Customer experience management advice from the pros

Customer experience management pushes companies to evaluate their brand experience from the customer’s point of view, not the company’s. Without that angle, departments often set internal goals that conflict with the customer’s interests.

“Your departments often have metrics that they’re trying to meet that are not customer-facing goals,” Dave explains. “Your support team might want to lower costs by 10%. And if you just focus on that, it can actually steer you into a worse customer experience at the same time that you’re meeting those goals.”

For example, trying to keep all customer conversations under five minutes will improve your call center’s efficiency—but it will also likely translate to a terrible customer experience.

Before adopting any departmental or company-wide objective, it’s important to ask, “How will this affect the customer?”

“Getting people within the company focused on improving the customer experience can be a hard sell,” warns Dave. “Especially if you have a siloed organization, or you don’t have a Chief Customer Officer.”

That’s why he feels it’s important to have leaders who are constantly beating the drum of “make it about the customer.”

Whether you’re investing in CX software, other parts of your tech stack, or even just a new customer-oriented strategy, it’s crucial that you have leadership’s backing.

“Executive sponsorship cannot be overstated when it comes to adoption and implementation,” Sam says. “In fact, only about a quarter of projects that don’t have effective executive sponsorship actually make it off of the ground.”

To get executive buy-in, managers need to curate the most relevant data points. After all, executives often don’t have time to look at a sea of numbers.

According to Brian, it helps if you’re able to both show the ROI of your proposed customer experience initiative and tell a compelling customer story about why you’re doing it.

“Show the long-term impact,” Brian advises. “Not just that a customer was upset one time, but that the customer then tweeted about it and got other people upset, or later left us for the competition.”

CXM strategies focus on both the experience of using your product or service and the experience of interacting with your business.

“If you’re tracking product complaints, that can help steer you towards product improvements,” says Dave. “If you’re tracking the customer journey from start to end, looking at all the touchpoints where customers interact with you and where those break down, that’s a good process, as well.”

Both processes require an automated system for capturing relevant data sets. Customer experience management software solutions like Zendesk Explore provide instant access to all of the customer analytics your company needs to be measuring:

• Filter customer conversation by reason for contact, whether that’s product support, pricing concerns, or any other issue

• Integrate engagement data from every communication channel so you know how customers prefer to interact with your brand

• Identify problem areas from support tickets

• Quickly fix routing issues to improve support operations

• See which support teams and agents have high or low CSAT (customer satisfaction) and one-touch ticket rates (here’s how to measure CSAT in Zendesk)

Use the data you capture to inform your operational adjustments and priorities. Find your customers’ pain points and do what it takes to relieve them.

When Dave was working as a customer support manager, he learned that one of the product integrations was leading to a high number of support tickets. With Zendesk’s software, he was able to track and organize tickets to investigate the issue. Agents used the drop-down menu on each support ticket to indicate what the conversation was about, and a time-tracking app recorded the amount of time spent on each ticket.

“We were able to say to the product team, ‘Here’s how much it costs us per month to support this feature,’” explains Dave. “I think giving them that kind of hard data helped them justify spending money to make those product improvements.”

According to Zendesk’s 2020 CX Trends Report, less than 30% of companies offer self-service, live chat, social messaging, in-app messaging, bots, or peer-to-peer communities. The study also found that among millennial and Gen Z customers, 30% typically resolve issues through chat, and 40% regularly use messaging.

That represents a big opportunity for many companies to outflank their competition by offering more digital communication channels. At the same time, Sam cautions against adding new channels just for the sake of adding new channels.

“If you just want to add chat, for example, because it’s got a high CSAT score and you want a high CSAT score, you should back up a little bit,” cautions Sam. “Do you have the resources to man a very active live channel like that? Do you have the first reply time benchmarks that will meet the expectations of somebody who is chatting in?”

If the CX data says your organization can’t fully support a new channel, you may need to either increase your staff or temporarily stick with less intensive channels.

And even if you do have the bandwidth for multiple channels, keep your focus on the customer’s expectations. Leverage customer data to see which platforms your audience actually likes and focus your energy on those.