Customer experience is best measured by value
In your business, customers have multiple ways of providing feedback. They can tell you whether you have delivered on their expectations in survey forms, they can offer complaints directly to your support staff. They can abandon online shopping carts. They can post about the experience on social media. They can tell their circles of friends and colleagues.
They can also keep their complaints to themselves and simply shop elsewhere.
Customers who disappear from the revenue path are often a mystery. When you hear complaints, you can evaluate your service quality, discover the breakdowns, and identify areas of improvement.
Most companies that report a need to improve services often seek to offer products and features to address critical needs. They may also figure out ways to speed up operations, or deploy a more targeted personalization strategy. They may explore pricing options and involve partners with complementary solutions.
The number one item is always to discover what customers expect, and work to meet it. In some cases, possibly across the organization, change is required at a fundamental level.
Efficiency is only part of the story
If the surveys are in, and customers have told you they want faster, more personalized service for lower costs, there are multiple process improvements you can make. The components of process efficiency include:
- Cost: Every solutions provider seeks to limit the cost of doing business, and a large portion of those costs are derived from customer service, as well as the storage of customer-related content. Multiple repositories may include variable charges for content storage. In addition, the costs of maintaining multiple content libraries can often defy the financial team’s attempts to control them, because multiple departments may rely on different platforms to serve customers. A consolidated content management solution offers the most effective measure to get these costs under control.
- Access: Managing access to content is critical to the effectiveness of the customer service operation. Everyone who needs documents and materials to help customers must gain access to varied storage repositories, requiring management from technology staff. This can waste critical resources that are better spent improving products, delivering more accurate analytics, and driving the business forward.
- Speed: Customers expect faster service in just about every aspect of your business. When your professionals can readily find the materials they need while in a support session with a customer, it raises satisfaction and adds to brand loyalty. The hidden costs derived from the time spent crossing from one platform to another to find the documents they need, while customers wait, can reduce profitability as well as drive customers elsewhere.
- Accuracy: When you’re a customer, there is nothing like hearing ‘yes, I found your exact case here’ while trying to solve a problem. Your interface with the typical company involves finance, sales, technology, marketing, and support services, all of which tend to use different platforms to store your account information and other content. For the company, it is worthwhile to integrate as many repositories as possible into an interface that lets them cross-examine different aspects, to get a complete picture of the customer relationship.
- Intelligence: This is where consolidated access to multiple content repositories can really deliver. You can use analytics dashboards to identify problem areas and bottlenecks in the customer service process, which gives your entire organization the feedback you need to make process improvements. How easily your staff can find relevant content, and how quickly the information can be relayed to customers, can be critically important to raising service quality as well as identifying business growth opportunities.
Get a handle on your content
The eBook, Conquer Information Sprawl with Process Automation, authored by Peggy Winton, CIP, President and CEO of AIIM, covers the methods you can use to harness content sprawl with process automation. You can use the insights within to control your content and improve the customer experience.
Content and workflows to support the customer experience often take a back seat to a business focus on product features, sales relationships, website interfaces, and brand messaging. Understanding the importance of document management across your enterprise can be the key to competitiveness, productivity and ultimately the growth of your business.
Download your free copy of this eBook to learn how to combat information sprawl, unleash innovation, and yield significant and immediate ROI within your organization.