How To Build A Customer-Centric Team

In recent years, customer expectations have sky-rocketed regarding interactions with your brand. 80% of customers now view their experience as being of equal importance to the products they buy from a company.

That means businesses have to up their customer-centricity game. But what does that mean, and how can organisations improve the customer experience while increasing their ROI? This post will explore how contact centre teams find that customer-centricity sweet spot.

What is Customer-Centricity, and Why is it Important?

It’s about making the customer the central point of all business decisions. This aims to drive better customer satisfaction and, in turn, advocacy.

If you adopt customer-centric practices, it helps you build trust with your customers. Over time, this will help you build a better reputation through the power of word of mouth.

In a competitive market, adopting this approach to your operations could be the difference between converting that lead and delighting your customers or losing out to a competitor who delivers a smoother customer experience.

How to Get Started

First thing’s first, you need to have a real understanding of how happy, engaged and well-equipped your team is.

That means implementing the right tools, practices and routines that will simplify the working day for your staff and improve productivity so that your customers start to feel the impact of these more thoughtful outputs.

Here are some of the best ways for you to achieve better customer-centricity in your workplace:

1. Put Employees First

One of the first steps in delivering a better customer experience is focusing on the employee experience. Your teams are the ones you rely on to interact with customers day in and day out. So, if they’re feeling overwhelmed or unsupported, that will come through in how they serve customers.

The only way to truly get the most out of employees is to give them all the support they need and check in regularly on how they’re feeling.

The proof is in the pudding. Organisations that excel in customer experience have 1.5 times more engaged employees than those with poor customer experience.

Top Tip: Make Asking for Help Easy

Your agents may not always have the right answer at hand, and it may not be in any knowledge base either. Make it easy for agents to ask co-workers in other parts of the organisation for help.

Give agents everything they need to get things done with an intuitive dashboard to assist customers and a single app to communicate with co-workers across departments via messaging, video or phone.

2. Connect All Parts of Your Business to the Contact Centre

Streamline your business by bridging the gap between your business communications and contact centre. An integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution can ensure your employees and customers stay connected at all times.

With this tighter connection, employees can easily share knowledge to resolve customer issues faster, and silos can be a thing of the past.

Top Example: Côte Brasserie

Leading restaurant chain Côte Brasserie brought all their communications together with RingCentral. This meant they could free up their restaurant staff to focus on in-person experiences and use the call data to predict peak calling times and quiet periods.

This enabled them to schedule their staff more effectively and significantly improve the customer experience.

3. Be Ready in Your Customer’s Channel of Choice

Offering an omnichannel experience can be vital. It means customers reach out to your business on the channel that’s best for them at any given moment.

Does your customer prefer to communicate on socials, email or phone? Remember, it’s about making it easy for them to get in touch.

Top Tip: Really Get to Know Your Customers

It’s one thing knowing that you need to meet customers on the channel/s they prefer, but how do you find this out?

You can do two things: understand your customers’ personas and journey mapping to understand where the customer is coming from and where they want to be.

A good customer-centric approach will inherently boost your ROI and support profitability for the long term.

That’s because your bottom line relies on customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. Great customer experiences come with having great people on your side and great technology to empower them in their day-to-day work life.