform daily tasks, spending precious time to carry out regular activities that could be more simple. To avoid this problem, a few management software are available in the market to streamline routine tasks: from automation to centralizing customer data in a single location.
How can Customer Service Consulting help your business?
By identifying the problems mentioned above and others that are part of your daily processes, Customer Service Consulting will analyze potential errors and failures harming your business and guide decisive measures to correct them and boost your operation.
To achieve that, Customer Service Consulting will analyze all your customer service processes from start to finish. Specialized and purposeful Customer Service Consulting is carried out based on the following factors:
- Focus on investigating the customer’s current scenario;
- Data Analysis and the determination of the scenario;
- Action Plan, through the definition of implementation steps;
- Execution through the validation of proposed actions.
Benefits of Customer Service Consulting
Identification of weaknesses in the operation
It becomes difficult to identify recurring failures when you’re immersed in a customer service routine. As a result, issues such as lack of data and planning, poor cooperation between the teams, and insufficient investments in marketing, tools, and training are only noticed when the operation reaches a critical situation, causing unacceptable results and losses. To face this challenge, Customer Service Consulting helps you identify the points mentioned above and others that might be harming your business by carrying out a survey of key performance indicators.
Broad View of the Business
Customer service consulting aims not only to look at internal failures but also to have a vision of everything happening in the market. As a result, it brings in external experiences that can contribute to solving complex problems for which your company couldn’t find a solution.
Business Model Renewal
To face the constant changes in the market, you must have digital transformation as an integral part of your business, especially in the Customer Service area. With that in mind, expert consulting helps renew Customer Service by bringing external innovation. Otherwise, your business risks losing market share to its competitors, who constantly seek to be one step ahead. Support tools such as CRM, satisfaction survey, chatbot, Intelligent IVR, cloud storage, and others should be proposed by the consultants to improve the company’s performance.
Business Independence
Contrary to what many think, consulting makes it possible to be totally independent, guiding the business to make decisions that provide the expected result. To achieve that, expert consultants work by observing the daily routine of your customer service process so that the necessary changes can be made at the right time.
Cost Reduction
Reducing costs and maintaining productivity and results is something that several companies strive to achieve. And when there is no proper control, expenses can significantly compromise revenue. That is why Customer Service Consulting helps establish an intelligent cost reduction plan, allowing the departments involved to be optimized and for the company to evolve, investing in the right strategic points that will bring opportunities to the business.
How Aktie Now’s Customer Service Consulting Works
Aktie Now has expertise and experience in Customer Service, developed over 41 thousand hours of projects in seven countries. Our company has a dynamic, transparent, and technological methodology that suits the needs of each business, regardless of their industry and size. We monitor and develop all flows and processes for the success of your customer service, using modern tools to optimize your operation.
By relying on Aktie Now’s consulting services, your business will have the advantage of:
- Omnichannel platforms
- Systems integration
- Customer Self-Service
- Workforce management solution
- Customized forms
- Geographic Freedom. Among others
And these are some of the benefits of Customer Service Consulting for your business:
- Process improvement
- Scalability
- Control of the entire operation
- Demand management
- Measurement of customer satisfaction level
- Professional recognition
- Implementation of tools capable of facilitating the day-to-day operation; and much more.
Now that you know some of the benefits of our Customer Service Consulting contact our sales team and request an assessment of your operation. Count on Aktie Now to help you out on this journey!
