5 Effective Ways to Leverage Technology for Better Customer Experience

5 Effective Ways to Leverage Technology for Better Customer Experience Do you need a better customer experience? Technology is a businesses best friend when it comes to improving and automating the customer experience, see how.

Running an efficient and effective customer support department is a challenging task in the competitive online market, but ensuring stellar customer experience across the board can often seem like an insurmountable task. Not only do you have to communicate directly with the consumers to establish yourself in the local and global markets, but you also have to personalize these experiences, and most importantly, leverage technology to minimize costs while upping customer satisfaction, lifetime value, and word of mouth marketing. This can seem like a lot, and there is no denying that technology cannot achieve all of this on its own, but it’s definitely the most cost-effective solution.

After all, the modern business world runs on technological applications that make various processes more manageable and many far-fetched goals achievable, including marketing personalization, so your priority should be to utilize various tech solutions to elevate customer experience in a financially-sensible way. With all of that in mind, here are the best solutions you can integrate quickly to achieve better results with your customers around the world.

Automate tasks to improve customer support

First and foremost, managing a round-the-clock customer support team might not be impossible, but it’s definitely cost-intensive and it can severely impede your productivity and output, simply because of the workload that modern customer support teams have to endure. Now that any company can become a global venture through the use of digital technologies, customers from all over the world are able to get in touch with their favorite brands and communicate with them directly – this is both a blessing and a curse for many.

More often than not, you will see a devoted customer support team that simply doesn’t have the resources to handle such an influx of customers, which is why integrating chatbot technology into your strategy is a great way to regain efficiency and productivity. The AI-driven chatbot will take over the menial and repetitive tasks, and handle simple customer queries and problems so that your human staff can focus on the complex issues. This will create a round-the-clock support system that will allow customers to get in touch with your company at any time, which will lead to increased CX and satisfaction. 

Capitalize on big data analytics

Speaking of AI-driven solutions, nowadays companies are integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning to stay on top of the latest trends in their field, and collect and collate vast amounts of industry data in a short timeframe. This is called AI big data analytics, and it is becoming an essential element of success in the modern business world, simply because there is too much data flowing around for a human analyst to handle.

Manually organizing such vast amounts of customer and industry data is not impossible, but it definitely requires a lot of time (and time is money) and a big team of analysts. These are the resources you simply can’t afford to invest unless you’re running a wealthy enterprise, so make sure to integrate AI into your data analysis process in order to find out exactly what your customers need and adapt quickly.

Upgrade your old phone system

To ensure stellar customer experience, you have to communicate with your online and offline audiences on a daily basis, and the only way to do that efficiently is to have a comprehensive phone system at your disposal. Now, we live in a digital age, and traditional phone systems are ill-equipped to accommodate the needs of a digital workforce and the digital consumer, which is why it’s imperative that you transition to a cloud-based system like VoIP.

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is quite simply the best cloud-based business phone service that’s fully-optimized for the digital age, allowing you to run an efficient customer support department from anywhere in the world while giving you all the features you need for seamless internal and external communication. Using a VoIP infrastructure, your employees can leverage call and customer analytics, mobile optimization, video conferencing, low-cost calls, and various other features to communicate with your customers and leads, and elevate their experience.

Don’t forget about the social media experience

Having a strong social media presence is not an option nowadays, it’s a necessity, especially if your goal is to improve customer communication and experience. People use social media chats and comments to get in touch with their favorite brands quickly, however, instead of wasting time trying to manage your social accounts manually, you should use a handy tool. Consider integrating the popular Hootsuite platform to manage all of your social media accounts seamlessly, boost engagement, and automate various SM processes in order to stay on top of all social activity and never miss an opportunity to engage your followers.

Elevate social proof with technology

Finally, building social proof is becoming increasingly important in a time when people have so many options that they don’t know which brand to trust. While there are numerous ways you can build social proof and thus improve your brand perception through WOM and content creation, your best bet is to implement a simple tool on your site that will display real-time notifications whenever someone buys a product, signs up for your newsletter, or makes a positive action in general. 

These notifications will show your website visitors that others are interacting with your brand and that they are buying from you, which will prompt them to repeat their actions and form a positive opinion right off the bat. In turn, this will help elevate their overall experience. 

Wrapping up

Raising customer experience in the oversaturated online world is definitely not an easy task, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have some powerful solutions at your disposal. Concretely, you should put technology at the forefront of your strategy to elevate customer experience and happiness in an effective and financially-sensible way.

by Chris London of Pixel Productions Inc. The Everything Design Company