Your Customer First: customer culture and customer relations

Putting the customer first means taking good care of them and paying attention to all their expectations.

Keynote extract facilitated by Salomon Parienti during a convention on the Customer Experience held in October 2022.

Any company’s results, whatever its size, are directly connected with the importance assigned to listening to its customers.

More than ever, companies need to develop a customer experience strategy based on their customers’ expectations.

In order to do so, they must meet their customers, listen to them, question them at regular intervals, and organise focus groups with the advisors who manage their requests from day to day.

In this regard, the Customer Experience Director is now a member of the Brand Management Committee.

What have consumers come to expect?

Customers are more than ever inclined to give their opinions, talk about their experience with customer services and, more generally, with the brand. Their opinion counts for potential future customers…

In 2022, 90% of customer relations professionals considered that consumers had more stringent requirements that in the past as regards the customer relationship delivered to them. (Barometer of the economic, social and territorial impacts of outsourced contact centres in France – 2022 Edition).

Simplicity and Immediacy

These days, customers expect a certain level of promptness and precision as far as their experience with the brand is concerned.

One of customers’ major expectations is immediate handling of their requests, whatever the channel used. When problems arise, quick solutions will make a good impression on customers.

The customer experience must also be effortless and require a minimum of time and action on the consumer’s part. In this regard, you need to develop efficient, simple and accessible customer journeys.

Nonetheless, before going to work on the customer journey, it’s essential to audit the UX (User Experience), with 2 main objectives:

• smooth navigation, enabling access to the information sought in three clicks for a merchant site and five clicks for a non-merchant site: The consumer journey must be short.
• information and instructions accessible and comprehensible to everyone. A chatbot can be a response to the first level 1 questions.

Transparency and Accessibility

The pandemic has led a growing number of customers to use digital channels. These days, 73% of customers want to be able to solve their problems themselves. All brands have to give their customers the opportunity to use their services autonomously.

Making services accessible to the customers themselves also meets the need for transparency: customers expect to have visibility on all the stages in their journeys.

Efficiency and Omnichannel

Being where the customer is, that’s the key to meeting their expectations.

Numerous recent studies have demonstrated the importance of the customer being able to contact the company via the channel of their choice.

Today’s consumers expect to be able to communicate on several different channels with the same quality of response and without having to re-explain their request if they switch from one channel to another.

To meet these expectations, care must be taken to ensure that all channels are up-to-date, along with advisors’ knowledge: they must be proficient in all areas and informed of any changes.

In addition, equipping them with an omnichannel CRM tool is essential; each department must be able to consult the history of all customer interactions at any time if a relationship is to be fluid and effective.

The experience must be seamless and homogeneous.

Personalisation

One of customer relations’ cornerstones is personalisation via listening and data exploitation.

Consumers have a voice and it’s louder now than ever before. The customer must be at the centre of any brand’s concerns; proposals must be targeted and match each customer’s profile and preferences.

Customers want an experience in their own image.

This means having advisors equipped with tools that register all the information and responses they need in order to recognise and assist customers: context, journey, history, etc.

There must also be proactive engagement on the brand’s part: by anticipating and communicating relevant targeted information to customers in order to preempt their expectations and defuse any eventual frictions.

AI and automation play a structuring role in reducing numbers of reactive customer contacts and attaining a proactive approach.

A personalised proactive approach results in greater customer satisfaction and loyalty and development of cross-selling.

In conclusion

Over the course of the last 2 years, our way of life, habits, expectations and the importance we place on time have all changed.

In the coming years, the customer experience will include artificial intelligence, human considerations and the metaverse. We’ll have to know how to balance these components in order to provide consumers with a unique, rapid, efficient customer experience of real quality…

The customer experience, the right one!