It is the age of the customer where every experience counts. Companies are beginning to learn and take actions to improve their customer service to provide ease and effectiveness. However, providing exceptional experiences while still maintaining costs is a bit of a balancing act, especially given the competitive, technological and regulatory ‘change’ challenges organizations have to contend with. But if companies are able to create a consistent correlation between their strategies and operations, there is room for higher profitability; and performance.
To be a customer experience business while still meeting bottom-lines; here are three top tips for optimal operations:
- Standardize processes: Every organization needs to redesign their structure in order to shape themselves for the future of customer service. This means bridging the gap between department silos by defining expectations and creating accountability. An organization should also ideally integrate its capabilities with the development of intuitive business processes which ultimately will help streamline and simplify the end-user experience. Having processes in place will help align priorities and achieve collaborative decisions.
- Drive digitization: Tapping into technology in the right manner and with the right management can give businesses a significant competitive edge. One way to proceed with this is to automate repetitive tasks that do not require human judgement. For instance, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) helps drive business value and service delivery quality by improving routine tasks as they deploy artificial intelligence and process improvement software technology. Depending on their digital maturity, companies can also work to automate their entire end-to-end processes. Companies must also redefine their IT models by keeping up with emerging IT ecosystem components.
- Quantify what matters: The key segments in the customer-company journey need to be monitored and measured to determine what works and what doesn’t. Analytical tools, big data sources, dashboards, KPIs and others can be utilized to understand customer responses and also maintain market share. These numbers will help assess the current operations by pinpointing the areas of opportunity and improvement.
While it is not always easy to deliver customer service to match customer expectations, it is a goal that can be attained. Optimizing one’s operations goes a long way in not only providing cost advantages to clients but also in promoting cost efficiencies and effective experiences. It helps an organization connect the dots between what they want to deliver and how to do it.
