Article • 4 min read
Why CX Champions must continue raising the bar on excellent customer service
You’ve built a powerful support organization, a feat worth celebrating. But now what? Learn what other CX Champions are doing to continue providing innovative service.
By Heather Hudson, Contributing Writer
Last updated October 2, 2024
Even the highest-performing service organizations need to know where they stand among their competitors and how they can continue raising the bar to retain their status as leaders.
You can find answers in the 2022 CX Accelerator report, where CX organizations are categorized according to our CX maturity model scale and rank as Starters, Emergers, Risers, and CX Champions. Each group faces its own advantages, disadvantages, and unique opportunities to set teams up for even greater success in the future.
Here we’re focusing on CX Champions. This group has strategically invested in solutions that allow them to scale and meet critical milestones, yet Risers are nipping at their heels and quickly closing the performance gap. This year, even CX Champions report seeing an increase in resolution times and fewer one-touch tickets, leading to more effort and frustration from the customer’s perspective. There has never been a better time to harness real-time reporting and lean in hard on areas where you can deflect easier-to-resolve tickets.
Stay a step ahead: Identify areas of vulnerability
If you’re at this stage in your CX maturity, then you know the value a service organization—your service organization—brings to the business. At this point, you have a support system that is well-integrated with other core business applications and you’re harnessing customer data to everyone’s advantage.
Realizing CX maturity doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for improvement. Here are the challenges organizations at your level continue to face:
You’re mostly providing streamlined experiences across all touchpoints with a good balance between agents and bots, but you may need to fine-tune your hybrid support strategy
You’re not quite there yet when it comes to regularly reviewing team performance and customer journey metrics with senior leadership
Data fragmentation across legacy tools and apps is a significant issue
You could stand to improve performance metrics through tools and trainings
Performance metrics might be slipping, but you’re mostly able to correlate collected data with specific interactions to meet business KPIs
It’s still a struggle to bring on and retain support talent
How to stave off Risers
Not content to rest on your laurels? There’s plenty you can do to address common challenges and keep competitors from overtaking your significant progress—especially as current economic conditions pressure teams to do more with less.
Support your customers:
- Make the most of AI and machine learning tools. Offer proactive purchase recommendations through interactions with automated bots.
- Get customers to the right place, every time. Use machine learning or AI to recognize when an interaction is sensitive or should bypass chatbot flows immediately, to get the right level of service.
- Shore up your support team with tools. Leverage self-service, no-code bots, app integrations, and reporting to encourage efficiency and build more robust internal support teams.
- Build stronger customer relationships. Create personalized customer experiences using past interaction history and other important context. Consider interactive options like in-message checkout options that prioritize convenience and keep you one step ahead of customer needs.
Support your agents:
- Use AI to take the burden off agents. Machine learning can provide recommendations and context to agents.
- Prioritize quality over quantity. Focus on getting key apps for a complete view of customer data integrated in a single agent workspace. That means no more toggling between screens to understand exactly who a customer is and how best to serve them in that moment.
- Connect the data dots. Invest in a flexible, easy-to-use platform with integrations to fuel informed, data-driven decision-making that will boost customer acquisition, loyalty, and business profitability.
Build in operational efficiencies:
- Connect agents with back-office teams. Integrate collaboration tools so teams can interact with the right people internally who can help them solve customer inquiries faster.
- Adopt agent training and incentives. Show agents you’re invested in them to help them stay motivated, productive, and able to provide empathetic support.
- Correlate data collected with specific interactions. Use surveys and feedback to stress test your customer experience and prepare for changes in the market. Consider apps that allow you to easily monitor customer interactions across multiple channels and generate real-time reports to easily identify areas of improvement.
If you find yourself in this category, then you already know that customers are keen to comment on the difference between automated and personalized service and that the more you know—by integrating key data across critical apps—means the more you can help customers get to the resolution they’re looking for.
