Want loyal customers? Try these five strategies
May 2, 2024 / Unisys Corporation
Short on time? Read the key takeaways:
- Customers are the VIPs of any organization and customer-centric organizations prioritize them by offering a stellar experience.
- One way to boost the customer experience is to enhance the employee experience because happy employees lead to happy customers.
- Other strategies include offering user-friendly and personalized digital experiences, making it easier for people to access your services and protecting their personal information.
If business were the Academy Awards, customers would be the VIPs. These very important people rely on you for products and services. And understandably, they prefer to spend their dollars on companies that give them a superior experience.
Customer experience is all about the connection people feel with your organization. It’s their overall satisfaction encompassing all their interactions with your brand, down to touch points with individual departments including sales, marketing and customer support. Throughout this entire experience, customer-centric organizations treat clients like the stars they are. To help them roll out the red carpet, they’re adopting five strategies to improve experiences and realize a growing list of exclusive benefits saved for showstopping organizations.
#1: Improve the employee experience
It may seem counterintuitive to begin this blog post about the customer experience by talking about employee experience, but there’s a clear correlation. Happy employees lead to happy customers. Treat your employees right and they, in turn, will be more motivated to deliver stellar service. You can elevate client intimacy through associate development.
Unisys explored this topic during a conversation with Greg Kihlström, the best-selling author of “House of the Customer,” for this episode of the Digital Workplace Deep Dive podcast, “Happy workers = happy customers? 4 expert tips to make it happen.” Kihlström shared several stories of companies that illustrate the “very tangible” connection between the employee experience and customer experience.
Delivering experiences that make people feel special is not the sole responsibility of frontline workers. Even employees in behind-the-scenes roles can display empathy, according to Kihlström in the podcast. Developers, for instance, can design with the user experience in mind. That’s where optimizing the employee experience is key.
“If you have employees who stay at an organization longer, they learn more about the organization. If they’re more engaged, they’re going to deliver a better quality of service,” Kihlström said. “Everyone has a role in the delivery and quality of customer experience. Highly motivated employees, whatever they do at the company, should be serving the customer as well. There should be more of a connection made and drawn in most organizations.”
#2: Deliver user-friendly digital experiences
People want more convenience and simplicity in their digital experiences. To help meet their increasing demands, the most innovative organizations are implementing technologies that provide user-friendly experiences from the start and at every touch point. One approach is offering an omnichannel customer experience, which integrates communication channels such as websites, mobile apps, social media and chatbots. This results in a consistent experience across channels.
Building user-friendly interfaces into your websites, applications and software makes them intuitive and visually appealing. Thoughtful digital experiences enable convenience and accessibility, saving customers from common and increasingly outdated frustrations such as waiting in store for services. The fewer the steps to buy from you, the better.
The same is true for resolving service issues. Faster, hassle-free resolutions delivered online or in your mobile app result in better impressions of your brand – and how you treat clients.
A U.S.-based financial institution, for instance, wanted to transition clients to a new portal for smoother and more intuitive transactions as well as introduce an omnichannel, responsive single-page application experience. With expertise from Unisys, the firm natively integrated more than 10 web applications into a single portal and successfully onboarded more than 40,000 external users. All this with zero downtime while the web portal was in production.
#3: Personalize customer experiences
A personalized experience makes customers feel understood and reassured you care about them. Instead of treating them like a faceless number on your balance sheet, you demonstrate that you recognize their unique challenges and needs and tailor your services to help them achieve their goals.
Data analytics and machine learning enable you to easily extract historical data, which provides valuable insight into their personal preferences. By harnessing these technologies for insights, you can tailor the customer experience based on these past preferences.
#4: Make it easier for people to access services
Customers expect to be able to connect with your services at their convenience. That means on their schedule and through their preferred channels. As a result, organizations are taking an always-on approach to service by adopting a few strategies and technologies, including:
- On-demand 24/7 support through chatbots so customers can get answers to their queries or request service outside of human operator hours.
- Self-service online options so clients can help themselves by accessing information, submitting forms, checking balances and completing other tasks.
- Reliable, robust automation to keep activities progressing. Just as cloud automation can help your IT teams optimize cloud use, customer service optimization can help you improve the customer experience.
#5: Protect people’s personal information
Trust is a critical component of strengthening the customer connection. To trust you, people must have confidence that any online transactions or tasks they perform on your applications, website or online portal will be secure. And they must believe their financial data, healthcare information or other personal data is safe in your hands.
Customer-centric organizations foster trust and instill confidence with fast, secure online transactions. A few cybersecurity strategies they employ are secure payment gateways, encryption technologies and fraud detection systems.
Securitas, a security guarding solutions company, turned to Unisys for expertise with digital security. Unisys provided consulting and integration services so it could secure the European Union Intellectual Property Office’s assets. This increased protection for citizens, employees and clients by letting Securitas better predict, prevent, detect and respond to threats.
“Our collaboration with Unisys gives us access to expert IT consultants, advice on cybersecurity and constant support,” said Emilio Torres, regional manager at Securitas. “Undoubtedly, they have strengthened our capacity to secure applications and create seamless environments to help protect Intellectual Property across the European Union.”
Deliver memorable customer experiences with Unisys
Outstanding customer experience is built on a sound digital foundation. This can help you create superior employee experiences that empower your entire workforce to focus on customers. You’re also better able to focus on developing user-friendly interfaces, personalizing the experiences you offer and giving people the means to help themselves with self-service tools. Protecting their data with cybersecurity technologies will become second nature.
Besides building solutions that enable clients to optimize the experience of their customers, Unisys also prioritizes delivering a positive experience to Unisys clients. For the second year in a row, the Digital Workplace Solutions global service delivery team at Unisys was praised at the 2023 European Contact Centre & Customer Service Awards for offering the Best Customer Experience. The awards recognize organizations that excel in customer service.
