If your business is to have any chance of achieving its growth ambitions in the coming decade – especially when the buffeting effects of a certain troublingly persistent pandemic are also factored in – it simply must fine-tune its customer service offering to near-perfection.
The statistics certainly consistently point to the importance of this, with customer experience futurist Blake Morgan having observed for Forbes, for example, that 73% of companies with above-average customer experience deliver superior financial performance to their rivals.
So, what are just some of the steps your business could take to elevate its customer service to the next level in the immediate years of the 2020s?
Embrace ever-more sophisticated chatbots
In a short space of time, chatbots have gone from being a customer service ‘nice to have’, to nigh-on essential. They’re great as a means of providing real-time support while relieving some of the time pressure on your human customer support staff.
So, if you don’t yet have a chatbot on your firm’s site, 2020 might be the year to introduce one. And if you do already have one, why not look into the higher capabilities that the latest chatbots are beginning to gain, such as helping visitors to navigate a website, offering discounts, and even providing ideas for inspiration?
Make the most of Unified Communications (UC)
Far from a mere buzzword, Unified Communications is central to many 2020s firms’ efforts to properly harness the power of their various communications channels, by bringing them together into a single application.
As the UC Today website explains, “we’ve innovated so fast that the sheer number of communication tools available is enough to overwhelm any worker or IT team.”
That’s why looking into Unified Communications by Gamma or another reputable provider of this service, to integrate such channels as voice, video, messaging, and more could be one of the wisest things you do to reinforce your firm’s customer service offering in 2020.
Elevate from personalisation to hyper-personalisation
While personalised touches for the customer – such as referring to them by name in marketing emails – is nothing new, the very fact that customers do tend to expect personalisation as a standard these days, means that hyper-personalisation should increasingly be the term on your lips.
As we all know – because we are customers ourselves – a customer loves to be treated as if they are special. In the 2020s, then, more emphasis is likely to be placed on the sophisticated ways in which brands should not only collect customer data – such as through quizzes and surveys – but also harness that data, with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, to improve the customer experience still further.
Personalised email marketing, individualised product offers, personalised content based on the customer’s own preferences and requirements… these are all potential outcomes of the hyper-personalised approach that will become increasingly standard in the decade ahead.
Focus on achieving a better user experience (UX)
When you think of all of the digital channels through which your current or prospective customers are likely to interact with your brand – encompassing not only your firm’s main website, but also its social media pages, messaging apps, and much more – it’s important to consider whether that interaction is as easy as it could and should be for them.
The likelihood is that there will definitely be aspects in which your brand could enhance its UX for customers. Is your website design intuitive to use, for example? Is it a straightforward process for visitors to find the information they seek, and do potential customers or clients move effortlessly through your sales and marketing funnels, thereby maximising the chances of conversion?
Implementing just a few of these steps will help your brand to create the customer experience that a brand like yours should be offering in the 2020s. Your competitors will certainly be putting in place strategies like these sooner or later, so now’s the time for your brand to steal a march on them to bolster its customer numbers, sales, and revenues for months and years to come.