18 Ways to Make Your Customers’ Lives Easier

Here are 18 ways to reduce customer effort.

1. Empower your agents to make customers’ lives easy

Get the cart before the horse: it is critical that front-line customer service staff are empowered to make customers’ lives easy.

There’s a HUGE difference between ‘doing your job’ and ‘serving your customer’ – to do the second one, we might need to break the rules or at least think outside the box.

With thanks to Paul

2. Tailor your interaction methods to the age of your customer base

Tailor your interaction methods to the age of your customer base.

Certain age groups prefer to do it for themselves via Twitter, while other generations prefer to physically speak to a human to get their point across.

If you are unsure as to what your customers want… ask them!

With thanks to Clare

3. A ticket system can help identify problems in different departments

It can often be difficult to solve customer problems that originate in a department other than customer service. We have introduced a ticket system across the company that allows us to raise incidents with those departments.

We have a 24hr Service Level to adhere to. This basically means that if a customer emails us with an issue, the department where the problem originated is targeted to ensure that same problem does not happen to our other customers.

We have seen a massive culture change that has led to reduced contacts, an improved customer experience and a more customer-centric business.

With thanks to Mark

4. Stop interrogating your customers every time they call

Forcing your customers to answer several security questions before they can even begin to tell you their problem can – unsurprisingly – taint the customer experience.

Introducing voice authentication to your contact centre can help to eliminate this problem by allowing your agents to get on with what they are being paid to do – help the customer.

With thanks to Ed Creasey at Nice Systems

5. Pre-empt customer behaviour and prepare your agents accordingly

Using the power of social media and the information shared from news sources, pre-empt what customers are going to call about.

If you are aware of what is going to happen, you can then give your front-line customer-facing teams the best tools and knowledge to do their job.

This can also help you to improve First Contact Resolution.

With thanks to Clare

6. Make sure your agents are trained to know the answers

We empower our agents by training and ensuring they have all the answers to hand.

Having the full history of the customer also helps to empower the agents.

With thanks to Ian

7. Enable your customers to reset their own passwords

We have introduced password manager tools for our customers.

This enables them to unlock and reset their own passwords without having to ring up the support centre.

With thanks to Christina

8. Look at the customer journey

We find that physically looking at the customer journey that leads to a call is very useful, as is looking at the customer experience over the last few hours and days.

By having this information at hand, we make sure that we have all the answers ready when they call.

With thanks to Ian

9. Staff up the voice channel

Remember that high levels of agent availability can make voice an easy channel for everyone.

With thanks to Martin

10. Consistently measure your customer experience metrics

Make sure you are consistently measuring your customer experience metrics (CSAT, NPS and Customer Effort) – same question, same scale, same timing – across all channels that your customers interact through.

With thanks to Lee

11. Give front-line staff the ability to use their initiative

Give front-line staff the ability to make decisions and use their initiative to go beyond the traditional limits.

For example, allowing extra time with a customer to go beyond the call of duty.

With thanks to Paul

12. Implement a webchat strategy

Implementing a webchat strategy can help to make customers’ lives easier.

Webchat typically has the highest level of customer satisfaction, as well as the lowest effort.

With thanks to Lee

13. If you spot a problem, change your processes

Make sure you are always looking at your end to end journeys to understand what works and what doesn’t for the customer.

If you spot a problem, change your processes quickly.

Don’t procrastinate! Test, refine and retest until a new process is good to launch. Your customers won’t wait for you!

With thanks to Lee

14. Ask your customers how they would like to be contacted

We ask customers on day one of their interaction with us how they would like us to contact them.

Then we follow through on their wishes.

With thanks to Liz

15. Use SMS for feedback surveys

Use SMS for your feedback surveys.

In my experience, SMS has strongest response rates to surveys and is really engaging for customers.

The survey can add to the customer experience of the brand, so start gathering mobile numbers now if you don’t have them!

With thanks to Lee

16. Always greet the customer by name

We connected our database with our software so the client or customer can be identified by the number they call in on.

We always greet the customer by name and this works wonders for customer satisfaction.

With thanks to Martin

17. Keep customer satisfaction questions to a minimum

You should only ask a few questions in your Customer Experience feedback surveys.

It is also best to lead your survey with a people question (e.g. Agent Satisfaction) – not a brand question (e.g. NetPromoter Score).

With thanks to Lee

18. Remove barriers that stop agents doing what is best for the customer

We’ve recently empowered agents by ‘unclipping their wings’ and removing some of the barriers and processes that stopped them doing what was best for their customer.

This has proved to be very successful.

With thanks to Lesley