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I am pleased to receive Julien Rio, Marketing Director of the Omni-Digital Dimelo customer relationship management solution.
In this interview Julien explains to us:
Why Optimizing the Customer Experience Must Be a Priority
The 7 best practices to implement to optimize the Customer Experience
How to spread a customer culture in a company
Why should optimizing the Customer Experience be a priority for a company?
7 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience!
2 For 80% of contact centers, improving the customer experience is strategic objective number 1 (Deloitte).
Why?
Quite simply because according to Gartner 64% of customers abandon a brand following bad customer experience and that the cost of acquiring a customer is higher than its cost of retention.
In fact, taking good care of your client and providing them with a memorable and seamless experience becomes essential.
For a company, Customer Relations is the front line, the “visible” part from the customer’s point of view.
If this relationship is not fluid, it is the image of the brand as a whole that is tainted.
Why is a company like Uber so successful?
Smooth customer experience on the app, additional services in the vehicle, ease of contact in case of problems.
7 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience!
3 Why is Amazon so popular?
Beyond a very wide choice, it is an ease in the return of products, simplicity of contact as well as a clear and intuitive customer journey.
7 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience! 4
Successful businesses often hide an exemplary customer experience.
What are the 7 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience?
Before wanting to offer an extraordinary customer experience, it is necessary to respond to the fundamentals of customer relations.
Indeed, if the minimum expected is not there, you never manage to offer a customer exception “who”:
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In particular, it is necessary to deal with the slowness in the responses, the quality of the responses, listening to customers, the availability of customer service…
7 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience!
6 I offer a selection of 7 tips to offer optimal customer experience:
Being digital in your contact center
7 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience!
7 It is not a question of being present on all existing digital channels, but of being attentive to its audience to find out its privileged points of contact.
If your clientele is young and mainly uses messaging apps for their personal communications, forcing them to use more traditional channels (telephone, mail, email) is counterproductive.
Here is a graph that shows the use of different communication channels across generations:
7 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience!
8 You must be available on the channels on which your customers spend time and are comfortable.
Offer an identical customer relationship on all channels
7 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience!
9 58% of customers say they are frustrated by an inconsistent experience from one channel to another.
Traditionally, contact centers are organized in silos, with a different team per communication channel.
7 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience!
10. The problem with this approach is that the customer may receive different responses depending on whether they contact you through one channel or another.
This inconsistency is a source of frustration, therefore, it is negative customer experience.
Allocate messages effectively
7 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience!
11. 89% of customers say they are frustrated having to explain the same problem several times.
We’ve all been there: after ten minutes of waiting on the phone, we explain our problem to a first-party who transfers us to a colleague who needs to explain the situation again.
And the game can continue like this over several rounds…
Understand the incoming message, categorize it effectively for sending it automatically to the agent with the right skill is essential to providing a positive customer experience
4 steps to pilot the customer experience
Actions to be implemented at each stage
Practical examples
You will also receive advice by email from me
E-mail. I also want to receive advice to improve the customer experience
7 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience!
12. 72% of customers expect the agent receiving their message to know their contact information (source cloud blogs).
Being able to identify your interlocutor automatically is not only beneficial for the customer, who therefore does not need to spend time explaining who he is and the context of his message, but also for the company that earns precious minutes to each message.
Focus on your FCR: the FCR (First Contact Resolution) is the reverse of the reiteration rate.
In other words, it’s the ability of a company to solve its customer’s problem from the first interaction.
This indicator is essential since it has an impact on all your other indicators: when it increases, you reduce your volume of incoming messages, you increase your customers ‘satisfaction, your agents’ productivity and reduce your costs.
More concretely, a 1% increase in resolution rate at first contact reduces your costs by 1%, increases customer satisfaction by
7 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience!
13. If you have not already done so, I invite you to check what is your resolution rate on the first call:
7 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience!
14. Connect your tools
7 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience!
15. 42% of agents are unable to solve your customers’ problems effectively because of disconnected systems (source Forrester).
A customer relationship center uses on average 8 to 12 tools (CRM, BPM, BI, voice tool, interaction platform, etc.).
If these tools are independent of each other, the information does not flow and becomes redundant at best, obsolete at worst.
To obtain the Saint Grâal of Customer Relations, namely the 360 ° view of the customer, you must first interconnect the different tools so that they communicate with each other and allow your agents to have a clear and precise vision. Of your customers.
Trust AI
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Chatbots cannot solve everything.
To think that they are able to replace the human is to have a utopian vision of their capacities.
On the other hand, well-configured chatbots are now able to manage all level 1 messages (simple, redundant requests) which can represent up to 80% of incoming requests in certain industries.
In this context, failing to solve all the problems, a chatbot will be able to absorb part of the volume of interactions and allow the human agent to focus on tasks with higher added value.
In order for the chatbot not to be disappointed, it is important to choose the use cases (customer requests), which have both a large volume, but also a minimum of added value (eg personalized or contextual responses). Indeed, a chatbot which is a simple “FAQ” can sometimes waste more time than a conventional FAQ.
Beyond this productivity aspect, the chatbot will also allow greater availability and shorter first response time.
Here are some examples of companies that are at the forefront of the customer experience.
In France and abroad, telecoms are the companies processing the highest volumes of customer requests in all industries.
They are generally ahead of their peers because customer loyalty is essential for them and is above all a fluid customer experience.
Observing these companies is therefore essential for effective monitoring.
AXA is also interesting because it is a regular pioneer.
Available on Messenger before everyone else in 2016, it has shown the way to many other brands now present on so-called messaging channels.
Digital banks, like Orange Bank, for example, are also important to watch.
These have both purely digital and security issues. Tracking their development allows you to see where the market is moving.
As a general rule, you have to know how to get out of your direct perimeter or industry.
When a consumer benefits from an extraordinary experience with minimal response time when contacting Amazon, he expects a similar experience with your business.
Any positive experience becomes a given and raises the bar for future expectations.
How to spread a customer culture in a company and ensure that employees are driving forces in improving the customer experience?
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The customer service department is very often poorly judged.
Sometimes seen as a cost center and a necessary evil, sometimes as the noisy branch of the business, it is actually the heart of the brand.
Your customer relations department can quickly become a profit center.
Your agents have very specific knowledge of the concerns of your customers.
Some companies, such as Bouygues Telecom, have set up a field feedback process to deal with and analyze the problems of their customers by bringing them up in the corporate hierarchy to ensure that they are understood by all.
7 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience! 187 best practices to implement to optimize the customer experience!
19. To change the dynamics of the company and truly become customer-centric, a good approach is to ensure that each employee is put in contact with the customer:
Either by accompanying the sales team in their visits,
Either by spending time in the customer relations department to better understands its workings and difficulties.
This approach also has the huge advantage of tightening teams and taking employees out of their comfort zone to look at the company through a different lens.
What mistakes should you not make when you want to improve the customer experience?
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The biggest mistake you can make is to think for your client.
The famous phrase, often attributed to Henry Ford, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have answered faster horses” does not always hold true.
Of course, you have to know how to be innovative and invent the future to differentiate yourself from the competition, but this should never be done at the expense of continuous listening to customers.
Your agents are in constant contact with your customers.
They know their frustrations and their desires.
Involving your customer relations department in product development, directly or indirectly, avoids many errors.
Criticism must also be seen as an opportunity.
Admittedly, it is never pleasant to read negative comments.
However, it is by inviting your customers to express themselves that you will discover your main areas of progression and differentiate yourself by offering them an ever more fluid experience.
You must, therefore, set up a system for collecting customer reviews (eg satisfaction surveys, a crawl of reviews on the web, review sites, etc.), then use them to draw continuous improvement plans.
Do you want to know more?
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Julien Rio is Head of Marketing for Dimelo, a company specializing in Omni-Digital Customer Relations.
After obtaining a Masters in Marketing & e-Commerce at the Polytechnic School of Hong Kong, I spent ten years in Asia working in various industries with always a special focus on digital marketing and customer relations.
In 2017, I wrote the Trade Show Chronicles, an educational novel aimed at improving trade fair management for marketing teams.
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I returned to France that same year to join the Dimelo team and participate in its international development.
Author of the blog JulienRio.com, I regularly share my experience and opinion through conferences, forums or articles on subjects related to customer relations and marketing.
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