Are Your CX Systems Also Keeping Up With EX?

It doesn’t seem like too long ago that getting from place to place was a matter of sticking your hand up to catch a taxi at the end of the block.  Fast forward to today, and we live in a world of instant gratification in all aspects of our personal and professional lives.  From ride sharing to online banking to retail customer service and more, speed has surfaced as a key primary lever by which consumers evaluate their purchase and support experiences.

“In fact over 60% of customers will tell you that response speed and quality are the primary characteristics they look for in evaluating Customer Experience (CX).”

In this world where how we sell and support customers is continuously changing, the question every Chief Customer Officer should be asking themselves is - does my technology stack provide a strong enough foundation for delivering great CX?

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Digital Transformation and the relevance to CX

The rapid evolution of consumer behaviors to ‘real-time’ as the basis for evaluating CX requires that your systems accurately reflect these expectations.  The truth is, so many companies across so many sectors including financial services, manufacturing, and even eCommerce, have yet to update their systems to deliver on these expectations. 

But what’s the net effect when transformation doesn’t happen soon enough?

• Lower than average industry metrics around CX
• Staffing inefficiencies rise dramatically, affecting operating expenses
• Employee satisfaction drops,and retention becomes an issue
• Employee engagement and morale starts to decline
• CX becomes a hurdle and not a competitive strength in both pre and post-sales

The rapid evolution of consumer behaviors to ‘real-time’ as the basis for evaluating CX requires that your systems accurately reflect these expectations.  The truth is, so many companies across many sectors including financial services, manufacturing, and even eCommerce, have yet to move their systems and processes into the modern age to deliver on these expectations.  Simply put, it’s time-consuming, it’s risky, it’s expensive, and it’s daunting.  

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How do I know my current systems are impacting CX?

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A great customer experience starts with a great employee experience - and an audit of the former can provide some insight.

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“60% of support agents will tell you that their companies don’t provide the tools they need to address support issues.”

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It can be simple to identify where bottlenecks and frustrations exist - you might even hear about them in random Slack conversations or even the water cooler.  Employee experience (EX) is a great starting point to gain early signals.  Are your teams working as quickly and efficiently as they should be?  Are they satisfied at work?  Are they handling customer resolutions as quickly and efficiently as possible?

Here are some common EX symptoms for companies who haven’t updated their systems to support the ‘real-time’ nature of business:

• Context switching across multiple systems slows customer response time
• A massive application stack creates distrust in the information people find
• Employees feel the information in the organization is stale
• Chat apps like Slack and Teams become the company search engine
• Senior members of the team are bogged down with repetitive Q&A 
• New employees cannot onboard quickly enough

Be on the lookout for these, as they can be symptomatic of a larger problem that carries over from employees to customers.  

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Key ingredients for a stack that maximizes CX

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We can’t say this enough - great customer experiences start with great employee experiences.  And because the world has embraced new modes of work - office, hybrid, remote permanently - tools, systems, and processes must be designed for, and delight, in all of these situations.  

So whether you’re investing in your current tools, or acquiring new ones, here are some key characteristics of the tools you should be evaluating:

• Horizontal and ubiquitous - whether it’s in CRM, Slack, Gmail, your tasks exist everywhere and your ability to execute and close tasks should exist everywhere as well.  
• Dynamic knowledge-ready - business moves at the speed of light.  And the pandemic reminded us that circumstances can change quickly.  Are your knowledge bases adapting?
• Insights-driven - with EX and CX being fully remote for the foreseeable future, your tools should be able to provide actionable insights that improve your organization.
• Integrated - modern organizations deploy an average of 88 apps as part of their stack, from email to documents to chat.  Tools must integrate broadly to find information anywhere, quickly.

This is only a slice of the things to be aware of.  Be on the lookout for these and as you evaluate existing solutions and new ones, ensure that you evaluate on these criteria.

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It’s easy to stay ahead of transformation

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Here’s the good news - digital transformation to help you realize your CX goals is not all-or-nothing.  Small, meaningful, deliberate steps to maximize your employee experience can happen quickly and painlessly.  Once you’ve decided it’s an organizational priority to improve and you have the cross-functional buy-in to improve, start your assessment.

We can help.  Talla, by Seva, is an AI-first platform that puts the collective wisdom of your entire customer-facing team behind every salesperson, marketer, and support representative.  With workflows in Slack, Teams, Chrome, and integrations into Salesforce, Google Drive, JIRA, Confluence, Zendesk, and more - Talla puts the information that your teams need right at their fingertips.  Deployment is simple and your stakeholders will love it.

Don’t fall short of your customer’s expectations.  Take the steps to modernize your EX and CX experiences today.

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