Customer experience has traditionally been viewed as a cost center. However, this has been changing over the past many years. Today, CX has emerged to be one of the top competitive battlegrounds.
According to a recent Gartner study, over 80% of organizations today expect to compete mainly on customer experience. Thanks to social media amplification, even isolated cases of poor customer experience can have a significant impact on your brand equity, brand perception, and ultimately your bottom line.
A holistic customer experience strategy is not just a nice thing to have - the growth of your business literally depends on it.
Understanding holistic customer experience
Holistic customer experience can be defined as a 360-degree approach that integrates every physical and digital touchpoint - from sales, marketing, customer support, and product usage - into one consistent journey.
There are five key components to establishing a seamless customer experience strategy that is also holistic.
Unified touchpoints: Connecting various touchpoints like website, app, physical store, and social media into one backend CRM system. If you use a support ticketing system like Jitbit, you may also look at using their API to map these tickets against the customer profile in the CRM.
Cross-functional collaboration: Breaking down the silos that exist between various departments (like sales, IT, and marketing) to establish a predictable customer-facing setup
Customer journey mapping: Plotting the entirety of the customer’s lifecycle from the pre-purchase research stage up until post-purchase support
Emotional and Functional connection: Bridging the gaps between the customer’s functional needs related to product functionality to their emotional needs - how using the product makes them feel
Data-driven insights: Standardizing data captured from across the customer life journey to understand user behaviors and to enhance personalization
Establishing a holistic customer experience strategy for your business has various upsides. This includes
Higher operational efficiency
You do not have different teams tackling the same customer experience problems. This leads to higher operational efficiency
Enhanced brand reputation
A holistic CX strategy establishes a more seamless experience with fewer slipups. This enhances brand reputation and increased loyalty
Higher competitive advantage
Better efficiency and higher loyalty help businesses build a moat that is not easy for competitors to replicate. This contributes to a higher competitive advantage that translates into lower price elasticity and better profit margins
Role of Customer Support in CX
Customer support is a pivotal element in the post-purchase engagement between the customer and the business. An efficient and helpful support ensures that grievances are handled promptly and customers choose to transact with your business again. Poor customer support is thus the epitome of poor customer experience as well.
Traditionally, customer support has been considered the most significant, if not the only, component of customer experience. However, in a holistic customer experience setup, a diligent support team plays an equal role as the other department dealing with customers pre-purchase and during the transaction.
Whether you have an in-house team or have hired a virtual assistant to execute customer support tasks, it is important to know that an impactful customer support team serves not just as the problem solver, but also as a value creator. The objective of such teams is to offer a proactive support model instead of being a reactive system.
In a traditionally siloed setup, customer support may not perform as effectively as it should.
High effort, low reward systems
In a siloed system, customer support teams operate without the advantage of a singular customer view. What this means is that support teams may often be deprived of the conversations and experiences that a customer may have had prior to contacting them.
This causes several escalations between different teams, and a high resolution time. Customer resolutions that should take minutes can often take hours, or even days without a single clear owner for the problem.
Lower customer satisfaction
When customer support is siloed and not part of a holistic strategy, the CX is often broken. This causes poorer satisfaction and higher churn. You may often notice this by tracking the relevant metrics like the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES).
Share rate, or the number of customers referring your business to their network could also be a valuable metric depending on the industry. According to a recent ReferralCandy article, a share rate of under 5% could mean visibility problems or also something to do with poor customer satisfaction.
In order to derive maximum value from your customer support operations, it is important to build a holistic system that integrates your support with other parts of customer engagement - including pre-purchase.
Setting up a holistic customer experience system
Before you begin to set up a holistic customer experience system for your business, it is important to align on your goals.
What does ‘holistic’ mean for your business? How do you measure success? Also, if you are a large organization, secure the buy-ins from the various department heads before you begin work on establishing the new system.
Set up your CX vision
The first step in building a holistic customer experience system is to work on your CX vision. This could be a simple one-page vision document that serves as the benchmark to knowing what your customers should feel at each stage of the purchase process, what metrics you use to measure success, and what common principles must each team across different departments agree upon.
Map your customer journey
Once you have aligned on your CX vision, the next step is to map out your entire customer journey. The objective here is to run through your entire customer lifecycle in the eyes of a customer to see what’s broken.
To do this, you start by jotting down all the customer touchpoints. This could start with your landing pages - the specific pages that your customers land on from clicking an ad, or the homepage, or the various other blog pages that they land on from a Google Search. It could also be from a call that the customer receives from an SDR, or a cold email about your SaaS product.
Then identify the specific funnel-entry points. This could be signing up for a newsletter, engaging in a conversation with a chatbot, attending a meeting over Zoom, joining a webinar event, or submitting a contact form.
This is followed by the nurturing cycle - the various sequences in your email marketing automation campaign, the subsequent calls and meetings between the potential customer and the business. This either ends in a sale or the lead is put on hold to be reactivated later.
The last part of the customer journey is the post-sales engagement. This includes the use of customer support channels to fix product or service-related issues, use a referral link to promote your business to people in the customers’ network.
Audit existing support & engagement systems
At this point, you have the entire customer journey mapped out comprehensively. The objective of the next step is two-fold: One, to capture the customer’s emotional state at each stage of the journey, and two, to identify the specific gaps in the process that leave the customer vulnerable and create friction.
Capturing the emotional state of the customer involves a lot of subjective hypothesizing as well as evidence gathering. Auditing of the customer’s emotion should be mapped to specific moments, and not the entire stage, since it does not yield helpful insights that way.
For example, you could mark that a customer is anxious while filling out a form, or feels uncertainty when they are asked to wait 24 to 48 hours for a refund request. In such cases, perhaps an AI Video generator can help you create personalized onboarding, product walkthroughs, and support tutorials at scale that bring down customer anxiety.
Or, sometimes it may not be the customer, but poor employee engagement and satisfaction that is causing a breakdown in customer experience.
At each step, try to answer the question - what is the customer trying to achieve right now, and what could go wrong. The auditing process should also identify what the business is doing to avoid things from going wrong, and subsequently bring down negative emotions.
Emotional state mapping could be inferred from a number of sources, including customer interviews, support ticket conversations, feedback, as well as website interactions (repeated clicks and refreshes, abandonment, long dwell time, etc.).
The tools you use for customer engagement and support play an important part in establishing the right emotions. For instance, visitors are generally apprehensive about giving away details before building trust. This is why using a live chat window to answer customer queries before capturing their data works better than traditional contact forms.
AI has emerged as a significant contributor to a seamless customer journey. According to this article on ZenBusiness, breakthroughs in generative AI and automation have enabled businesses "to streamline operations and scale smarter."
During the audit process, make a note of turnaround times for each step - this could help with your AI transformation if you were to find it more efficient at a later stage.
Unify customer data into a single source of truth
The major reason why customer experience is broken is because different departments operate in silos without a common ‘source of truth’. Even in organizations that use a single CRM across the organization, it is not uncommon to restrict user information to specific departments and pass details on a ‘need to know’ basis.
This prevents internal stakeholders in your organization from knowing the complete context of a customer’s call. This creates friction during the conversation, and the customer often ends up explaining the issue to multiple stakeholders during escalations.
A centralized CRM system that synchronizes information from multiple sources in real-time can make sure that all teams see the same customer story. For businesses looking to explore the right tools, CRM platforms listed on G2 provide reviews and comparisons to help choose a solution that fits their needs.
The centralized system must have every bit of information about the customer in the same place. Invest in comprehensive lead tracking to know what channel and page the lead came from, how many touchpoints they were exposed to before they chose to convert, how long they have been nurtured, what kind of sales and support questions they have asked in the past, and what kind of CSAT scores they have offered to your business in the past.
All this information underlines their preconceived expectations from your business, and could help predict their emotional state while reaching out for customer support.
In addition to customer support, this is also effective during customer engagement. For example, you may avoid sending a referral coupon to a customer who just rated your support staff a one star - they may not be an ideal mindspace to refer your business.
Design seamless omnichannel experiences
A customer calls in about a billing error. They explain the issue, share their account details, and walk through what happened. Then they're transferred. The new agent asks them to start over. By the time they reach someone who can actually help, they've repeated themselves three times, and the billing error is no longer the problem. The experience is.
This isn't limited to support, either. Sales teams do the same thing when prospects bounce between channels. Someone fills out a form, has a conversation with an SDR, then hops on a call with an AE who has no idea what was already discussed. Every time a buyer has to re-establish context, they cool off a little. Do it enough times, and you've essentially reset them to a cold lead.
Most of this boils down to one gap: teams don't share context. And so the fix is straightforward: every team needs to be looking at the same customer story. That's what omnichannel customer service software does in practice, tying together voice, chat, email, messaging, and social into a single view.
Platforms like CloudTalk help unify voice interactions with CRM data and other channels, so teams always have full context before engaging with a customer.
So when an agent picks up a conversation that started on chat and moved to a phone call, they're not asking the customer to recap because they already have the full thread.
Automation, in this case, does not replace humans. It gives teams better visibility into what's already happened so they can spend time solving the problem instead of piecing together the backstory.
Enable Teams with Shared Processes and Playbooks
A consistent omnichannel experience comes from shared processes and playbooks. This requires teams across different departments to follow the same playbook and processes.
Start by establishing Standard Operations Procedures (SOPs) that define how your sales, marketing, and support teams interact and handle cross-team workflows. The SOPs must also cover
- How events get documented across different teams
- How your engagements (both manual and automated) follow pre-defined support events
- Response guidelines and escalation paths that all teams must adhere to
According to a report published by Skima AI, an AI recruiting software, an impactful customer experience is not possible without training your teams on empathy, personalization, and how to handle customer conversations across different emotional states.
Use Technology to Scale
While comprehensive CX playbooks and SOPs can set the tone to build a holistic customer experience strategy, the effectiveness of this ultimately boils down to how teams can execute this consistently and predictably.
Technology, especially AI and automation, can be instrumental in making this happen. While it is important that the customer-facing tasks are still handled by humans, modern AI tools can help with backend systems like smart ticket routing, sentiment detection, and offering personalized canned responses. They can also help detect churn risks and identify engagement opportunities.
Rule-based automation setups can help with predictable follow-up systems, onboarding, and customer check-ins.
These systems ensure that your organization can execute a flawless customer success strategy without losing the human touch.
