Integration is a crucial component of best in class Customer Experience.
If the business doesn’t make the sale – everyone loses.
The very best businesses constantly strive to offer world-class Customer Experience, knowing that they are only as good as their last customer interaction. The very best know there is no room for a day off in Customer Experience. Or that it can all be left to their best ‘closer’.
The best salesperson in the world cannot save a company that doesn’t live up to her/his standards of customer service at every stage of the customer engagement process. You’re only as strong as your weakest link. And of course, the very best support each other, to be the best they can be. A team wins together and loses together.
You spend money on marketing, driving traffic to your website, generating leads, following them up, booking appointments, delivering valuations, etc, etc… There are multiple stages to the process, involving lots of different people or even teams. Not only does each stage have to perform to the very best that it can, it must assist every other stage too.
So how does a business go about achieving the required levels of integration, for the highest success?
Every team in any business needs goals, targets or standards to aim for. For the team to win, everyone needs to be pursuing common goals, shared and agreed upon in advance. Investing in training and development is essential if every team member is to be firing on all cylinders. And delivered well, this becomes a huge motivator and assistance. A key part of this process is measuring and benchmarking current and ongoing levels of capability.
Only by identifying areas for improvement, can a business truly succeed. The best companies know this, and regularly benchmark and improve Customer Experience delivery using Mystery Shopping. In an objective, real-world setting, they are able to share with their teams where constant, regular improvements can be made, to put their business at the top of the league table. Rather than something to fear, this is an enormous benefit for an ambitious team. In fact, it is the only way to be sure that you are on a winning trajectory, setting a course for constant improvement, towards world class customer experience.
But creating integration on a practical, experiential level is clearly what makes the ultimate difference. By truly integrating each stage of a customer journey (ie. your sales process) and delivering an excellent experience at each stage, a business can create a multiplier effect upon conversion levels and consequent revenue generated.
For example, fully-managed Live Chat on a website can be the beginning of an exceptional customer experience, and when it is delivered well will generate leads with the highest propensity to convert. Now, if the hottest of those leads can be instantly and seamlessly fast-tracked to the next stage of experience (eg. a telephone call with a salesperson), their propensity to convert will be increased further.
Clearly the business must ensure that the standard of customer experience delivered continues at the highest level through each stage, (hence the need for measurement and training) and thus the multiplier effect is achieved.
At Yomdel we strive to be an integrated part of our client’s team, so when Yomdel chats with a web visitor, identifies a hot sales lead, and refers it instantly through to our client sales team, we need to be confident that the salesperson will follow it up in double quick time. We need to believe that the customer will be looked after, their needs effectively understood, queries expertly handled, and their requirements seamlessly delivered. All the leads in the world will come to nothing if all stages are not equally high quality. In fact just one bad experience can lead to 30% of prospects walking away and not returning.
That’s why we get inside the business of our clients, and provide service components that assist as many stages of the customer conversion process as possible. Here’s a link to the example cited above, of service excellence within an integrated process which boost conversion at each point of the process:
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Yomdel Live Connect – enables seamless transfer of a live chat customer immediately to a voice call with a client’s sales team. Why make the hottest lead wait, when we can offer to move them to the next engagement stage immediately? Arun Estates boosted conversion of Yomdel sales leads by a staggering 67% using this service. |
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So to summarise, it’s not as we might have thought…
Excellent Experience + Integration = Higher Conversion
It’s actually….
Excellent Experience X Integration = Higher Conversion
Get each component of your sales process lined up, with a set of clear objectives, and have a development programme which includes a measurement system. Put in place tools and techniques that assist each stage of the process, and allow each stage to support the next stage to be better.
If you’re ambitious for the best customer experience, come and talk to us at Yomdel. We’d love to see if we can help with any aspects of your process, or even just share our experiences.
Simon Taylor is Marketing Director at Yomdel.
Always pleased to have a chat about Customer Experience, and loves to discuss business challenges.
