If you’re just playing catch-up with your customer service, your brand will likely fall behind. Make omnichannel customer experience a part of your business growth to maintain a competitive advantage.

This is the era of disruptive technology and innovative solutions. Many forward-thinking businesses are using transformational products and services — and they’re breaking growth and innovation records as a result.

However, most of these disruptive players are failing to provide the same transformative and innovative customer experience as their products or services. Customer experience is often overlooked because of two common mistakes:

Mistake 1: No Standardised CX Strategy

When a start-up is learning to “Walk,” the founders don’t have enough resources to plan for an omnichannel customer experience or fund an all-in-one call centre solution. This usually results in them inheriting several different CX systems as the business grows. And that makes them unable to standardise their CX strategy.

By the time a start up reaches the “Run” stage, the business has grown exponentially. But their customer experience is still fragmented across multiple systems. The systems don’t talk to each other, and they don’t provide a unified customer experience across all channels.

Mistake 2: You Don’t Consider CX as a Growth Opportunity

Often, founders are more focused on growing the business and increasing revenue. They don’t take customer experience into consideration due to other priorities or limitations.

Customers don’t differentiate whether you are a new player or an established business. They expect the same level of support from a start-up as they get from Amazon, Apple, Google or any other giant. So give the customer experience you provide as much attention as you do with business growth.

When it comes to poor service experiences, consumers are impatient and they’ll leave when their needs aren’t met. More than 74% of consumers said they’d switch brands after five or fewer negative customer service interactions. One in 10 would abandon an organisation after a single bad interaction. In the past year, one-third of consumers have switched brands due to poor service.

Moving to the Fly Stage of CX

So, what do high growth organisations need to do to move from “Walk” to “Run” and from the “Run” to the “Fly” stage? In their stages of growth, they have a tremendous amount of data, disjointed channels and multiple challenges.

To “Fly,” rapidly growing businesses need a cohesive experience across the entire customer journey so they can provide customers with a personalised, connected and seamless experience on the channel of their choice. Brand is important at every step and customer expectations continue to rise. This year, 86% of consumers globally said a company is only as good as its service, up from 70% in 2021.

Convert your consumers into loyal customers by meeting their needs and delighting them at every touch point. Let your end users know they matter most to your business by providing the best customer experience.

Here’s what CX leaders should keep in mind when building a customer experience strategy and choosing the right solution for their fast-growing business:

  1. An Omnichannel Experience
    Look for a system that seamlessly connects all individual customer interactions across multiple touchpoints over a variety of channels. Connecting systems for a 360-degree view of the customer reduces customer effort and service costs. A best-in-class solution will help you uncover important customer journeys and learn how these journeys impact customer satisfaction and business results.
  2. Multichannel Integrations
    Modern call centre software should have the capabilities to integrate customer communications across all potential touchpoints and channels. These can include CRM systems, voice, digital, collaboration solutions and more. Your CX solution needs to be flexible, efficient and easy-to-use so it easily integrates with existing technologies and allows you to maximise your investment. Connecting your contact centre to other business-critical systems will improve business and operational efficiencies, as well as enhance the customer and employee experiences.
  3. Break the Data Silos
    Data is gold for your business — if you can harness it. Next-generation analytics platforms transform customer data silos into journey data pipelines that fuel analytics, modelling and orchestration. Get the most out of your data by breaking down silos for deeper insights, effective automation and personalised experiences that differentiate your brand. Gain valuable insights by connecting data sources to make informed decisions.
  4. Proactively Use AI and Automation
    Drive innovation with artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to accelerate business growth and maintain a competitive advantage. AI makes agents’ jobs easier, boost revenue and improves customer loyalty. Look for the solutions that provide predictive routing and web engagement capabilities. The best systems have real-time AI assistance to improve agent efficiency and quality of customer interactions. They should also offer AI-powered bots that understand context. You can automate repetitive tasks with AI while providing seamless personalised self-service to human handoff.
  5. Paying the Right Price for the Right Solution
    Save time and money by choosing the right call centre solution. Unify customer and agent experiences across phone, email, chat, text and social channels. Look for flexible pricing options and choose only the capabilities you need. If you want to scale down your solution or upgrade at any time, choose a partner who makes it easy to do that. A composable all-in-one cloud call centre solution reduces your IT footprint and costs. Your cloud platform must be secure and compliant — and it must protect your data so that your business can grow and innovate without interruption.
  6. Customer Experience Depends on Employee Experience
    Your customer service representatives and employees are the face of your brand. Empower them with the right tools to support your customers and the bottom line. With the right customer experience system in place, your business can deliver consistent customer experience at every touchpoint. Customers won’t experience long pauses, multiple transfers and dead ends. In the past, call centres prioritised optimising efficiency and effectiveness. Today’s employees have higher expectations. It’s important to strike a balance between flexibility, efficiency and empathy. Make employee engagement part of your digital transformation to provide the best customer experience.

Be the Customer

Try this exercise: Put yourself in your customers’ shoes to understand how you’re providing customer service. Contact your call centre; chat with the bots you’ve implemented; reach out to your business through multiple channels — just like a customer would. Then repeat this exercise with your favourite brand.

Doing this will help identify the gaps, uncover opportunities for improvement and create better customer journeys. And you’ll get a better picture for choosing the CX goals that best align with your business and optimise the customer journeys that matter most to end users.

Remember: Silos shouldn’t exist while scaling your business or afterward. Fragmented, unsatisfactory and inconsistent customer experiences are lost opportunities.

When you’re ready to “Fly,” we can help.

Genesys works with you before, during and after the deployment. With the Genesys CloudTM platform, you’re investing in a partner that’s proven and a product that’s visionary so you can adapt, scale and create meaningful experiences with confidence.

Talk to us about how we can support your CX needs and help you keep flying.