How to improve the customer experience in 3 simple steps

It’s a fundamental truth about customer experience (CX): Reducing customer effort is the key to a great customer experience. Lowering the effort required to do business with your company can increase customer loyalty, reduce your cost of service, and increase how much money your customers spend with you today, tomorrow, and beyond. But if you’re not ready to commit to the effort-reducing bandwagon quite yet, whether due to budget constraints, lack of executive buy-in, or other reasons… You’re not out of luck! There’s a lot of ways you can start small and work your way up to the bigger changes that improve the customer experience.

Here’s a simple three step process to improve the customer experience in your call centers and beyond.

Start by... improving the employee experience

Your call center employees are the front line of your company, and a huge factor in how your customers perceive effort. Especially in a world where callers are bringing more complicated issues to call center representatives and expecting higher levels of critical thinking and problem-solving skills, it’s essential to focus on agent empowerment. Improving the employee experience by providing trust, support, coaching, and resources for success can make a huge difference in how your employees are able to perform on calls—and in how your customers perceive effort on those calls. 

Then... utilize conversation analytics and Voice of the Customer (VoC) solutions

As many of our customers are fond of saying, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Conversation analytics tools that analyze calls for key phrases, discover positive language, and keep track of common problem areas are a great starting point for beginning to measure your customer experience. If you want to improve the customer experience, you’ve got to measure it, so investing in even a simple conversation analytics tool is a great way to set yourself up for success. 

Finish by... setting effort reduction goals

Finally, now that you’ve empowered your front line and the data has begun to roll into your new conversation analytics tool, you can start focusing on ways to improve. Set simple effort reduction goals for your team, like focusing on advocacy, expectation setting, closing statements, or other elements of a great low-effort call. By setting clear goals and working to achieve them one at a time, you’re more likely to see a measurable increase in low-effort CX across the board—a surefire way to improve the customer experience. 

These three steps are just the beginning of the work needed to measurably improve the customer experience. Once you’ve gotten started with the basics listed above, there’s a whole host of ways to dive deeper into CX analytics and really get granular about what’s making your best calls successful, and what’s holding you back in others. Our research-backed conversation intelligence platform is a state-of-the-art solution to the customer experience problem, and if you’re serious about better CX, we’d love to share it with you. 

To learn more about Tethr and what a conversation intelligence platform can do to improve your customer experience, request a demo today.