Chapter 7
Facing a choice between the two, 81% of customers value fast, frictionless interactions over highly personal ones.
In today’s customer-centric reality, they should not have to make that choice. Customers are empowered to ask for a customer experience that fires on all cylinders, and they are not squandering the opportunity.
Customers want friendly, accurate, fast and resolute experiences in their preferred channels whenever and wherever they choose to interact. They appreciate when organizations think beyond an individual support interaction, but they object to spammy marketing messages or unwanted sales pitches. They are open to using bots in some cases, but they still seek the accountability and resolve of a human touch in many others.
To put it simply, today’s customers want it all. Customer-centric organizations cannot skip any steps or overlook any options when it comes to creating the most valuable experience possible. For example:
Customers view first contact resolution and friendly agents as the top signs of a great experience; no unwanted upsells and consistent and accurate information also represent top demands.
Top signs of a poor experience include employees who lack knowledge, multiple transfers, unhappy employees and inconsistent information.
More than 50% of organizations value proactive engagement for customer service and follow-ups, but fewer than 13% support proactive marketing or sales efforts.
Only 33% identify live web chat as a preferred customer service channel; only 26% say the same about messaging. Since many of these customers routinely use chat and messaging in their everyday lives, these statistics are surprising. Clearly, they are not due to a fundamental aversion to digital communication.
They more likely speak to a lack of faith in chat as a viable customer service option, particularly for complex issues. Building education and trust in chat’s value accordingly represents a pivotal part of the disruption journey.
To do that, customer-centric organizations will vehemently stress interaction quality as indicated by both customer sentiment and conversational accuracy. Through training and proper knowledge integration, they will ensure agents and bots consistently communicate accurate, relevant information. They will use journey maps to deliver the right message at the right time, while turning to proactive communication specifically to reduce effort or add value.
The best chat platforms do not simply translate the phone experience for the digital world; they offer capabilities that do not exist elsewhere.
File sharing, collaborative co-browsing and document signing appear on this list. These capabilities offer a more tactile, more interactive experience for customers, which in turn fuels greater satisfaction. Per Comm100 benchmarking data, the CSAT average for interactions with co-browsing is 89%, six points higher than the overall chat average.
To further enhance the experience, modern chat platforms offer built-in transactional capabilities. If the system, as an example, notices that a customer is comparing laptop models on the website, it can initiate a proactive chat window that allows the customer to make a purchase and take advantage of a coupon code.
The joint availability of bots and agents further enhances the experience by ensuring customers have instant (or near instant) access to the best support mechanism for their issue. Should the customer’s needs change, the chat platform allows customers to seamlessly move from bots to agents or agents to bots.
