Information Technology Can Be Used to Improve the Customer Experience

The people who make use of your products or services, be they clients or customers, are the ones who keep your business afloat. Therefore, you must do your part to ensure that they are happy and satisfied with your business. Thankfully, the right technology can make doing such a thing much easier. Let’s explore some of the opportunities your business has to improve the customer experience through the use of innovative IT solutions.

IT Needs to Be Less About Product, More About Experience

Many businesses are shifting their priorities to the experience that they provide for their customers rather than letting their products or services take center stage. This is based on the premise that clients care more about consistent results compared to what you have to offer. In fact, 78 percent of Chief Information Officers (CIOs), who responded to IDG’s State of the CIO survey reported that customer interactions became very important over the past year.

With recent events up-ending so much for countless businesses all over the world, it’s no surprise that customer service has also been influenced. Safety, in particular, became imperative for business’ long-term success and reputation, as well as businesses finding new ways to engage with their audience and customers while ensuring operations were not influenced by remote work. To further reinforce this fact, half of the businesses surveyed by SuperOffice indicated that customer experience would be their focus for the next five years.

Customer experience, or CX for short, is an umbrella term for how a customer and an organization interact with each other. So, how can the right technology help your business ensure that customers have a satisfactory experience?

Is CX Really That Important?

To answer this question, let’s take a look at yet another study, this time by Forrester. In their US 2021 Customer Experience Index rankings, 5 percent of performers were brands who focused on making things easy for their consumers over the past year. So, yes, customer experience is important, and it can translate into more profits from your existing consumer base over time.

How to Boost CX

There are several ways that your business can enhance the customer experience, and the best part is that they can all work together to create something great for your company.

Understand Your Customers and What You Want Their Experience to Be

It is critical that you understand your customers in that they are not just a generic group of people who you serve. Rather, they are a group of diverse individuals who all have different needs, tendencies, and capabilities. Depending on your own business, you might have some tech-savvy clients and you might have those who don’t know how to turn on a computer. Once you know where on the spectrum your customers are, you can develop an experience that best suits their needs.

Collect Feedback

The simplest and easiest way to discover your clients’ experiences is to ask them about them. This type of feedback can be collected through several tools, including live chat logs and good old-fashioned surveys. You also should not discount anecdotal evidence about particular customers’ experiences.

Your employees will prove to be an invaluable resource for direct feedback. Take some time to listen to what your employees have to say about their interactions with your customers. This perspective will be incredibly helpful not only for discovering how your customers feel about your business, but also how you can improve them.

Standardize Your Processes

One great way that you can make sure your team provides a consistently positive experience is to standardize your process. This first involves making sure that you are aware of your customers’ needs; once you understand their needs, you can implement processes that are most likely to address them. This will improve the customer experience dramatically and ensure that they get the type of service necessary to keep them coming back for more.

Zinc wants to help your business improve the customer experience through the use of IT tools and other solutions to assist with ironing out and streamlining processes. To learn more about how we can help your business ensure a high-quality customer experience, reach out to us at (713) 979-2090.