Any leader who oversees a customer support team or Twitter account understands the effect that customer experience (CX) can have on brand loyalty firsthand. And while companies expect optimizations to this part of their business, leaders also know that the importance of customer experience is still on the rise. In fact, by the end of 2020, CX is projected to overtake both price and product as the key brand differentiator.
So how do you balance the investments required to stand out in today’s customer experience landscape with internal needs to deliver results cost-effectively? Here are three trends that operational leaders can try this year:
1 Streamline your team’s technology
Of course, any highly efficient CX team needs good internal software. But often there’s a different communication software for each type of communicating your team has to do. There’s customer relationship management software, like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Zoho, but you might need different tools for social listening and support. Then there’s Slack (or another instant messaging app) and email for internal communications.
When you’re using a bunch of different systems and workflows to provide customer care, think about how you could consolidate or better document them. Streamlining where you can helps ensure consistency despite some of the necessary complexity. Look for software that works across platforms to help your team stay on the same page.
2 Make sure resources are easily accessible
If a member of your team needs to answer a customer question, where does the answer live? Is there a clear internal source of truth for frequently asked questions and troubleshooting, and if so, how detailed is it? Is there a documented set of dos and don’ts for what language team members can use?
Individual teams have different solutions to these pain points—a good source of information could be a support section of your internal wiki, a one-sheet FAQ, or a detailed style guide. Consider how your competitors and other companies handle these challenges and ask your team members for input on the best way to solve them.
Once teams are equipped with these internal resources, tools like Grammarly Business can help ensure important messages are conveyed effectively with real-time writing suggestions for clarity, tone, conciseness, and more. Not only will this cut down on costly back-and-forth, but your customers will be delighted by the experience.
3 Keep writing and communication standards high
Customers can interact with your brand in a variety of ways. Whether your customer comes across a representative through replies on Twitter, a live chat on your home page, or through a bug report email, the brand voice they encounter should be consistent across all of them. Even if you don’t have a hammered out brand voice, these customers still expect to chat with a real person who writes like a professional. The only way to ensure that all customer-facing communication is up to snuff is to make sure all text gets checked before it goes out.
But with customer support teams becoming more distributed, it’s not always possible to have direct oversight on every customer response or individual who is interacting with customers. With centralized reporting, Grammarly Business offers visibility into tool adoption and aggregated writing trends for individuals and teams, giving you confidence that quality writing standards are met wherever your team is communicating with customers.
