Six Customer Satisfaction Lessons from the Coronavirus

Whatever you want to call it, we’re all “in it” right now and struggling to find a new normal for our daily lives. As far as our work life is concerned, companies around the globe have been working tirelessly to handle the demand, both from a customer side and an employee side. Although the examples represented below are not of a life-altering or threatening nature, they are used illustratively to provide guidelines on how we should be behaving with our customers during this uncertain time. We are all hopeful that the damage from this pandemic will be minimal and we will be back to normal soon. 

Raise your hand if you’re guilty of sending secure information using your cellular device. Don’t worry—we all do it, despite the inherent risk involved in transmitting sensitive information across cellular and data-driven networks. However, this could leave not only your organization, but also your customers’ personal information, at risk. Customers want to feel safe interacting with your business. A critical component of an excellent customer experience involves ensuring the safety of your customers’ data.

Why don’t companies want to make their IVRs more profitable?

A business process outsourcing (BPO) provider with 5,000 global agents was primarily focused on customer experience and contact center outsourcing for large companies. Like many in its industry, the BPO ran on very tight margins and wanted to move away from spending capital money. It preferred operational expenses because it billed its customers on a monthly usage basis (i.e., how many phone calls it took), so it desired to match its cost structure with its revenue structure. Having to pay money upfront with the hope that the customers would use the system would not benefit the BPO; instead, it desired for its underlying technology and business costs to be paid when its clients made payments. For this reason, an “As-a-Service” model best suited the BPO from a financial and technology perspective.

More than ever, business leaders are focusing on how to optimize the customer experience they’re delivering. Gartner studies indicate that 89% of companies plan to compete primarily on customer experience. Optimization always starts with understanding and measuring the customer experiences you’re currently delivering. The only way to do that accurately is via technology solutions that can automatically mine and compile the wealth of unstructured customer interactions data hidden in Call Recordings, IVR Logs, and so on.

While voice authentication is now a hot topic, it is not a brand-new concept. Traditionally, voice authentication was used purely as a way to replace a user’s password. It was a very manual process to establish your voice password (today, we’d call that “active enrollment”), and you were limited to very specific ways of using it (typically a challenge-response model).

At ConvergeOne, every collaboration engagement follows the WAVES Methodology. The first step is a Workshop that helps our customers take an “outside-in” view of their environment. In other words, the Workshop allows our customers to first view the expectations from the end user’s point of view (the “outside”) and subsequently consider the technology’s capabilities (the “in”) being provided to meet the end user’s expectations. This outside-in approach works equally well for all user-facing services like customer experience (CX) and unified communications (UC).

In a previous blog post, we shared how organizations must move toward a customer-centric approach, with a focus on the customer journey as a strategic capability. How, specifically, can you do that? Here are five steps to follow to ensure you find and keep the right customers.

In a previous post, we shared that organizations today need to live and breathe customer-centric values, where Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and IT collaborate to give customers the best, most seamless experience. Today’s customers have endless options, which means they will not hesitate to move on to a competitor after suffering through a bad experience with a company. Creating a seamless and exceptional experience is the only way to build truly loyal customers who can grow into brand advocates.

At ConvergeOne, WAVES is our proprietary Methodology that guides each and every one of our collaboration engagements. WAVES is an acronym, with each letter representing a specific phase of the methodology. Each phase provides a specific contribution to the final outcome, which is a recommended solution that is tailored to the customer’s business and technology needs. The WAVES phases, which must be executed in order, are: