Does improving Customer Experience (CX) mean increased costs?

Today’s business scenario calls out to cut costs, optimize expenses. Yet the customers are demanding more from the organization. So how does one continue to improving Customer Experience in these trying times? Would cutting costs mean compromising on customer experience? It can, but it need not be!!! The two are not mutually exclusive. You could cut costs yet elevate your customer experience, let’s see how.

The first step is to choose the right customer experience (CX) initiatives.

Which means, identifying customer touchpoints – the social media, Sales team, contact centre, service team and even consumer forums etc.

Next comes

• Identifying the available customer experience initiatives that will help enhance the customer experience at each touchpoint
• Evaluate identified initiatives on two accounts :

• • the feasibility & impact on the customer experience and your business
  • the risk that it offers

For example, customer impact could be: improves customer interaction critical to the customer experience. The business impact could be Increased revenue. Feasibility could be the availability of resources required to implement the initiative (people, infrastructure, funds). The risk could be the likelihood of achieving the projected results.

Customer Service undoubtedly forms the largest denominator of Customer Experience, hence improving the customer service experience is a good place to start. This translates to, taking a hard look at the store ambiance and staff, your website navigation, post-sales support, mobile apps, the response rate on social media etc.

All these require the right and unified communication across channels. Good communication helps improving customer experience & business metrics; this is also the cheapest lever to pull in the journey of enhancing the customer experience.

Teach your teams to listen not hear, empower them to give, not ask. Go the extra mile. Remember, the key is to cut costs, not corners.

Embrace technology and use it to enhance your customer experience.

Some things to adopt would include incorporating chatbots on your website, investing in a customer feedback management systems, social listening, open mapping platforms, webcasting & transactional content management.

The responses that businesses have had to make to demands that the new normal has placed on them can be divided into two sections :

Digital First: 

Automate with personalization: This would entail strengthening digital engagement across the online channels.

Multi-channel is the way to go for both products & services with enablement for the customer to transverse seamlessly from one channel to another.

Engage with context – be relevant.

Human-Centric Design:

Enable Collaboration: Plan a human fail-safe for all digital-first support. Leverage contact centres for designing experiences and incorporate insights received from there.

One needs to remember while the need of the hour is to adopt Artificial Intelligence(AI) and machine learning but do it with caution. Use it to augment customer understanding and insights but not replace the human interface or personal touch.