What is customer effortless experience?

Gone are the days where customers cared about one thing and one thing only: a quality product. There has been a shift in customer behavior, trending towards wanting a more complete experience. If the customer feels roadblocks in their journey, they will simply quit and go on to the next shop. The point of the modern customer experience isn’t about having all the bells and whistles, but wanting to experience smooth sailing without any hiccups or grating details. That’s why, as a business, you must think about customer effortless experience. 

Definition and explanation of customer effortless experience.

While you may be familiar with the idea of customer experience and what it entails, customer effortless experience is a slightly different beast. Here, the focus is on ease, simplicity and fluidity. How easy is it to use your website? How quickly can a customer complete their journey? Did they encounter roadblocks or frustrations during the process? These are the questions that you should be asking yourself because that’s what the customer subconsciously thinks about. 

The best way towards understanding customer effortless experiences is to imagine the process of purchasing something and thinking about what can go wrong and how to avoid it. Imagine you’re looking to buy a piece of clothing or some shoes. You open the website of your go-to retailer and before you’ve even started looking for the item you want you’re bombarded with pop-ups about promotions, the help chat is opening in the lower right and a banner is appearing notifying you about the upcoming sale. After you’ve managed to close everything you try to find some shoes to go with your outfit but every pair you find is not available in your size, and the store doesn’t have the option to filter by size. At long last you’ve reached the end, you have the item and proceed to checkout finding that you have to enter your address and the rest of the shipping information all over again. All of these things are small problems but amount to a terrible shopping experience. At that point you might decide that the hassle isn’t worth it and you switch to your second favorite retailer. One that has a more narrow selection, but one that offers a smooth experience. 

That is the power of customer effortless experience. 

How to work on customer effortless experience?

Recently one of our clients, a clothes retailer, experienced a boom in business after lockdown lifts due to an increase in social gatherings and formal events. Through optimization of their processes and listening to customer feedback we concluded that their main issue was the level of difficulty for the buyer to change their address. 

This dissatisfaction and frustration of the user with their customer experience culminated in a lot of bad reviews and feedback. Once the issue was identified and rectified, customer satisfaction increased to a point where the client no longer needed 40 FTE but reduced their operation to 20 FTE. We can also do something similar together. So how do we actually do this?

Find out where your customers are and meet them there.

lt pays off to consider where your customers are, because that’s where you should be. It always pays off to implement an omnichannel approach,this means being active on social media, using instant messaging apps, email, etc. This is immensely important because it allows the customer to contact you in a way they see most convenient which increases their satisfaction before the interaction has even started.

This also means implementing a CRM to stay on top of the interactions you have with your customers. The fact that you’re open to having interactions via different channels means that your customers will use those channels and sometimes that ease of use for them means a headache for you. Keeping track of who talked to a customer, when they did it, and what they talked about can be a nightmare. Luckily, we’re experts at CX with a long experience in omnichannel services, meaning we can help you keep your customers happy and carefree, without them having to repeat the same information several times over.

This omnichannel integration creates a win-win-win situation. The customer has a seamless experience contacting you that integrates with their lives and preferred channel of communication. You, as a business, get better reviews, returning customers, etc. And last, but not least, the agent experience is vastly improved. With an implemented omnichannel approach and CRM the agent has less clicks per interaction and has all the information they need. All of the data, from history of interactions to history of purchases, helps the agent resolve the query faster. 

Stay a step ahead of the customer.

Things that we can do to improve your customer effortless experience is to implement tools to help customers with any and all questions they may have about your service. These can be FAQs, chatbots or agent chat. Not only should you have these options in place, but they should also be quick and efficient because 75% of customers expect help in under five minutes. 

FAQs are a quick and simple solution compiled from the actual frequently asked questions your customers had. This is a relatively easy tool to implement, and if it’s well done it can save a lot on cost for your business and time for the customer making their experience that much smoother. 

Listen to your customers.

If the customer is unable to solve the issue through the FAQ, you can have a chatbot to answer more questions and to add an interactive element. This has the added benefit of giving the customer a bit more sense of control over the situation because they can ask actual questions. These work best to explain things to the customer in a bit more detail and we can implement AI learning to make the chatbot more efficient and natural. The issue with implementing a chatbot is how to make it available and obvious without it being intrusive and becoming just another window to close. While it does help customers that have questions, if implemented incorrectly, it can become a hindrance to customers that know exactly what they want and how to do it. 

The final step is actual agent chat where you have a dedicated agent talking directly to the customer, giving them personalized and immediate support with their questions. At the end of the day we feel most secure with that personal touch. The communication with an agent can make or break customer effortless experience. You want to have agents that are capable and sympathetic to the customer and their problems, without relying on purely apologizing. While you are, of course, genuinely sorry for your customer's problem or bad experience, the emphasis should be on solving the present issue as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is a last resort, though. The idea is to successfully create a customer effortless experience so that this doesn’t have to get to a point where the customer feels they need to contact support. This creates decreased workloads for agents freeing up time for them to do more complex or more urgent tasks.

Reduce the number of customer decisions and make them easy.

Apart from making the customer's life easier before and after purchase, we can also focus on the purchase process itself. By using Transcom’s experience and knowledge we can build AI tools that make the shopping process that much smoother. For example, one of the biggest problems online clothing retailers have to deal with is the issue of fit and look and the uncertainty the customer faces. This delays their decision, gives them more chance and incentive to give up on the purchase completely. Even if the customer decides that they would buy an item, the prospect of maybe having to return it can sometimes be enough to dissuade them from completing the purchase.

That’s where we come in. By applying AI learning and models, we can create a fit and look tool that helps the customer make a decision and provides certainty in a traditionally uncertain area of online shopping. This takes away the decision of which size to buy because you tell them which size is right, or it could eliminate the question of if two items of clothing go together and also suggest items of clothing that match which also reduces the number of choices the customer makes and also having them leave with a potentially fuller basket.

Stay open for feedback and create that feedback loop.

Lastly, after everything is done, as we talked about in our example, you need to give your customers the chance to express their opinions, offer feedback or give praise. This can also be done in several ways. 

Being upfront about your wish to receive feedback and offering an email address for customers to send it to is a great first step. It also pays off to be more proactive by sending out emails after purchase to remind customers to give feedback or reviews. This shows the customer that you care about their opinion and experience. Also, you can set up a form for leaving feedback and actively remind customers about it. 

It’s paramount to create that kind of open relationship with your customers because feedback leads to improvement which leads to more customers, which leads to more feedback and improvement. This means that with the integration of our predictive analytics voice solution you can easily figure out how to improve customer experience.

These are just a few of the ways you and your business can improve the customer effortless experience that you offer. At the end of the day it comes down to customer satisfaction and the ease with which they use your product. If their needs are met you will retain a steady base of returning customers. That base can then influence others to use your services. Investment in loyalty can pay off manyfold in the long run.