5 Best Practices for Offering the Journey of a Lifetime

A Sponsored Article by eLoyalty, a TeleTech Company.

It’s no accident that marketing mavens choose the word “journey” when describing a holistic strategy for customer interactions. As a customer-facing company, you don’t want to simply offer an experience: a trip to Disneyland where you get on a plane, ride a few rides and come home. You want to offer a lifetime of service, a partnership, a destination shared. Whether it’s a journey to good health, the journey to career satisfaction, or a journey to inner peace, it is the constant movement toward a common goal. A customer journey contains three components:

1. Individual transactions;
2. The connections between the individual transactions (the journey’s “legs”); and
3. The mode of transport (i.e., mobile, chat, etc.).

While you likely have a handle on individual transactions, it’s connecting the interactions that’s trickier, especially when offering multiple modes of transportation (contact). So what makes up a customer journey, and what makes one good or bad? Here are five best practices to make your customer journey the delight of your customers, and the envy of your competitors.

1. Satisfy the Channel Surfers. Your customers are sophisticated technological consumers. They interact daily with smartphones, tablets and other devices that by design are tailored to offer many means to communicate. If your customer contacts friends and family by phone, video chat, social media and text message, she is unlikely to be content with a company only offering one or two outdated modes of contact, such as email or phone. To remain relevant, companies need to keep up with technological advances, offering interaction in the channels its customers use… or would use if they knew about it.
2. Consistent Consistency. Whatever mode of communication your customer seeks, she should get the same answers, the same level of urgency, the same commitment to service. The easiest and most cost-effective way to achieve this consistent across-the-board level of assistance is to utilize the same blended-channel representatives for each mode of contact. Your representatives are the face of your company; the face should be consistent from channel to channel.
3. Know “My” History. It’s no good having a bunch of interactions if you’re not keeping track of them, or if your representatives are unable to access the data. With access to the context of previous interactions, your agents become experts in each customer, offering a personalized, high-touch experience each and every time contact is made.
4. Up the Ante. So, now you’ve got web chat, social media and phone. Adding the newest forms of interaction, video and collaborative interactions, with co-browsing and interactive screen sharing, can bring a richness to the customer experience for a truly loyalty-inspiring customer journey.
5. Support Your Troops. Your customer-facing teams deserve to have the whole story of the customer’s journey—how customers got to where they are, and the steps taken to get there. Armed with a complete view of the customer’s journey on a single desktop, with simplified capture and management of interaction details in real-time and ready access to relevant knowledge management systems, your agents are able to do their work quickly and effectively… and with a smile.