CSG Systems International Inc.

07/25/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 07/25/2024 09:36

What Is Experience-Led Growth

3 Best Practices to Cultivate Customer Loyalty for Exponential Growth

According to Gartner, "Customer loyalty depends on how easy you make it for your customers to do business with you." Almost all (96%) customers who have high effort experiences (e.g., must contact the business more than once to resolve a problem) reported being disloyal, compared to only 9% of customers who have low-effort experiences.

Creating simple, frictionless journeys is the key to an exceptional CX that differentiates your brand and increases revenue. Here's how to make every interaction with your brand quick and easy.

1. Use a CX platform that combines journey analytics, a decisioning engine and digital communication to deliver the right messages at the right time, making it easy for customers to accomplish a task. For example, when the journey orchestration system detects that a telecom customer is approaching their contract renewal, the system identifies the best upgrade offer and communication channel to encourage the customer to upgrade their internet plan. The system sends the targeted upgrade offer, making it simple for the customer to achieve their objective (such as finding a higher-speed plan at a competitive rate), without needing to spend hours researching competitors' plans.

2. Focus on "forgotten" journeys. Many companies focus on CX primarily at the point of sale, neglecting interactions that occur afterward. Experiences that occur at the other stages of the customer lifecycle are equally-if not more-important for customer satisfaction and loyalty:

  • Onboarding (activating a device or account)
  • Paying bills
  • Scheduling service appointments
  • Receiving outage notifications

For example, communicating consistently and proactively regarding service outages improves transparency, trust and loyalty. Proactive outage notifications prevent customers from taking steps like turning to social channels (such as NextDoor) to figure out what's going on or calling your contact center. Use a journey orchestration system to send customers timely messages regarding outages and a link to digital channels for real-time status updates. Inform your customer service agents so they're prepared to respond quickly to requests for information.

3. Improve digital communication. Personalize the customer experience by sending the right message at the right time via each customer's preferred channel (e.g., voice, email, SMS).

For example, the journey orchestration system detects that a customer whose payments are regularly late is not responding to email payment reminders. Determining that the customer often responds to text messages, the system sends payment reminders via text instead of email. Or the decisioning engine anticipates, through predictive analytics, that the customer is more likely to make partial payments. With this information, you can offer a payment plan that meets the customer's needs.

Take personalization a step further by using the right language or dialect, messaging and tone. Using an empathetic tone when communicating with a customer about late payment ("We noticed you haven't paid your bill. We know times are difficult, so we'd like to help you set up a payment plan so you can avoid late fees and keep your service") may be more effective than a hardline approach.

These actions improve the customer's experience by preventing late fees or service disconnection. The company benefits through accelerated time to revenue and avoiding the expense of using a collections agency.