Think back to the last time you had to contact support to solve an issue. If the experience was positive, you likely stuck around with this company. Now, if the experience was exceptionally great, you probably even started recommending this company to your pals.
Customer experience is often the tipping point between an ok product and an outstanding one — and it should be every brand’s top priority. But often, teams struggle to provide truly helpful resources and solve the customer’s challenges. Here’s how you can create a positive customer situation by aligning your internal teams.
But first, let’s break down the most common mistakes companies make regarding customer experience.
Many people use the terms customer service and customer experience interchangeably. But these are very different functions within your business.
On the one hand, customer service (also called customer support) teams focus on providing the best possible solution to problems that arise from interactions between your business and your customers. There are many ways they can offer support to customers.
Many companies use a combination of DIY solutions (like a knowledge base or tutorials), live interaction (such as chats or calls), and asynchronous assistance (such as emails) to offer customer support.
On the other hand, customer experience (CX) combines all interactions between a company and its customers. It includes everything from the first contact with a potential customer to the last interaction before a sale is made.
Many times, people see customer service as a negative term because it implies that there is something wrong with your business if you aren’t able to solve customers’ issues quickly and efficiently. However, CX and CS are two sides of the same coin. Both are important aspects of running a successful business and should be considered equally.
Having a dedicated customer experience team is a modern concept in business, but one that can greatly fuel growth and customer retention. As research shows, it can cost 4-5x more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones who are loyal to your business and brand.
Part of building a customer experience (CX) team is building out the customer experience (CX) journey, and this requires the right tools. A proper customer relationship management (CRM) software, such as HubSpot, will allow you to collect feedback at each customer touch point to adjust your sales and marketing strategy,
If you use legacy tools, such as Salesforce or HubSpot, independently, you can significantly improve your customer experience by integrating these tools and eliminating any data silos. This will help create a seamless experience from first contact to final sale.
Overall, some general considerations to keep in mind when hiring for a CX team include:
In addition to hiring the right CX team, organizations can improve their overall customer experience by shifting their attitudes and focusing more on CX.
1. Focus on customers over competitorsThe CX concept has been around since at least the early 1990s, but it wasn’t until the past decade that companies began to really focus on improving their customer experiences. In fact, PwC reports that more than half of consumers would leave a brand after repeatedly experiencing poor customer service.
While there are many ways to improve customer experience, one of the most important things you can do is to focus on your customers over your competitors. A CX team should focus on the needs of the customer rather than the competition. This means that the team needs to understand what makes customers tick and how they behave when interacting with your brand.
2. Create a shared visionA common mistake among organizations is failing to align customer experience teams with the company’s mission and values. But each point of contact between a prospect or customer and your company should feel like a continuation. There needs to be a common thread between your marketing, sales, and CX teams in order to enable customers to achieve your organization’s goal for them.
For instance, at Coastal Consulting, we’re a people-first organization. In practice, this means that we prioritize people and their needs by creating the resources our clients need to thrive and grow their businesses at every stage. Doing so, we’ve grown exponentially over the past year. But beyond that, we’ve seen our clients take ownership of their HubSpot Salesforce integration, transition from third-party managers to self-managing their CRM, and cutting that dependency that was holding them back while feeling confident in their decisions.
3. Keep your brand consistentA strong customer experience means that customers feel valued and appreciated when interacting with your business. This requires consistency between different touchpoints, such as websites, social media, mobile apps, and more. Customers expect consistency across channels, so make sure that every interaction feels familiar and holds the same standard of quality.
Achieve a consistent brand experience by:
The old model of B2B business involved a lot of silos. Teams worked independently and only interacted with prospects when it was “their” turn to act. Ie, marketing created collateral, sales connected with prospects, and CS handled troubleshooting.
Now, we’ve realized that each team’s input can greatly benefit the others. A positive customer experience begins with seamless interactions.
Revenue Operations, aka RevOps, is a strategic approach that aligns your marketing, sales, and customer support to keep the lines of communication open through workflows and automation. A RevOps strategy starts by clearly delineating team responsibilities and the common objectives they’re striving for. This solid foundation ultimately leads to better communication and improved customer satisfaction.
Complicated storage and multiple tools are often a recipe for trouble. If your team communicates through chat, calls, emails, and more, you’re bound to miss something. What’s worse, you may find your team sending customers conflicting info or confusing them with the wrong resources.
Avoid these issues by having a single source of truth for your data, which makes it easy for your teams to serve your customers more effectively. When you use a tool like HubSpot, everyone on your team is on the same page about your prospects’ journey, interactions, and needs, which helps you create a frictionless service. It also pays to develop your own data hygiene policy to eliminate friction from disorganized data.
Your customer experience team is often the first point of contact when something goes wrong. They hear your customers’ pains and how they interact with your products, which can be priceless for improving your service and growing your business.
Furthermore, listening to your customers’ needs directly from them puts your customer experience team in a privileged position. They can help your marketing team create campaigns that address these needs.
Your CX team also often handles issues like bugs and feature requests, which can help your product team set priorities.
And finally, your customer experience team can aid the sales process. They can document commonly asked questions, frequent objections, and even upsell opportunities for the sales team to improve their conversation with existing customers and prospects.
In short, a CX team that’s aligned with your sales, product, and marketing teams is surely an investment worth making.
Are you curious to learn about how the HubSpot and Salesforce integration can align your teams for an exceptional customer experience? Enroll now for our highly anticipated HubSpot Salesforce Integration course.