Optimize Your Customer Experience To Win the Community Support Game

Customer expectations of brands have changed pretty dramatically in recent years. While speedy email response time or a polite voice on the other end of the phone were once the trademarks of good service, customers now want a more empathetic experience - one that values their time, anticipates their needs, and feels seamless regardless of where they are in the buying or service cycle. Because of this, getting the customer experience right is absolutely critical to an organization’s bottom line - research has demonstrated that 82% of people have abandoned a company outright because of a bad customer service experience.

At the same time, companies struggle to:

• Develop and manage engaging, multi-channel customer support experiences
• Get organizational buy-in for enhancing online support efforts
• Validate the ROI for growing online customer communities

How to Delight the Evolving Consumer

In our work with leading technology companies such as Workday, Red Hat, and Pinterest, we’ve helped tackle some of the most pressing challenges companies face when they scale up online community support operations to match explosive growth. A common factor in their success has been an emphasis on optimizing the user experience, design, and underlying technical architecture so that the entire digital support ecosystem is intuitive, fast, and consistent across touchpoints. The benefits of this approach are invaluable - deepened user engagement, faster support responses, and increased customer loyalty.

There are many innovations to support this change to a digitally-driven, customer-centric experience: personalization, omni-channel strategies, conversational interfaces and chatbots, component design systems, artificial intelligence, sentiment analysis…the list of digital advancements are ever-expanding and somewhat daunting. Because of this, it’s important for organizations to devise a roadmap for customer engagement success, one that capitalizes on near-term opportunities and plots a course for leveraging the right enabling technology to better support users and convert them into loyalists.

How do you build a customer support community that leverages the power of your brand?

Every interaction with your customers is an opportunity to build (or lose) brand equity. Delivering a community support platform that surpasses customer online engagement expectations will elevate brand affinity while increasing operational efficiencies. Our history of creating customer management solutions, along with research into emerging trends and customer support data, has given us a powerful perspective into how organizations can best respond to demands of modern consumer.