How Well Do You Know Your Customers?

Jonathan Sharp, CEO, Britannic, takes a look at how well insurance brands know their customers.

Many companies are frustrated that they have implemented the latest technology to improve their customers journey, and some are still picking up the phone and not using the digital channels available to them, and not getting the answers they need. Twilio surveyed 100 of YouGov’s most popular brands and revealed that of those companies that had digital channels in place a grand total of 55% of customers believed their queries weren’t being deal with efficiently!

Customers want answers now and 67% of people want to self-serve (Nuance) rather than speak to an agent. You want to deliver a speedy efficient service and so do your customers, but if your customers’ digital journey hasn’t been designed correctly then you maybe making it more difficult for them to navigate rather than facilitating it. If you don’t know why they are contacting you and what the problem areas are, then how are you going to resolve them and improve the customer experience?

FOMO

In today’s digital age companies are rushing out and getting FOMO if they don’t have the latest digital technology in place, but if your customer journey isn’t well thought out and designed correctly then it will fail on all levels. It is critical that companies work with a Solution Provider to understand what their customers want, what do they know about them and how exactly do you want to improve the customer journey so it is intuitive, easy to use and will deliver on your objectives.

Today’s Customer

The irony is that customer service feels poorer than it did a few years ago when we didn’t have all the channels of communication available to us. As there were less channels, there were less to manage and now there are more it is getting increasingly difficult to manage and control. Maybe with hybrid working as the norm, systems and customer service has become increasingly fragmented and lacks centrals management. Consequently, managers don’t always know what is happening in the conversations between agents and customers. If you don’t know what’s wrong, then how are you going to fix it?

Complete Transparency

Everything is visible, if a customer is happy with your service, they will tell you but what is more probable, is that is if they are not happy then they will tell everyone on social media and this will seriously damage your brand and can be hard to recover. Customers want to feel recognised and valued for their loyalty, they want a personalised service where companies understand their needs and pitch tailored personalised offerings to them.

Customer Culture

Over the last few years, there has been a shift from a transactional relationship to that of a more personal relationship involving both parties. Companies that exceed in delivering an outstanding customer service are those that have their customers at the centre of their operations and live and breathe a customer experience culture. This needs to be supported from the top down with focus applied on how to improve customer experience by understanding – who your customers are, what they want, how they behave and any other data you can collect on them to build a profile of them. The more you understand the better you can tailor your offering to them and improve your service.

Re-Engineering Processes

Before re-designing your customer and agents journey look at the existing processes and understand what works and what doesn’t. Empower employees and involve them in the study, after all they are the ones that do the job, ask your customers what communications channel they prefer and what they want to see less of and more of.

Ascertain what you want to achieve, is it first time resolution, reduce waiting times or introduce new channels. By working with a Solution Provider they can advise you on what channels to have whether its phone, email, video, web chat, SMS, WhatsApp, kiosks, social media or digital self-serve. The key here is to ensure that they are all joined up in a single seamless solution, so if you have lots of digital interactions occurring, they are funnelled into a single screen where data can be accessed on the customer, saving time for both the agent and the customer.

It is essential that the process is design led so customers can communicate via the correct channel of your choice. For example, if it is a basic enquiry for information you would want to use an automated email response or web chat that is low cost to you and a high-cost complex enquiry can be routed to a human agent. This way you can engineer waste out of your processes and not just improve the customer experience but also reduce your operating costs too. It’s a win win!

Do you know your customers?

Data collection is everywhere, on every website, TV channel or app you have to fill out your personal details to access it. Companies know that this information is gold. The more they collect from you the more valuable it is to them and the more they can use it to improve their relationship with customers, improving the customer experience and increasing their advocacy and lifetime value.

If you don’t know who you are customers are and what they like or don’t like, what they buy and what they don’t then someone else will take the time to understand and profile them and you will lose out.

360 Degrees Insight

Contact centres and feedback forms and forums only provide limited point in time or emotive feedback but AI and automation technology can provide a full and comprehensive picture of your customers, revealing why they are satisfied with your products or services and what areas of their journey they are having challenges with. You can reveal problem areas that you didn’t know existed, or if you did know they existed then you will get the detail on why they do. Analytics will reveal the hidden nuances that make the difference between happy customers and employees enabling you to make improvements and transform processes.

A Solutions Provider can help you design an AI analytics solution to discover why your customers are contacting you, what problems they have and how they can improve them. This can be done by AI’s powerful capability of gathering and analysing data through any digital interaction by analysing text to reveal key words or phrases and analysing emotions to determine if its positive, neutral or negative. Whether that’s in emails, customer support chat transcripts, social media, reviews or converting voice calls to text. Identifying patterns and trends to help you implement business decisions to improve processes for agents and customers. As a result of these discoveries you may want to automate some areas of your processes to reduce resource and expenditure but at the same time improve efficiencies.

Learning and Evolving

The customer journey is a constant evolutionary process where AI solutions need to be nurtured to learn and improve with you. It is a continuous process of growing and improvement if you care for it you will reap the benefits. You will know your customers and your customers will know that you are a company that cares, delivers what it promises, and always puts customers first.