Three Ways to Improve Your Customer Experience
Delivering an excellent customer experience is now important across all phases of the customer lifecycle. Increasingly, it is service organizations involved in these touchpoints. Unfortunately, most organizations neglect to monitor and improve their customer service experience.
If your service organization is like many others, you actually do damage to your customer experience every time a customer contacts you for help. Customers are dissatisfied, because they have a disjointed, disconnected customer experience when they make contact, especially across more than one channel. Employees are inefficient, because they deal with multiple, overly complicated systems that get in the way of delivering a high-quality customer experience. Inconsistent systems bog down IT teams struggling with changing business requirements and an interminable backlog of requests.
We often fail to deliver customer service suitable for this digital age, putting up obstacles that require sometimes Herculean levels of customer effort to work through internal deficiencies. So how can you deliver a satisfying, efficient, and consistent customer experience?
To deliver a great customer experience and overcome these obstacles, your customer service should invest in three areas: the Power to Engage, the Power to Simplify, and the Power to Change.
The Power to Engage
Customer service has long stopped being confined to phone calls. Nearly three quarters of all customers use three or more channels for customer service issues. Whether it’s mobile apps, social media, instant message, video chat, co-browsing on your website, or even in-person – your customer service needs to be able to switch between these channels without restarting their conversation with you each time.
You need to break down the organizational silos that detract from your customer experience. If you can empower your employees with the right information, guidance, and authority, and connect them to centralized information no matter what the channel, then your agent can connect the dots instead of hoping the customer can do it.
The Power to Simplify
Take a walk around many contact centers and you’ll see some decidedly un-digital artifacts. Screens are crowded with way too many applications. Sticky notes and workarounds get tacked to cubicle walls. Many have binders full of company policies, procedures, or special product offers. Manual processes and paper shuffling take care of whatever agents can’t by themselves.
To solve this problem, at a minimum your contact center needs a unified desktop that pulls all your customer information into one view. But even that’s not enough simplifying, because you’re still overwhelming your agents with information. You should provide intelligent guidance to your agents so they can make sense of that information. Tell them what to say next, step by step, based not only on the customer’s issue but also based on your business goals for that specific customer. Automate busy work and take care of decisions that don’t require their experience, so they can spend less time escalating or chasing workarounds and more time delivering a quality customer experience.
The Power to Change
Any failure to adapt to changes – limited time offers, new policies and procedures, exceptions to the rules – is a terrible blow to your customer’s expectations. Yet every customer service organization faces change. Whoever’s maintaining your systems, in traditional do-it-yourself software development, is constantly struggling to keep up with the requests.
You need to eliminate the lag time between when your business decides it needs a fix in place, and when you can deploy those changes to your business. You want those changes – those new products, decision points, and processes – to propagate across all channels, so you aren’t simultaneously reprogramming how you interact with customers across separate silos of disjointed customer experiences. For that to work, you need an environment in which business and IT can work together, with a common understanding of the steps in place from point A to point B. That way your team can rapidly adapt and quickly deploy changes.
Your service organization is at the heart of most touchpoints in your customer journey. But to deliver a superior customer experience, you’ll need to meet the increasing expectations of this digital age. By engaging customers, simplifying operations, and quickly adapting to constantly changing market needs, you can deliver a satisfying, efficient, and consistent customer service experience for your connected customers. 
About Pega
Pegasystems Build for Change® Platform is the heart of Better Business Software®. It delivers business agility and empowers leading organizations to rapidly close execution gaps and seize new opportunities. Pegasystems leverages its recognized leadership in Business Process Management (BPM), Multi-Channel Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Rules, and Adaptive Analytics to uniquely give its clients the power to engage customers, simplify operations and Build For Change®. For more information, please visit us at www.pega.com.