Leigh Simpson
Positive customer experience is vital for referrals and maximising life time value from your customer relationships. However, one of the biggest challenges any business faces is keeping customers happy and being consistent in the way we deal with customer challenges and needs.
Unhappy customers can spread their dissatisfaction quickly with social media. But, a delighted client can be the most valued influencer in attracting new customers.
Discover how A.I. can help you improve customer experience, build your brand reputation and grow your business.
What is 1st Class Customer Service?
The foundation of first-class customer service is personalisation. Tailoring an experience to the individual customer's needs and challenges is a sure-fire way to make your customers experience with you a delightful one.
By using A.I. you can not only deliver on this personalised customer approach but organically assess your customer's common pain points and issues over time.
Reports show that nearly 50% of customers will switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. Whilst, over 52% of customers report going out of their way to engage and buy from the brands they are loyal to.
Using A.I. To Set Goals
Before you start with A.I. it’s important to understand which parts of your business are falling behind the competition or are not performing well enough for your customer.
Are you taking too long handling complaints? Slow at responding to complex quotations? Making errors in order processing?
With clear objectives, you can then scope out your project, identify the data you have in the business around these processes and start to produce data models to provide insights into where the bottlenecks, or problems, are occurring.
With your clear goals in place, you can then begin to plan the changes to your processes and the possible cultural change that will follow.
Being Better Than The Competition
During the buyer's journey, it's essential that you use the tools available to you, in order to distinguish yourself from your competition.
A.I.'s customisability, adaptability and innovation can help to establish your brand during these early research stages. For example, by using A.I. to ensure quick responses to complaints or queries 24/7, you are effectively delivering first-class customer service.
Customers remember terrible experiences with companies. Think about it...
We all have a definitive experience that we can recall when we think of bad customer service. An unhelpful call centre, a rude checkout attendant at the store... a customer always remembers and it's very hard to change a customer's perception of your brand after the fact.
Being better than the competition isn't simply being more efficient than your competitor. Ensure that you're using A.I. to listen to your customer's needs, thereby crafting a tailored experience they'll remember fondly forever.
Managing Your Data
Do you have the data that you need to understand your processes properly?
If not, it’s time to start capturing every step of the sales, marketing and customer service process.
Make sure that every touchpoint with your customer is recorded via your CRM system. This includes every email, every phone call and every meeting.
Train and educate your teams about the value of data, how it can be leveraged to improve the customer experience and how this will drive growth.
Using the data that you have is a great way to start, but why not add ways of collecting data from photo uploads or video uploads from your customers? What about records of voice calls?
Reviewing past decisions and assessing the probability of current issues being the same can drive quicker resolutions by prompting operators to ask different questions and prompt for upselling or cross-selling.
Delivering Improvements
If you are kicking off with A.I. for the first time, then it is probably better to start with some simpler projects which can deliver clear profitability results for your business. Maybe look at how you can improve customer experience during the sales process?
Remember your customers probably don’t really care about you or your products; they are just trying to get their job done as quickly and smoothly as possible, naturally with a cost that represents great value.
Helping customers with access to relevant answers to common questions, even at the sales stage, can accelerate decision making and shorten sales cycles, keeping customers in your sales pipeline rather than skipping to a smoother process.
The same process post-sale, either with managing installation queries, dealing with damages in transport or handling complaints, can keep potentially unhappy customers satisfied as their challenges get resolved quicker and smoother.
By tapping into CX (Customer Experience), A.I. can analyse your FAQ database to automatically deliver suggestions and solutions to your prospects and clients 24/7, giving you a clear competitive advantage.
Measuring Success
There are a few areas that need to be considered. These include:
- Financial
- Employee satisfaction,
- Regulatory compliance
- Most importantly; customer satisfaction
Measuring your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a useful method of monitoring customer satisfaction, providing opportunities to engage with dissatisfied customers and encourage happy customers to advocate your solutions.
Conclusion
A.I. doesn’t have to be out of the reach of SMEs or daunting for the inexperienced.
With the lack of adoption of A.I. in most businesses, being the best is achievable to most businesses with low levels of investment.
This change can provide your team with more insights and time to provide a better customer experience, improving customer satisfaction, customer retention and referrals.
If you want to discover how A.I. could be used in your organisation to help you grow and improve your customer experience, contact us for a free consultation.
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.