Customer Experience: Make it Personal before they take it Personally

66% of all consumers say they’re extremely or somewhat likely to switch brands if they feel like they’re treated like a number rather than an individual.

– Salesforce, State of the Connected Customer Report (2017)

That’s a pretty frightening statistic for any brand, especially those looking to scale.

How do you make sure your customers feel valued when you go from 10s to 1,000s? If you ask me to name all my LinkedIn connections (a somewhat modest 496 of them), I probably couldn’t name more than half. Yet when I call a company with 1,000s of other customers I expect them to know who I am, and ideally what I’m likely to be calling about. Is it unfair? It shouldn’t be.

We’re firmly into the hyper-connected world where everyone can know each other within a few clicks. So how can a business go from fearing for 66% of their clients switching, to being a leader in customer experience?

Make it personal before they take it personally!

Customers expect a consistent experience wherever and whenever they engage with your business (e.g. via your website, social media, mobile, in person). Many companies we speak to have spent a lot of time and investment into tools like marketing automation, website UX, etc, to revolutionise their customer experience but so many are unaware of the efforts they could be doing via the telephone.

Why is telephony any different?

If you’re having to wade through several switchboards and repeat your name and issue to an automated system before getting the service you need, you don’t feel like an individual because you know you’re having the same experience as everyone else.

Feeling like an individual is all about feeling like you’re having a unique experience based on your history with a company.

By using tools like Salesforce to store customer information, you’ve already won half the battle because you already have a personal ‘cheat sheet’ for providing that experience. You already know the products someone’s interested in, where they’re based, if they have an ongoing issue or even just their favourite music if that’s something you want to capture. By using this data with other tools, such as Natterbox AVS, from the very moment someone dials your company they can have a unique experience and feel positive about their interaction before they even speak to an agent.

With 100% native integration with Salesforce, Natterbox AVS brings voice into the digitised customer experience by capturing data to enable personalised speech, reduced call queues, increased sales and service productivity, as well as improved business intelligence.

Imagine no longer needing to go through tortuous phone menus to then get routed through to the wrong department, or time spent explaining your query/complaint to multiple agents before you can get your issue resolved.

As consumers, we’re quick to recognise these bad experiences but why then do we forget to apply these learnings within the organisations we work?

If you’re currently looking for ways to improve your organisation’s telephony experience, please get in touch to see how we can help.

Simon Woodward, Enterprise Telephony Specialist, Natterbox