Customer Experience Management | | Published October 09, 2014

How to Create a Great Customer Experience

Providing a customer experience is more than face-to-face interactions or a conversation over the phone. Not every client wants to interact that way, yet they still want that personalized service, or a customer experience.

What you may not realize is that you can continue to give your customers exactly what they want using your collaborative customer support software. Here’s how to create a great customer experience:

  • Create multi-channel support. Every customer has an idea of how they want to be helped. When you have hundreds or thousands of customers, no one solution is going to please them all. So, you need to provide multiple ways for them to reach out and find the answers they seek. Here are some ideas of channels you can provide in your customer support plan:
    • Live chat
    • Email
    • Social media
    • Videos
    • Webinars
    • White papers
    • FAQ
    • Good old fashioned telephone
  • Make it convenient for customers to help themselves. Some clients may prefer to look up information on their own. These are ideal self-service customers and will likely utilize one or many of the channels listed above. If a client does prefer a phone conversation, they are likely ready to speak with a live person. In this case, low hold times should be a high priority.
  • Provide personalized support. The complete customer experience package always circles back to the interaction your clients have with your support agents. Your agents should have the information at hand to know small details about every interaction the client has had with your company.

It starts with a robust knowledge base.

Your knowledge base is a living component in your collaborative customer support software. It will help you:

  • Invest. Use it to track the support channels your customers are more likely to use. This will give you information on where to invest more time and money.
  • Time. Making it easy for customers to help themselves will free up your support agents’ time. Their time can then be used to build the knowledge base or help customers with more complex issues.
  • Energy. To provide individual service, your support agents need to be engaged and energized. The self-service channels are critical components to ensuring your customer support agents’ time isn’t spent answering the same question over and over again.

Now what?

Your next step is to build your knowledge base. Get some tips on where to start by reading this blog.

photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives via photopin cc