No matter what kind of business you run, no one is more important to you than your customers. Providing the best customer experience possible is imperative for inspiring customer loyalty and achieving high customer retention. Good business leaders know that retaining existing customers is frequently even more important than customer outreach, thanks to the high costs involved in marketing.
Because of this, you’ll need a reliable customer relationship management (CRM) system to guide how your business interacts with customers, and how customers are able to provide feedback. This will not only help your sales team close deals and capture new leads more effectively but also boost the efficiency of your customer support team. Here are just some of the innovative solutions that are improving customers’ experiences.
Voice of the Customer
A voice of the customer program or VoC program is a method of collecting customer feedback on their expectations of your products and services and then determining whether or not their experiences matched those expectations. VoC is great for gaining usable insights, and as a metric, it’s becoming more popular as customers demand more direct interactions with organizations.
However, it’s best not to rush into a VoC program. It’s important to take your time when building your voice of the customer program for it to be effective. A successful VoC program needs to collect context-rich customer feedback by asking the right questions at the right times through all available digital channels, including online popups, email, social media, and more. Collaborate with all of your business leaders to create a customer-centric platform that uses the voice of the customer data to learn how your brand and customer experiences resonate on an emotional level. The best tools will even give you options to visualize the feedback you collect, so teams across your entire organization can easily understand this metric.
CPQ Integration
Salesforce is one of the most popular customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, and if your business sells customizable products, you’ll be glad to know that Salesforce CPQ integrations make it easy to set up, configure prices, and quote features. CPQ tools are all about letting customers fully explore the configuration options for products in real-time. Once they’ve selected a version of the product they like, CPQ software can accurately price the product immediately and even produce quote documents.
With Salesforce integration, any unique products are sent to Salesforce and added as new revenue items. All customer data is automatically sent over as well, so your tools are never out of alignment, and your team members can always focus on providing better experiences.
Omnichannel Support
Your contact center is one of the main lines of communication you have with your customers, and you need to provide the best customer journey possible. While most modern contact centers allow the use of digital channels for customers to “call in” (text, email, SMS, mobile apps, etc.), you can take your center to the next level by upgrading it with omnichannel capability.
True omnichannel support means customers can seamlessly switch between communication methods if needed, all while staying in contact with the same agent. This saves everyone’s time and makes for a highly personalized and memorable customer experience which is more likely to earn positive feedback. The customer data collected by your contact center can also help your salespeople make special offers to loyal customers.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) use for CRM solutions has been growing in popularity for many years and can be applied across a wide variety of technologies including machine learning algorithms, call routing, language processing, and more. Chatbots are extremely popular for company websites since they can help customers resolve simple issues and easily collect relevant data for more complex ones before connecting them to the right agent. AI can also help salespeople by prioritizing leads based on their past buying history.
By improving your customer service, you’ll be taking your first step toward becoming a market leader in your niche.