6 Things Consumers Expect In A Great Customer Experience

Delivering a great customer experience is critical to every business that seeks to retain existing customers, attract new ones and help them stand out from their competitors. Delighting customers and making long lasting good impressions builds long-term loyalty and contributes to a positive customer experience. While many businesses deliver a good customer experience, few are consistently delivering a great customer experience. Taking your customer experience from good to great is rarely easy and many businesses turn to outsourced customer service specialists like Impact. They benefit from the insight and track record of delivering positive change that successful customer service outsourcing companies can offer.Shorten with AI

While a carefully crafted customer experience strategy is important, businesses can easily overlook the core expectations that consumers have when it comes to a great customer experience. By meeting most of these core expectations, your business can go a long way towards delivering a great customer experience. We explore six things that consumers expect in a great customer experience.

What Consumers Expect In A Great Customer Experience

Every consumer will have different expectations as to what a great customer experience looks like. However, in most cases, there are common expectations that feature in most great customer experiences. It’s so important to make it easy to do business with you and these core expectations help companies achieve just that.

When you deliver a great customer experience, everyone benefits from it including the consumers that you serve and your customer service team. We outline the benefits of improving customers in our how to improve customer service article. Discover the expectations that consumers have in terms of a great customer experience, so you work towards delivering the all-important great customer experience and meeting consumer expectations.

1) Frictionless And Easy To Do Business With

Consumers want companies to make it easy to buy products/services. They will expect a positive and frictionless experience with no barriers. While this may seem obvious, it is surprising how many businesses, mostly inadvertently, have processes or systems in place that make it far from frictionless or easy for consumers. Common issues include not supporting the communication channels that consumers prefer using. For example, some consumers may be more comfortable contacting you via phone while others will turn to email or online chat. By supporting the communication channels that most of your consumers prefer, you can make the contact process so much easier. If your business serves consumers across a wide demographic, it is more likely that you will need to support a greater range of different communication channels.Shorten with AI

Being available to help consumers when they require it is just as important – if not more so – than the communication channels that you support. When consumers can easily contact your customer service team, you remove a common frustration. Achieving good customer service availability presents a significant resourcing challenge, even for established businesses with in-house customer service teams. In order to deliver good availability in terms of customer service operating hours and reasonable response times, you may need to consider outsourcing customer service to a customer service outsourcing specialist like Impact. We help organisations including some of the UK’s leading brands to improve their availability and make it easy for our clients’ customers to do business with them. Why not contact us to find out how we can help you successfully outsource customer service?Shorten with AI

2) Friendly & Positive Customer Service Agents

Friendly and positive customer service agents make a world of difference to customer service delivery. Consumers who contact your business with customer service queries will want to feel comfortable raising issues and asking questions. Unfortunately, some customer service agents can be negative and less than welcoming which is to the detriment of a great customer experience. Most consumers expect friendliness to be present in their customer service interactions. Hubspot research indicates that 73% of consumers will stay loyal to a brand if they have friendly customer service agents. This demonstrates the significant value that approachable, can-do agents can bring to your business and the transformation they have on customer retention.

Positivity is equally important to consumers. Customer service by its very nature involves the resolution of issues every day, some of which may be complex or reoccurring. Ensuring that customer service agents provide an upbeat customer service experience is a challenge that many businesses face. We believe that positivity is best achieved by hiring agents with a great culture fit, passion for customer service and willingness to continuously improve their skills. The reward for providing a helpful and encouraging customer experience is clear with 89% of consumers being more likely to make another purchase following a positive customer service experience according to Salesforce.

Selecting the best possible customer service agents to represent your business is key to meeting the consumer expectation for friendly and positive service. Whether you have an in-house customer service call centre or are outsourcing to a customer service call centre, the friendliness and positivity of your agents will be key to your success. At Impact, we are proud to have a team of just such agents who are passionate about customer service. At our UK call centre, we prioritise our customer service agents through the culture of care that is at the heart of our business. We take the time to train, support and empower our customer service agents so they can be at their best for our clients.Shorten with AI

3) Knowledgeable Advisors

In business, knowing your product, service and customer is key. This also extends into customer service as knowledge makes all the difference between managing to resolve a customer query and not being able to. When you are able to resolve a customer query, the customer is delighted, and their loyalty is won. Not doing so may allow frustration to build, and their business may be lost. 31% of consumers consider a knowledgeable customer agent to be the most crucial factor for a positive customer experience. This reinforces the critical role that knowledge plays in every customer service interaction. Consumers that contact your business will want to speak to an advisor with in-depth product/service knowledge. While it is not possible to achieve a first-time resolution for every customer service query, it is possible to increase the number of first-time resolutions when your customer service advisors are well-informed.Shorten with AI

Equipping your customer service agents with the knowledge that they need to confidently handle each consumer interaction has significant and lasting benefits. Your business will be in a stronger position to increase first time resolutions, which brings notable benefits to your consumers and customer service team. The efficiency gains and cost savings alone that can result from this make improving advisor knowledge a sound business decision.

At Impact, we pride ourselves on the in-depth knowledge of our customer service agents. We commit significant resources to our training programmes to equip every customer service agent with the knowledge that they need to delight our clients’ customers. Our customer service team take the time to develop product/service knowledge for each client that we represent. This ensures that they are well placed to handle each interaction with confidence. We are also experts on the processes and systems that our clients use to empower our agents so they can provide faster and more suitable resolutions to our clients’ customers. Why not get in touch with us by calling 01794 230 230 or completing our contact form to find out how we can provide knowledgeable customer service agents to represent your business?Shorten with AI

4) Issues Resolved Quickly

Customer service issues come in many forms, from the straightforward everyday through to the complex query. Whichever issue a consumer is experiencing, they are likely to have an expectation for a quick resolution. Whether they are encountering an issue with a purchase, have a question or are looking to return a product, the role of the customer service team remains the same, to achieve the fastest possible resolution of their issue. When issues are resolved quickly, customer satisfaction increases, and longer-term customer loyalty is won. It’s also a great way to ensure that valuable customer service resources are used efficiently, and unnecessary follow-ups are reduced.

The benefits that are gained from fast issue resolution are clear. Surprisingly, Nielsen-McKinsey research indicates that 33% of consumers would recommend a brand that provides a quick but ineffective response. Businesses that provide a quick and effective response to issues are able to gain an even greater advantage over their competitors through great customer service delivery. While of course it is not possible to resolve every customer service issue quickly, resolving a good proportion of issues quickly will delight your customers. It will also free up valuable time for customer service agents to focus on complex and on-going issues and drive faster resolutions in this area too.

The customer service team at Impact are focused on providing a great customer experience to our clients’ customers. We work closely with clients to not only improve issue resolution time but also to enhance the quality of each customer interaction. In many cases, a quick resolution may not always be the best outcome for a consumer if it is not also a quality interaction that delights the consumer and delivers a great commercial outcome for the business too. Our experience and expertise in customer service issue resolution, which has been gained from supporting some of the UK’s leading brands, makes us a customer service call centre of choice for businesses that are passionate about providing great customer service.

5) Personalised Customer Service

Personalised service is so much better than generic service. It helps consumers to feel like valued customers instead of just a number in a wider pool of customers. Providing personalised service to your customers will elevate your customer experience to the next level and help your business to stand out for all the right reasons. It can be as easy as greeting a returning customer by name or something more complex like remembering their product/service preferences, or something about their lifestyle.

The more tailored the consumer interaction, the greater the opportunity there is to build strong and long-lasting customer relationships. Consumer expectations when it comes to personalisation are high. Salesforce found that 63% of consumers expect businesses to know their unique needs and expectations, both of which are critical components are required for a business to effectively personalise its customer service. Many consumers are also willing to share personal information in exchange for better service, with research by Salesforce indicating that as much as 56% of customers are willing to do so. It is important that customer service teams are equipped to take advantage of the many opportunities that personalisation presents with suitable customer relationship management (CRM), processes and customer service agent training in place.Shorten with AI

At Impact, we adapt each service interaction to the consumer and effortlessly handle even complex levels of personalisation on behalf of clients. Our customer service specialists are experienced at working with a range of CRMs, SAAS apps and systems to help us effectively personalise each interaction that we manage for clients. The proven processes and extensive customer service agent training that we have in place ensures that we are best placed to help clients deliver exceptional personalised customer experiences.

6) Consistent Service

Exceptional customer service is great but if it is being delivered sporadically without consistency, customer satisfaction and the overall customer experience will not be as good as it could be. When great customer service is delivered consistently, across a range of channels and regardless of the customer service agent that a consumer interacts with, the whole customer experience is so much greater. Consumers do demand consistent service, with research by Salesforce highlighting that as many as 75% of consumers desire a consistent experience from a business. Delivering a consistent customer experience can be a challenge but the rewards that are gained from achieving it more than justify the resources that many be required.

We believe that service consistency is best achieved with outstanding customer service agent training. If your customer service team has trained, confident and empowered agents, it will be far easier to achieve consistent service delivery even when unexpected issues and challenges are encountered. Effective customer service training will cover many different elements, but the more relevant areas to service consistency include operating procedures, escalation procedures, complaints management and product/service knowledge. At Impact, we are always striving to raise the bar in all areas of our outsourced customer service offering including service consistency. We pride ourselves on the high-quality customer service that we deliver at scale for our valued clients, which include some of the UK’s leading brands.