It is hard to achieve a good experience for all customers at all times. Technology can fail, third parties can let you down and, despite your best efforts, end customers can feel like their issue is not being resolved fast enough.
Understanding how to best differentiate your proposition is a question many marketing, sales and product specialists are revisiting on a regular basis. It is hard to sell on the basis of customer service. Everyone will claim that their customers rate them very highly and prospects just expect this to be the case anyway. However, once you have satisfied customers you are less likely to lose them on price and more likely to win customers from your competitors, for whom customer service may be less of a priority.
What constitutes great customer service has changed over the years. It is no longer enough to answer the phones within 10 seconds and respond promptly to emails. Resellers, dealers and their end business customers expect more.
Putting the customer in the driving seat
Self-service portals are expected and if you don’t have the know-how or resource to develop systems in house you probably choose suppliers that do. Simply being able to order products online is no longer sufficient and the best customer experience occurs when every aspect of the ordering, provisioning and support journey is considered., Resellers and dealers need to be able to order multiple services in one journey, create branded click-to-order quotes and be able to extend online features to their own customers. The best companies are going one step further by creating management portals that anticipate and solve real business problems. Mobile data is a recent example. As coverage has improved and costs have come down, businesses that want to make more use of mobile data have been put off by unpredictable overage charges and their inability to manage large estates of mobile data SIMs. Mobile Manager has for the first time given resellers and their customers the tools to activate, swap, pause and cease SIMs through an intuitive, easy to use portal.
Two big initiatives
When it comes to enhancing the customer experience, customer journey mapping and personalisation are the two big initiatives. As marketers we can learn from the behaviour of our prospects and customers and customise our approaches and promotions accordingly.
The impact on growth and profit
Good customer experience is not just about a feel-good factor. Companies with higher customer satisfaction scores grow faster, are more profitable and worth more.
Jola is a leading supplier of internet connectivity, hosted telephony and mobile SIMs to UK SMEs via accredited partners. We aim to provide the widest range of services at the best possible pricing, putting the customer in control and continually investing to improve their experience. If this seems like a company you would like to know more about…
