Why Employee Experience Is Key to Driving Brand Loyalty

Janice Rapp at 8×8 explores why employee experience is key to driving brand loyalty.

The way customers communicate with businesses continues to evolve. Customers expect fast and personalised service and support using their channel of choice.

In order to meet these expectations, organisations have realised that their customer-facing employees must have the right tools and the ability to work from anywhere in order to deliver differentiated customer experiences.

According to McKinsey, “More than 70 percent of senior executives rank CX as a top priority for the coming years.

“Companies that effectively organise and manage customer experience can realise a 20 percent improvement in customer satisfaction, a 15 percent increase in sales conversion, a 30 percent lower cost-to-serve, and a 30 percent increase in employee engagement.”

The question today, given the rising importance of digital channels, is how to balance engagement strategies to deliver personalised, frictionless, and consistent customer experiences across voice and digital–both assisted and unassisted. According to Adobe, the digital economy is now worth $4 trillion globally, so this is a subject that is not to be taken lightly.

Communication Is About More Than Talking to Your Employees and Customers

While the need for personalised customer engagement and preferences has consistently grown since the introduction of mobile devices, it dramatically accelerated over the last two years when face-to-face interactions were moved to other channels.

In fact, Global Data’s most recent Customer Experience Benchmarking Report states that the majority of organisations are now providing customers a choice of nine channels–up from eight in 2020–by which to communicate.

The average contact centre supports nine channels, so by combining cloud communications and contact centre capabilities under one platform, businesses ensure that customers receive a consistent experience.

During this transition, call containment and digital self-service became leading strategies for many organisations. But it’s clear that successful organisations today need to think beyond voice and/or digital. Even omnichannel.

To drive successful customer experiences, orchestration of the entire customer journey is paramount. This means creating cohesive, seamless customer journeys across all channels, including voice, SMS, email, social media, messaging, web chat, and video.

Human Touch Is Not Out of Touch

To support customers throughout their journey, contact centre leaders need clear reporting and analytics to help them uncover sticking points in the customer journey.

Their agents, too, need visibility in which to view all of the information, data, sentiment, and customer context they need to easily, intelligently, and quickly help customers resolve issues.

For maximum productivity and customer satisfaction, this needs to happen within a single workspace that streamlines their workflow and presents only the most relevant information with single-click access.

Only when the stresses of searching, managing, and digesting information are addressed can agents focus on addressing customer concerns in a truly human-centric way, which is a critical piece of the CX puzzle.

Next Steps for Business Leaders

Business leaders need to recognise that providing enhanced customer experiences means prioritising technology solutions that will help them enable seamless, consistent – and human – interactions.

Moving to the cloud is where it all begins. From there, it is critical to enable all customer-facing employees within the organisation with access to the same applications designed to make a difference in the customer experience.

A great example of this is quality management and speech analytics. This combination of “classic” contact centre technologies offers other areas of the organisation the ability to monitor, identify, and take immediate action on trends that have the potential to impact their business.

For work from home and hybrid employees especially, the ability to provide immediate feedback and coaching is vital to customer loyalty.

Now is the time to define your organisation-wide CX vision. With the right communication tools and applications needed to support all customer-facing roles, your organisation will be the driving force for best-in-class CX delivery.

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Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.