“Would you recommend our services to your friend?” was probably the most commonly asked client experience question in 2018. According to research by Salesforce Consulting Partner Agmis, improving customer experience is at the top of agenda for companies in the Baltic states. These insights will help you to finally hear the dreamed of “Yes”!

Power to the People!

“Technology influence for customer experience is ever increasing. However, we often forget that people are the customer experience architects” – notes Business Development Manager of Agmis Jurgis Bakanas.

According to Mr Bakanas, by hiring customer experience project managers, companies often do not grant them the adequate authority for decision-making.

“Customer experience encompasses marketing, client support, call centers, brick-and-mortar client support centers, multiple sales channels – whole company takes part in these change projects. If company wants to improve customer experience, it must ensure that customer experience managers will have full top-management support and enough authority to make important decisions” – notes Mr Bakanas.

Jurgis Bakanas

Sales and customer experience manager

Employee Experience = Customer Experience

“Customer experience begins with company employees. It is not only about motivated employees providing great customer service. By improving company’s self-service platform or trying to reduce the waiting time at brick-and-mortar client centers, we often forget to make similar improvements to the tools our employees are using” – notes Mr Bakanas.

If a client can change his cellular plan with only few clicks on the self-service platform, why the sales representative must spend a few minutes performing the same task? If a client can contact customer support with only one click, why the customer support representative must use a plethora of information dashboards to solve a simple issue?

This is the daily call center routine. If employee experience changes, customer experience will follow.

One-Stop-Shop Experience

Phone calls, store visits, emails and social media messages – companies now operate in a multi-platform customer touchpoint environment.

“Although clients now have multiple options to initiate contact with your business, company CRM must operate in a client-centric approach. The CRM must represent all client requests and client history in a single dashboard regardless of the channel where the request was initiated” – notes Mr Bakanas.

Maybe WhatsApp will replace traditional phone calls or emails will be substituted by Facebook messages. According to Mr Bakanas, the CRM must not only attend to current customer needs, but also be future-proof.

I know without saying…

Personalized customer experience is already the norm in e-commerce. More and more companies are harnessing AI capabilities to improve sales and support processes.

“Chatbots can already fulfill up to a third of support requests. Furthermore AI solutions can predict future client decisions according to current customer preferences” – notes Mr Bakanas.

These predictions can be visualized in online sales and self-service platform. By introducing these insights into company CRM, they become a valuable tool for sales representatives.