The digital age is upon us. According to Pew Research Center, about eight in every 10 Americans prefer online shopping, while 15% of Americans buy online every week. This spurt in online shopping is matched by a growing number of digital touchpoints, with customers using up to six touchpoints before completing a sale. Consequently, not only must businesses focus on multi-channel retail but also offer a consistent experience on every channel or face their customer's displeasure.

According to experts, customers demand three things from a great digital experience – speed, convenience, and consistency. In other words, modern customers demand quick and easy access to information, fast and reliable customer service, and a consistent and seamless experience on each touchpoint they use to interact with a brand. 

A Deloitte survey revealed the top factors that influence online shoppers on your site:

• Transparent pricing (80%)

• Convenience (78%)

• Clear and useful product information (67%)

• Easy navigation for researching or purchasing products (60%)

While this puts a lot of pressure on brands, the good thing is that customers value businesses that offer an outstanding purchase experience and don't mind paying extra for better service. Consequently, companies that provide better experiences to their customers earn between 4% and 8% above their competitors. 

Evolving Technology and Customer Experience 

According to McKinsey, 70% of buying experiences are based on how consumers feel they are being treated. As a result, more companies are directing a large percentage of their resources towards digital transformation to offer speed and efficiency to their customers.

However, unlike your staff that is trained in using new tools and software, your customers learn by trial and error. And, if they experience any friction while interacting with your revamped interface, it may lead to dissatisfaction, and often, disassociation with your brand. 

Well, this does not mean that you refrain from using the latest technology to improve your CX. Instead, you can offer on-screen guidance to your customers, through live chat integrated with co-browsing technology, to iron out the creases, if any, during the shopping process. 

Embrace Automation for Improved Service at Reduced Costs

When was the last time you dropped an email to customer service or tried contacting support via phone? Research indicates that, on average, customer support takes a minimum of 12 hours to respond to an email. Talking about the phone, many customers report waiting for hours and speaking to multiple representatives before connecting with one who is poised to resolve their issue. According to HubSpot, "33% of customers are most frustrated by having to wait on hold. 33% are most frustrated by having to repeat themselves to multiple support reps."

Inefficiency is the easiest way to turn off your customers and reduce their experience of your brand. And, in today's competitive marketplace, inefficient customer service is the fastest way of killing your business. Fortunately, like every other sphere, customer service technology makes it possible to automate key aspects of your support process to save time and hassle for both you and your customers. 

The top benefits of automated customer service include:

1. Streamline the Customer Service Process

The life of a support agent is not easy. Attending to customers not just involves excellent communication skills but a lot of manual tasks such as retrieving customer information, identifying each account, logging every issue, and finally speaking to the customers regarding their queries or complaints. No wonder, customer service agents are often burdened with piles of tasks. 

Automation technology can free up your agents' time by eliminating the manual tasks from their plate so that they can focus on the human side of things. For example, an AI-enabled chatbot can answer up to 80% of queries automatically, leaving only the complicated ones for your service representatives to handle. 

2. Better Customer Experience

Time is money, and customers are increasingly demanding fast and convenient shopping experiences from the brands they interact with. 

An automated customer service assistant, such as a chatbot, can make your user experience quite straightforward to minimize customer efforts and time. For example, instead of a customer looking for something on your site, your chatbot can ask a series of qualifying questions to direct them to the product or service they need. 

3. Enable Self-Service

According to research, more than 50% of your customers prefer to solve product issues on their own rather than relying on customer service. And we don't blame them, either. Think about it – isn't it much more convenient to quickly share your issue with a chatbot on a company's site than waiting on the phone to connect with an agent for resolution?

Enabling self-service options on your site also frees up your support staff to focus on other aspects of their role, while reducing their workload significantly.

Use On-Screen Guidance to Improve Customer Experience

In the era of instant gratification, offering your customers real-time assistance during the sales journey can improve their experience considerably. 

Here's how on-screen guidance through live chat and co-browsing technology can enrich your users' journey:

1. Seamless Onboarding for Customers

There's no use of offering a great product when your customers don't know how to derive the promised value from it. 

We suggest a proactive approach to overcome this issue. Instead of having your customers rely on FAQs to learn how to use your product, use on-screen guidance via live chat and co-browsing technology to guide customers through the process with minimal effort on their part.

You can also send pop-up messages in real-time to inform the user about a specific button or guide them to the desired sections on your site.

2. Easy Access to Information

Visitors look for detailed information when buying a product online. For the same reason, sites that make it difficult for users to find information, lose customers quickly. On-screen guidance can prevent this from happening by serving customers with the information they need quickly and efficiently. 

3. Reduced Response Times

Speedy customer support is the hallmark of a brand loved by its users. With on-screen guidance, you can facilitate real-time support on your site to simplify your visitors' journey. For example, if a user is unable to find a product on your website, he or she can click the live chat button and receive immediate assistance. Or, if a user faces any issue in navigating your website, an agent can connect to them via co-browsing technology to share step-by-step instructions and resolve the query swiftly and efficiently. 

Enable Self-Service to Empower your Customers

 Did you know that:

• 70% of customers prefer to use a company's website to get answers to their questions rather than use phone or email

• 40% of customers prefer self-service to human contact

• 70% of people expect a company's website to include a self-service application

The beauty of offering self-service lies in the fact that it not only empowers your customers by enabling convenient and speedy support but also reduces your overhead costs. Accenture reports that adding self-service to your site can save you up to $3 million annually. 

But what is meant by self-service? In case you are wondering, Gartner defines self-service as:

"A blend of customer-initiated interaction technologies that are designed to enable customers to service themselves."

Some examples of self-service tools include FAQ pages, customer communities, and intelligent chatbots.

Here's an example of self-service in action:

Consider that you are a fintech startup offering a new mobile wallet service. One user decides to try the service but gets stuck while syncing his account with the wallet. Now, without a self-service option, he cannot proceed unless he calls up customer care. Or, he may have to leave the page to search for online resources and start the process all over again once he finds the solution to his problem.

Instead, had there been a chatbot option on the screen, the customer could have verified his credentials by answering a few questions and received instant resolution without navigating away from the page. 

Of course, not every query can be answered by chatbots. And, in such cases, intelligent chatbots can connect your customers with human agents for timely support. Here, once again, your agents can make use of co-browsing technology to access a user's browser under controlled conditions and resolve the issue, step by step, in full view of the user so that they can troubleshoot on their own in the future.  

Develop a Customer-Centric Culture 

Amazon, the e-commerce giant, is one of the most customer-centric organizations on the globe. 

The company confesses to being obsessed with its customers and attributes its leadership position in the market to customer-obsession. To ensure that every employee at the organization is steeped in its customer-centric philosophy, the company has a set of leadership principles that guide its every decision. 

The first principle, Customer Obsession, says that:

 "Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers."

Like Amazon, every company that wishes to be successful in the times to come must focus its efforts on creating a customer-centric environment, making customer success a core business principle. 

To get started, clearly define the customer experience you want to provide your customers. For this, you must know your customers and anticipate their needs to give them what they want even before they start looking for it. 

Once you define your ideal customer experience, it is time to embed it in your business philosophy. Like Amazon, there should be a distinct relation between your CX and business decisions. In short, your CX expectations will become the basis of your hiring policy, staff expectation, and even the level of training given to an employee. 

The Wrap-Up

In a survey, 73% of consumers confirmed that customer experience directly influences their purchasing decisions. Besides, PwC reports that one in three customers will stop transacting with a brand after just one negative experience. 

Clearly, customer experience is the new battleground for businesses, and those who do not deliver will perish. That's also the reason why it is vital to invest in advancing technology to give your business the edge in the market. 

But integrating customer-centric technologies with your site is not enough to capture the attention of your customers and expect their loyalty. You also need to make use of these tools optimally to make sure your customers benefit from them. 

Before you set you to create a customer experience strategy, ask yourself the following questions:

• Who are my customers?

• What are the potential challenges they may face?

• What do they wish to achieve by using my product or service?

• What can I do to meet their expectations?

Most customers demand speed, accuracy, convenience, and personalization from businesses they transact with. They also expect an omnichannel experience in line with their browsing habits. 

Besides these fundamental expectations of every customer, we highly recommend that you dive into the data provided by your analytics software to understand your customers better and make specific improvements to your CX. You must also use micro surveys, like Net Promoter Score, and gain user feedback at every step of their journey through a single question delivered unobtrusively through a messaging application, such as your chatbot, or at the end of a live chat session.

And that's it!

They say knowledge is power. So, we have armed you with everything you need to know about improving your CX and charming your customers with every interaction. 

Author bio:

Ashwini is passionate about Business, Entrepreneurship, E-commerce, and Digital Marketing. She is working with Acquire as a digital marketing expert. She is a free soul and adventurous scholar who spends her free time with herself, loved once, music, as well as watching & playing sports. She is ocean addicted and on roads being a thrill-seeking traveler to get new experiences as she looks at life as our very own works of art. 

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