Matthew Dixon of the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), and best-selling author of The Effortless Experience, emphasized the importance of effortless customer journeys in his keynote address at IQPC’s recent Call Center Week – Winter. Dixon said, “Any service interaction is 3.97 times more likely to drive disloyalty versus loyalty.”
Additional stats from his presentation speak to the importance of creating effortless customer experiences:
- Low customer effort results in 94% re-purchase rates, whereas high effort yields just a 4% re-purchase rate.
- Low-effort interactions result in negative word-of-mouth only 1% of the time but 81% of the time in high-effort interactions.
- Low effort for customers increases their total purchase amounts 88% of the time. In high-effort transactions, only 4% of transaction totals are increased.
Use the Channels Your Customers Prefer
Effortless customer journeys also extend to communicating via the channels your customers prefer to use. Dixon noted that “Customers don’t want to talk to you, but companies just don’t get it.” Three years ago, 66% of customers relied primarily on the voice channel. Today, that number is just 28%. However, companies believe their customers still prefer using the phone 2.5 times more than they prefer the web.
A Harvard Business Review study found that a staggering 57% of inbound calls come from customers who first attempted to resolve their issue on the company’s website. And over 30% of callers are on the company’s website at the same time that they are talking to a rep on the phone. That’s a lot of frustrated customers.
Omnichannel and a Single Customer Experience
Offering many channels means nothing if the channels involve effort as customers move between them. Fewer channels done right and tied together into one conversation is better than multiple, siloed channels that require additional customer effort. True omnichannel, not just multi-channel, experiences are the keys to reducing effort and increasing loyalty. Cyara customers continue to indicate the need for a single overarching view of the entire customer experience that provides actionable data identifying customer pain points at each step in the customer journey.
Best Practices for Omnichannel Customer Experiences
The Aberdeen Group’s report, The Business Value of Integrating Your Contact Center Within Your Omnichannel Strategy, recommends that companies adopt the following activities in order to better align omnichannel efforts with the best-in-class practices.
The three primary practices recommended are listed below along with how Cyara’s automated customer experience testing can help you follow these practices:
- Don’t look at omnichannel programs in silos.
Customer interactions span multiple stakeholders and touch-points in the business. Integrating the contact center as a key component of omnichannel programs helps companies reduce support costs, delight buyers and ultimately drive incremental revenue for the business. By using the Cyara Platform for testing and monitoring, Cyara customers are able to innovate 40 to 70% faster than their peers, adding new channels and capabilities with confidence. - Empower your agents.
Streamline internal data flows across different technology systems in order to provide your agents with a seamless view of omnichannel customer interaction history. Using Cyara provides the analytics to achieve productivity gains, reduce average handle times and increase first contact resolution rates, which provide real value to the contact center. - Take a holistic look at performance management.
Omnichannel CEM programs involve multiple components (e.g. channels, stakeholders and technologies). Assessing the performance of each pillar involved in those activities is crucial to understanding how they contribute to broader business objectives. Using Cyara provides key metrics that reveal insights indicative of success for your business.
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