Here are five of my must-have modern customer experience components.
1. Leaders Talk About Customer Experience Every Day All Day
You know how kids often imitate their parents? It’s the same with employees. If the leaders (the authoritative figures) talk about–and focus on–the importance of customer experience chances are the employees will value customer experience as well. I have a saying that what you focus on grows. If you focus on customer experience it will grow–but you’ve got to talk about it (a lot). If leaders value customer experience, frontline employees that touch the customer will feel pride in their work. On the flip-side, if executives spend all their time counting their sales revue–and all the praise, trophies and accolades go to sales–it’s likely the team that works with customers won’t feel their work is valued. If time is a problem for busy executives–not to worry! Leaders can send notes, record videos and do other multimedia to make sure the employees that touch customers know their work is important. If your leaders don’t make it known that customer experience matters at the company, why would you expect agents or frontline employees to care? If your customer service is terrible at your company, look up. If the leaders tell you “don’t look up,” chances are this is a company that really doesn’t understand true leadership (and culture for that matter).
2. A Top Quality CRM
Are you dusting off your CRM? Does your agent need to go to multiple systems to help a customer? Do you have one view of your customer in one system? If you don’t it might be time to throw the baby out with the bath water. An old CRM is a customer experience killer. The reason is the old technologies layered on top of one another make for super complicated agent processes. That means your agents are spending time walking through swampy waters with tons of weeds.
We can work hard to create strong cultures inside of our companies but our agents are often only as strong as the technology we give them access to. If an agent is on the phone with a customer and has to pour through an old CRM and climb a wall to get through another piece of internal technology—that’s not going to work either.