Nothing is more important in your business than serving your customers. Your customers’ experience is the front line of your brand and reputation. A great customer experience leads to more loyal customers and more dependable revenue. A bad customer experience can lead to revenue loss and poor word of mouth.
A lot has changed in the last several years regarding what constitutes a great customer experience. Obviously, some areas of customer experience are unique to your business: manufacturers need to provide high quality, distributors need to have the right items in stock, transportation companies need to deliver accurately, and on-time and physicians need to provide quality personal care. But regardless of the types of customers you serve, customer expectations have grown in key areas thanks to advancing technology.
Here are four tools your customers expect you to have in place to serve them well.
1. Interconnected Workflows
How many steps does it take for a customer to find a resolution to an issue? When they must deal with more than one person, do they have to start over in explaining their problem? According to a study by Dimensional Research, 72% of customers feel that having to explain their problem to more than one person results in bad customer service. However, 69% equated good customer service with a fast resolution of their problem. With integrated workflows, all the information and important documents regarding customer interactions are available to the right people in your company. If an employee is unable to resolve an issue – maybe there is an issue with billing that a supervisor needs to approve – the workflow can quickly send the issue along with the appropriate documents to the right approver. No more waiting on interoffice routing, emails or lost documents, everything is routed instantly with supporting information for fast customer resolutions.
2. Online Portals
Do you provide a document and content portal for your customers? According to research by Microsoft, 90% of customers expect you to have an online document portal. A portal is a secure content management system that allows you to exchange documents or other information through web access at any time. It is a very convenient way to input, retrieve and share information with your clients so it is no wonder that so many customers have shared this expectation. With Paperwise, your portal allows secure and legally compliant transmission of documents and information, gives users on-demand access to their information and is very easy to manage.
3. A Central Repository of Information
The same study by Microsoft showed that 72% of consumers want their customer support rep to know them and understand their interactions. One of the biggest issues that companies face in this regard has to do with siloed information. Information becomes difficult to share and access for two main reasons. First, different departments deal with different types of information. Without a central repository of information, each employee only knows a small part of how each customer interacts with your company. Accounting sees the bills, legal sees the contracts, sales reps see the transactions and so on. It is difficult to have a meaningful interaction with each customer if you don’t know the whole story. Second, most management and ERP systems are not built to manage all the many different types of information that relate to your customers. They might be great at storing invoice numbers and amounts, but what about emails, physical documents, photos, phone calls and more? A centralized repository allows you to see all the data you have for each customer at the click of a mouse.
4. Online Forms
No one likes filling out paper forms. Even worse, nothing makes your company look outdated like handing someone a clipboard filled with printed forms. Customers expect you to be able to send them electronic forms before they even step into your office. Paperwise allows you to share online forms through secure links that can be shared long before your customer arrives. Forms and links make it easy to collaborate with people inside and outside of your four walls – surveys, registrations, job applications, health information and more. Create and share data collection forms via email, web and custom links then incorporate the data you collect into your custom workflows.
Fortunately, Paperwise Symphony makes it easy to meet your customers’ evolving expectations. You can take control of your entire business, connect your data, design unique workflows, enable communication and collaboration. If you would like to introduce any of these solutions into your company, please talk to our process automation experts today.
