CSP Control Center
CloudEvents
CloudLabs
SaaSify
Customer experience is increasingly one of the most sought-after metrics that organizations are focusing on. Customers today demand seamless experience when they engage with any business and are even willing to pay a premium, if required. According to a study by PwC, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Furthermore, a pleasant experience can help businesses transform their customers into advocates and brand ambassadors. Recommendations from existing customers is a great way for CSPs to generate a constant stream of new business. Happy customers not only bring recurring business but can also be your best advertisers. Referrals are a trusted form of marketing as your customers advertise based on their experience.
Customer advocacy helps build trust by sharing real-world experiences. This results in your potential clients being better informed about your product or service and makes the relationship building with new clients smooth. In the new normal, customer experience is playing a critical role in helping organizations boost their presence and reach new audiences, as well as maintain a healthy revenue stream. However, building an optimum customer experience requires creating a robust strategy to weave customer excellence into the organizational fabric. Ad Hoc activities can only help reach a certain level. In fact, CSPs, like other businesses, should focus on integrating small activities into their comprehensive strategy to truly augment customer experience. Here are a few steps to create that overarching strategy to create repeat customers who advocate for you.
Craft a customer-centric vision
Building an optimum customer experience requires having a vision that aligns with customer expectations as well as core business values. To put it simply, organizations need to brainstorm and decide on the experience they seek to serve to their customers. It is important to ensure that the experience they seek to provide aligns well with what the customers seek as well. Therefore, comprehensive market research on customer expectations is vital to gauge their pulse and create a customer-centric vision.
For instance, as a CSP, you need to gauge what customers expect out of their Solution Provider and the kind of experience they seek to achieve. Your vision can focus on creating a seamless experience for your customers, in everything related to cloud services.
Create a roadmap for execution
Once the vision is in place, it is important to create a roadmap to achieve the customer experience you desire. This involves undertaking a comprehensive approach to understanding customer personas and creating an implementation plan to customize experience for the former. If your vision is to create a seamless experience for cloud services, you need to understand the areas of friction that your customers face while using cloud services. Once the pain points to their existing experience are clear, you should have a strategy to address each one.
For instance, customers might find it challenging if they have to go to their CSP for every modification to their subscription, leading to a poor experience. Offering self-service portal can be a great solution. It will empower your customers with a sense of control to access all their transaction related data such as past orders, pending payments, receipts, upcoming payments, leading to a seamless experience.
This suggests that the overarching vision can be divided into smaller actionable goals along with a strategy and implementation plan for each. This will require brainstorming, prototyping, prioritizing, implementing, etc. The strategy should also have some attached metrics on which aspects of customer experience, like satisfaction, stickiness, net promoter score, and the like.
Augment capabilities across your team
For instance, as a CSP, a billing automation platform can be a great way to help your team members serve your customers better in multiple ways. It will reduce the administrative overload of managing multiple spreadsheets and sending multiple invoices. Furthermore, it will encourage them to add value to customer experiences by freeing them from repetitive tasks. From a customer standpoint, automated billing will ensure error-free, reliable, and systemic invoicing for seamless record keeping.
Thus, technology solutions and upskilling can help team members collaborate on different levels and offer an omnichannel experience to customers along each step of the life cycle.
Get started on your CX journey
- Create an aspirational vision with inputs from leadership
- Form a working group to create innovative ways to achieve your vision
- Set metrics to track your performance of customer experience
- Regularly seek customer feedback and track customer analytics to gauge performance
- Understand the return on customer experience investments and realign the strategy
