Excellent Customer Experience Needs an Exceptional Workflow
What’s your New Year’s resolution? You might have a personal goal in mind. Perhaps to lose some of the inches that mysteriously appeared on your waistline over the Christmas season or to finally commit to that Duolingo language course you’ve been taking in anticipation of a long-awaited summer break.
It’s not just people who approach the New Year with a newfound spirit of renewal and self-improvement. It’s also when businesses are looking at new ways to improve their operations and customer experience, applying new tools and technologies.
This isn’t entirely selfless. If your company’s website isn’t right, people won’t use it. If you have a track record for being difficult to work with, your customers will go elsewhere. Far from being altruistic, customer experience improvements are just a savvy component of doing business in the digital area.
In 2020, the Baymard Institute surveyed 4,560 US adults about why they abandoned online purchases while checking-out. Unsurprisingly, customer experience complaints featured heavily in the reasons given, with 21 per cent citing complicated and long check-out processes. A further 13 per cent said they gave up because the website had errors or crashed.
“Far from being altruistic, customer experience improvements are just a savvy component of doing business in the digital area.”
These customer experience failures have a steep cost to online retail businesses, accounting for $260 billion worth of lost orders in the US and Europe alone. Resolving them would almost certainly cost a small fraction of that.
There’s also a reputational cost. As any marketer knows, word-of-mouth is a force to be reckoned with. It can drive sales and drive them away. Social media acts as an amplifier to this force and can see customer complaints echoed to thousands, potentially millions, of people.
This is why businesses spend billions on trying to cultivate their online image, ploughing on average 12 percent of their marketing spend into social media each year, according to the August 2019 CMO Survey report. That spending covers everything from brand evangelisation and crisis management and is forecast to nearly double by 2024.
“This is why businesses spend billions on trying to cultivate their online image”
Poet John Lydgate said: “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.” This statement rings true for anyone who has ever run a business. Customer complaints are just part of the job. The only thing you can do is limit them.
To do that, you need to take a holistic look at how your customers interact with your business starting from the moment they’re onboarded.
Taking a fine-tooth comb, look at each interaction point and identify ways to improve, eliminating tiny annoyances along the way. Does your website take too long to load? Do you ask for too much information from your customers?
And if your customers have an issue, can they get in touch quickly? Do you have internal KPIs that set targets for how swiftly you’ll acknowledge and resolve a customer complaint? As a general rule, if your clients can’t speak to you, they’ll talk to Twitter instead.
At Chiral Systems, we understand the importance of keeping your customers happy. Our team boasts decades of experience working on customer-facing projects for some of the world’s largest technology firms, and we’ve brought that expertise to our flagship dental practice management software.
To find out how we can help keep your patients smiling, click here to request a free demo.