Within this decade, the customer experience management market is anticipated to increase from its value of $16.91 billion in 2023 to $52.54 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.6%. During this time period, Gartner, Inc. expects 89% of businesses to compete mainly on customer experience.
Clearly then, providing a great customer experience matters a great deal, in the digital economy. However, there are several factors that can detract from this. Chief among them are communications failures that can disrupt customer interactions and provide a source of frustration for consumers.
Such communication mistakes can make it difficult for customers to get the information and answers that they need, solve any problems they may encounter, or even learn about the products and services that you have to offer.
In this article, we’ll be looking at ten critical communication errors that can hurt your customer experience. We will also consider some organizational and communication strategies that can help overcome these obstacles, increase customer satisfaction, and provide a consistent and positive experience that meets customer expectations.
Why a Great Customer Experience Matters
According to studies by McKinsey & Company, enhancing the customer experience can decrease customer churn by almost 15%, and provide potential increases in win rates of nearly 40%. ET Brand Equity research suggests that 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized experience or service.
Numbers aside, consistently providing a positive customer experience can differentiate your organization from competitors in a highly congested market. For instance as a retailer or eCommerce player, you could distinguish yourself from others in the arena by providing consumers clear, concise, and readily accessible information about your products, together with exceptional support and a personalized experience at all stages of the customer journey.
If you operate in the Banking and Finance sector, you can meet customer expectations by providing quick and easy access to your product or service offerings across multiple channels (mobile app, social media, etc.) – as well as 24/7 support and advice.
If your organization offers Transport and Logistics services, you can ensure customer satisfaction by providing timely and efficient delivery, real-time information and support, and seamless experiences for your clients across all touch points.
While this may all sound great in principle, the MarTech Alliance has recently observed that nearly 48% of businesses admit that the customer experience they offer is below or significantly below their customers’ expectations, while just 31.5% believe they exceed those expectations. You need to be aware that there are operational and communications-based challenges that can work against your ability to provide a great customer experience.
Factors that Detract from a Positive Customer Experience
We have identified ten (10) key factors that can severely limit your ability to deliver a positive customer experience. We also outline operational and communication strategies that can help overcome these obstacles, and/or mitigate their effects.
1. Not Giving Customer Satisfaction Sufficient Priority
It’s often tempting to focus on the bottom line – and to see the customer as merely a potential source of revenue or sales. However, viewing the customer as just a wallet is a shortsighted option that can turn away more business than it attracts. What’s more, this attitude can lead to the kinds of communication lapses that lead to incomplete or missed customer transactions, and a customer journey that can differentiate your brand as one to avoid, rather than engage with.
Putting the customer front and center provides a better path to commercial success. You can do this by initiating communication strategies and marketing tactics that focus on how the customer can most effectively use your product or service to achieve their goals and aspirations. Taking an omnichannel approach is a great way to accomplish this.
For example, with IDT Express Omnichannel Messaging, you can use real-time Alerts, to keep your audience informed with general information that matters. You can boost engagement and enhance the customer experience with special offers, loyalty promotions, and discounts to drive business growth. And if issues or queries arise, you can streamline your customer support processes across multiple channels by managing tickets and providing timely updates.
2. Not Taking a Proactive Approach to Customer Service
Recent studies by McKinsey & Company stress the critical challenges that businesses now face when dealing with customer support and service issues. Typically, today’s consumers demand swift responses on social media, with 40% expecting replies within an hour and 79% within 24 hours. Despite these expectations, only about 50% of businesses currently meet these response time standards.
Reactive customer support is all about responding to queries and providing solutions on a case by case basis when consumers call on you. However, taking a more proactive approach to customer service can lead to greater customer success. Working in this way, your customer support organization can help customers anticipate future problems, and provide immediate solutions for their current difficulties.
Using omnichannel strategies, there are many options available for achieving this state. A Solution Center on your website with tutorials, Frequently Asked Questions, and downloadable resources is one approach you might take. Using conversational marketing tools, you can offer guidance and support to consumers throughout their customer journey, and build a solid relationship that goes beyond email and live chat.
With mobile devices now making up some 58.33% of website traffic, it makes sense for your customer service organization to harness the power of the mobile app and mobile messaging. With IDT Express 2-Way Messaging for example, you can engage in interactive conversations with your audience and allow recipients to respond to your SMS messages, enabling a seamless communication loop. Since the IDT platform supports multimedia messaging via WhatsApp, Viber, and Facebook Messenger, you can go beyond plain text and enrich your SMS messages with multimedia content.
3. Initiating Too Many Customer Interactions
While being proactive in providing support and promoting a positive customer experience, you should remember that it’s possible to go overboard with your communications. Providing too much information and initiating too many customer interactions can work against your efforts to give customer satisfaction.
Receiving no feedback or response from a customer can give the impression that there’s something wrong at their end – and there may be a temptation to reach out to them directly, to find out what’s going on. However, silence does not necessarily indicate that your customer had a bad experience. Initiating customer interactions in such cases may actually annoy the consumer.
To strike the right balance, it’s important to remember that each customer is unique – in both their needs and their behaviors. Using information from their past transactions and dealings with your staff, it’s possible to develop an engagement pattern that keeps unwanted or unnecessary communications to a minimum, while enhancing the customer experience across various channels.
4 Promising The Customer More Than You Can Actually Deliver
If you promise something and fail to deliver, at best you’ll be branded as unreliable. Do so consistently, and your customers will view your organization as unprofessional, and not to be trusted. In the era of social media, such dissatisfaction can go viral, and ultimately ruin your business.
By human nature, most customers would prefer a solution to their problem at some point, rather than not at all. A degree of delay may therefore be acceptable – so long as it’s properly communicated. As part of your omnichannel strategy for customer engagement, your staff should have the ability to reach out to people immediately, when they know that a deadline or expected event relating to a product or service can‘t be met.
For example, using IDT Express to reach out to the omnichannel customer, you have the option to use notifications to keep customers abreast of what’s happening to their orders, and to ensure that important dates, appointments, deliveries, and renewals are never missed. With IDT, you’ll have the convenience of managing 15 different messaging apps all in one place. From SMS to WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and more, you can streamline your communication strategy with ease – and keep your customers continuously in the loop.
5. Creating a Generic Rather Than Personalized Experience
Taking a “one size fits all” approach to customer interactions is a surefire way to depersonalize the customer experience. While it’s tempting to create a generic formula for engagement, you need to remember that personalization is key to success in today’s environment. According to PwC, 63% of customers now expect personalized engagement as a standard of service.
In order to empower your staff to treat each customer outcome as a unique and personal case, they’ll need access to data and insights concerning the behavior, needs and wants of each individual.
With the offerings of IDT Express, you’ll have access to a range of resources to boost your personalization efforts. For example, IDT’s SMS platform offers comprehensive analytics and reporting features, as well as integration with all major Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms. Using IDT Express Omnichannel, you can enhance customer engagement with intelligent ChatBots., which automate responses, handle routine queries, and create personalized interactions, providing a seamless and efficient experience for your users.
6. Keeping Your Customers Waiting
Long delays in addressing issues and queries can frustrate consumers, harm your business reputation, and inspire customers to look elsewhere for satisfaction. Boosting the response time for your teams is therefore a priority – one that you can address by using effective omnichannel strategies.
So for example, you can use a communications platform like IDT Express with intelligent call routing, to ensure that each phone call reaches the relevant department for resolution. IDT’s SMS platform also has intelligent routing algorithms to ensure your SMS messages reach their intended recipients in a timely and seamless manner. With IDT Express Omnichannel, you can leverage a powerful Application Programming Interface (API) to seamlessly connect with your audience across a multitude of channels. IDT provides reliable coverage across the globe, ensuring that your messages reach your audience, no matter where they are.
7. Not Listening to Customers and Collecting Feedback
Your customers will have something to say about the quality of your product or service – whether for good, or bad. If you fail to listen and take note of their opinions, you’ll lose valuable opportunities to identify the areas where you’re getting it right, and the ones that need improvement.
To help you improve the customer experience, it’s therefore essential to solicit feedback from your consumers – and to provide easy and convenient avenues for them to share their opinions. You might for example use a sentiment analysis tool like an NPS survey to discover how customers rate a given product or service on a scale of zero (0) to ten (10).
With IDT Express Omnichannel, you can harness the power and immediacy of social media to gauge consumer opinion. For example, on WhatsApp you can engage in rich and interactive conversations with your audience on the world’s most popular messaging app. You can also share multimedia content and provide personalized customer support on the same platform.
8. Keeping Customers Out of the Loop
Engaged consumers will not only have something to say about what you’re offering. They may also have a genuine desire to learn more about your organization directly from you. Failure to get access to such information can lead to distrust of your business (“What have they got to hide?”) and disaffection with the way you operate.
Here again, omnichannel strategies for communication and timely messaging have a role to play in keeping your customers in the loop. As we have already observed, a platform like IDT Express Omnichannel integrates seamlessly with popular communications and messaging channels on social media and mobile. So for example on Facebook, you can connect with billions of users through Messenger, and boost engagement with automated responses, promotions, and personalized messages for a dynamic communication experience.
9. Relying Too Much On Technology
While it’s true that using automated chatbots can provide customers with an immediately available and easy to use channel for self-service and issue resolution, an over-reliance on technology can sometimes have damaging effects.
For example, chatbots can’t convincingly display emotion, or show empathy like a human being. So it’s important to strike a balance. On social media for instance you might have a technical support team to lend a more personal touch when replying to tweets and chat.
10. Not Sharing Information Effectively Within the Organization
Within your organization, a failure to share information between departments can lead to a disconnect between critical functions like sales, marketing, and customer success. Lack of access to shared data may lead to missed opportunities for product or service improvement, and have a negative impact on your ability to successfully engage your customers and provide a personalized experience.
With an omnichannel approach to communication and data management, it’s possible to ensure that your teams have all the resources and information they require to ensure successful customer outcomes. For example, in addition to its comprehensive analytics and reporting tools, IDT Express Omnichannel provides 24/7 customer support to ensure that you have assistance whenever you need it.
Your Logical Next Step
As we have seen, an omnichannel approach to communication and data management can help your organization avoid the pitfalls that detract from a positive customer experience. Here at IDT Express, we offer Omnichannel Messaging and an SMS platform that can take your customer experience efforts to a new level.
To talk to one of our experts today, and see if we are a good fit for you – and to get $25 Free Test Credit with a Trial Account – visit our sign-up page.
