CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Ways to give clients a winning experience without breaking the bank

By our News Team | 2022

Develop CX strategies that will reduce your cost-to-serve while maintaining a high level of service quality.

According to a recent Zendesk customer experience trends study, more than 60% of customers will defect after a single poor experience, which is up 22% from 2021. Consequently, businesses have had to prioritise customer experiences, while ensuring that delivering a flawless experience does not eat into corporate profitability.

Greg Gatherer, Account Manager at international software development company Liferay Africa, offers three strategies that can help CX leaders reduce their cost-to-serve while maintaining a high level of service quality.

Customer experience

Photo by Moose Photos from Pexels

1. Allow customers to self-serve

One approach to cut costs is to allow customers to self-serve. Self-service is not only the preferred method for customer interactions, but also helps businesses save more than US$7 per interaction for a B2C company and US$13 for a B2B company.

Self-service enables clients to quickly obtain the answers and information they require without having to contact a sales representative. Consumers can access necessary information online via FAQs, blogs and forums. This saves customers time and allows customer support employees to focus on more complex issues.

2. Automate personalisation

Customers have grown to expect the same amount of personalisation from local businesses as they do from, say, global names such as Amazon and Netflix.

According to various studies:

  • Seventy-four percent of customers feel frustrated if there’s a lack of personalisation.
  • Eighty percent of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides personalised experiences.
  • Sixty-six percent of consumers say encountering content that isn’t personalised would stop them from making a purchase.

While customers may desire more tailored experiences, having a single customer service agent manually personalise the experience for a few clients is neither efficient nor cost-effective.

CX executives must seek out tools that allow their teams to customise digital experiences based on roles, products, location and business without having to touch every encounter.

Different personalisation strategies that can be handled through automation include:

  • surfacing relevant content and product recommendations based on user role and purchase history
  • tailoring catalogues and pricing based on their organisation
  • targeting web pages for different audience segments
  • building custom workflows according to unique business purchasing processes, and
  • triggering automated alerts when specific products are back in stock.

3. Make changes without involving IT

Increasing the time-to-market for consumer solutions has become important to corporate success — even more so in light of the changes brought about by the pandemic. If, however, customer experience is contingent on IT teams, solutions will obviously take longer to deliver.

The good news is that emerging tools, such as low code and no code, can empower businesses and non-technical teams to create and deliver customised solutions without involving a developer.

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