The key to building brand loyalty? Prioritise your customer experience
Consumer priorities have shifted, with the quality of customer service now emerging as the driving force behind brand loyalty.
According to recent industry analysis by Genesys, 86 per cent of consumers worldwide say a company is only as good as its service. This highlights the emerging importance of the customer experience in influencing purchasing decisions and building lasting brand affinity. But many companies are failing to deliver positive service interactions that customers want.
Genesys’ survey of consumer attitudes revealed that only 43 per cent of respondents felt appreciated and valued at the end of a contact centre interaction. This signals significant room for improvement in the contact centre space when it comes to nurturing the customer experience.
TSA Group Head of Business Development David Machar says a big challenge for many organisations is that peoples’ expectations are sky high when contacting a company.
“People want to be wowed, they want to be blown away and they want an experience that almost surprises them,” Mr Machar says.
“But most importantly, people just want whatever they’re calling for to be done and done quickly. They want it to be painless and quick. Those two things are key.”
Quality as a strategic imperative
With product and price parity easier to achieve in today’s competitive landscape, service quality is emerging as a key differentiator among brands. Companies that can consistently deliver empathetic, helpful service are more likely to turn customers into loyal brand advocates. On the flipside, negative service interactions can swiftly erode brand equity.
Mr Machar says the implications for contact centres are clear – the customer experience must become a strategic priority. He says companies need to invest in employee training, quality assurance, and modern technologies to deliver personalised, seamless customer support across channels. Dissatisfied customers should be viewed as opportunities to demonstrate accountability, transparency and a willingness to make things right.
“Customers want the agents to be knowledgeable. They need to know what they’re talking about, and they need to know their product,” Mr Machar says.
“They also need to know how to handle whatever enquiry that comes through. They need to be efficient and they need to be able to get things done quickly, whether it’s a complaint or an issue with an order online, whatever it happens to be.”
“Customer service agents also need to have the tools at their disposal to do the things that they need to do. A lot of people have had experiences where they have called a company and someone has been able to identify what their issue is, but they haven’t been able to solve it for them and they’ve had to escalate it to another team or pass it on to another department. As a consumer, it is one of the most frustrating things in the world.”
Innovating to enable effortless customer engagement
Avoiding that frustration is one reason contact centre operators are increasingly turning to new technology, Mr Machar says.
Contact centre evolution has been swift in recent years, with AI-powered chatbots and instant messaging sitting neatly alongside traditional voice channels. But while the omnichannel experience has been embraced as an industry-standard efficiency booster, Mr Machar says the way customer information flows between different channels is becoming increasingly critical for a positive experience.
“One of the things that we’ve seen in the industry is frustration in instances where someone has been chatting with an agent for a while and they say they need to pass them on to someone else,” he says.
“Having to repeat yourself is just so frustrating across channels.”
“Authentication across channels is also really critical. If you’re logged into a business’ app and you’ve already logged in and authenticated yourself, and then you have to do it through another channel adds a lot of frustration and difficulty to customer interactions. It really stands out when you don’t get that seamless experience.”
But even as chatbots become ubiquitous in the industry, with a study by Tidio showing 88 per cent of consumers had at least one conversation with a chatbot in the last 12 months, Mr Machar says he expects voice as a channel to remain in high demand.
“A lot of people would have said 10 years ago that in a decade’s time, everything is going to be digital, and people will just be interacting on their phones instead of speaking with a human. And for a year or two, it probably felt like it was heading that way, but we’re almost seeing the reverse of that now,” Mr Machar says.
“People don’t necessarily want to talk to a bot online or have their enquiry automated. They want to have a human connection and speak to someone that can understand them in a different way than a voice to text program can.”
“But there are ways we can use tech to make the human’s life easier, there are some really cool applications around knowledge management systems and pushing articles to team members based on a conversation that they’re having – things like that are great.”
Mr Machar says the brands that can exemplify best-in-class service have a better chance of earning lifelong customer loyalty.
In an era where the costs to switch services are lower than ever, the customer experience is now central to building sustainable competitive advantage. Companies that fail to prioritise service excellence do so at their own peril.
TSA are Australia’s market leading specialists in CX Consultancy and Contact Centre Services. We are passionate about revolutionising the way brands connect with Australians. How? By combining our local expertise with the most sophisticated customer experience technology on earth, and delivering with an expert team of customer service consultants who know exactly how to help brands care for their customers.